Ransen's Blog

 I've been told, and I've found out for myself, that the best way to remember and learn things is to explain them to other people. So trying to remember the story told in this book by Frances A. Yates ... ...should fix it better in my mind. It is an interesting story. This is what happened. The (European) intellectuals of the 1500s had an idea that Hermes Trismegistus...  ... (that's the one on the left) was a great Egyptian magician who lived after the Biblical Abraham but before the Greek philosophers. Since in the 1500s everything that "ancient" was considered purer/better than the current age (whatever the current age was) Trismegistus was much admired. He lived in a Golden Age. By the way Trismegistus means "Thrice Great". Here is the wrong timeline:    Here is the correct timeline. " This huge historical error was to have amazing results, " writes Yates. The Corpus Hermeticum is an "ancient" text where Trismegistus is suppos...

 When I was at school in the 1970s there was a program on the BBC for pupils called "Use Your Head" with Tony Buzan. It was about how to improve your memory and learning skills and went beyond the "write the same thing down 100 times" type of technique. Buzan gave more interesting and fun memory techniques. I bought the book: I did use the techniques in the book and it did help me learn. And I got interested in memory techniques. Decades later I bought a book by Frances Yates... Frances Yates University College London 1924  ..."The Art of Memory": (Yates confessed that she was not interested in learning and using the memory techniques, which I found strange) I cannot remember exactly why I bought the book, but it got me interested in Giordano Bruno.   On the 17th of February 1600 Bruno was killed by the Catholic Church because of his beliefs .  Killed because of his beliefs . He certainly had some (what we would consider now) strange beliefs, as well as s...