The Incantation of Circe

...as well as dedicated to the Most Christian King Henry III of France (reigned 1574–1589), who was a patron of Bruno.; this work, which is entitled On the Shadows of Ideas original: "de umbris idearum," Bruno’s seminal 1582 work on memory and Hermetic philosophy., I have undertaken to publish. It possesses this specific and unique quality:

that whereas other arts used to fulfill the memory of words or phrases only with great difficulty—using thousands of substituted images and a hundred thousand "places" original: "locis." This refers to the classical "Method of Loci," where a person visualizes a building and places images of things to be remembered in specific rooms.—this art will accomplish it most easily. It does so by subjecting everything to one hundred and twenty principal forms (as the author himself calls them), according to the number of terms and sentences, through specific operations, signs, circumstances, and assistants These "assistants" (adsistentibus) and "forms" refer to Bruno’s complex system of concentric memory wheels, which allowed for millions of combinations using a limited set of core images..

By these means, it is brought about that this art, for the memorizing of words, requires far less labor, diligence, and practice than all other systems that can be studied. It is so effective that three or four months will provide more to those walking this path—and do so more easily and certainly—than three or four years could provide to those following the track of others. Truly, this cannot be in doubt for anyone capable of comparing this art with others.