About the author

Richard Saunders (1613–75), almanac writer and physician, was part of the intellectual circle of William Lilly, the celebrated ‘Christian astrologer’.

About the text

While his section on the divination of a person's character by reading the moles on his or her body is somewhat original, Saunders's tome on physiognomy and palmistry, including the section on Lull's artificial memory system presented here, is a straightforward if unattributed translation from Jean Belot's Oeuvres (1640). On the strength of the success of this richly illustrated folio, he published pocket-sized versions of excerpts on palmistry starting in 1663, and, in 1671, released a corrected and enlarged edition.

The arts of memory

Precisely because Saunders is so deeply indebted to earlier continental sources (Paracelsus, Della Porta and Belot), this work is a reliable English summary of the accumulated knowledge about the memory arts in general and Raymond Lull's combinatory mnemonics in particular (consisting of, in part, a set of wheels within wheels rotated to yield numerous combinations of possible propositions and memory sites). Following Bruno, Saunders highlights the organisational and generative principles of Lull's approach to make it accessible to attentive readers.

Textual notes

Saunders physiognomie, and chiromancie…whereunto is added the art of memory (London, 1671), 3C2r–3C4v.

Art of Memory

Chapter 1

Artificial memory is nothing but an art to assist the natural, for without the one the other cannot subsist. If there were not a natural memory, the artificial would not avail much; but the natural having some inclination to an art or science, doubtless the artificial is very serviceable to it, and by the artificial that may be shortened, which otherwise would take up a long time, and this is it wherein Raymundus Lullius hath bestowed his endeavours, and by his exquisite learning found out the perfection of this short art and artificial memory, which although he found out, yet did he conceal it under riddles and amphibologies that the learned might be at the expense of some leisure to know and attain it.