Presentations of our memory theatres will be next week, with the layout planned for Monday and Wednesday for the actual demonstrations and Friday for the explanations behind them.

Apparently the most important epithet in literature is contained in the final sentance of The Illiad: "Thus was concluded the funeral of Hector, tamer of horses." This great epithet has now been bestowed upon Jana. This also led into a very piquant discussion of the magic of names, discussed by Yates on page 177 of Art of Memory. This is also the basis for the school of Jewish mysticism called the Kabbala, which revolves around the names of the Divine and the magic carried by letters and words in the Hebrew alphabet(literary critic Harold Bloom's mode of criticism is based on the Kabbala). Kabbala's foundation is the Zohar a book written in Spain in the twelfth century, and was actually contemperanous(sp?) with Ramon Lull.

It's fascinating how, if words and names contain magic, then one's who wield words end up being the harbingers of powerfull forces(kind of like how in Celtic mytholigies poetic satire could actually kill, or how speaking 'the magic words' figures so predominately in fairy tales and the whole spectrum of fantasy fiction). Which is why it always falls to 'the scribe' to tell the story. And how when the final page of Finnegans Wake are recited, it becomes musical. It was Walter Pater who said "All art aspires to the condition of music". So when written up words become music, that says something. I'm actually wondering if maybe I wouldn't mind doing my term paper on this subject now.

And apparently the alphabet, outside of the Semitic tradtion, has a strong Celtic heritage. There's a book by Robert Graves called The White Goddess in which he traces this Celtic heritage, and how it in fact relates to trees. I did not know this.