Ancient Spells Designed to Enhance One’s Own Memory (Mnemonikai)
Ancient practitioners of the so-called “magical” arts - producers and consumers of spells, charms, and amulets - participated in these same cultural assumptions about the malleability of memory.
Scattered among the Papyri Graecae Magicae one finds examples of spells called mnemonikai, spells designed to cultivate or enhance the memory capacity of the one performing specified ritual actions and incantations. In one case, the spellgiver is instructed to write a series of mysterious names on hieratic papyrus with myrrh ink, to wash those names off into water from seven springs, and to “drink the water on an empty stomach for seven days while the moon is in the east.”[727] This sequence of ritual actions - including not only the acts of writing and drinking, but also the initial preparation of the ink from a recipe of ingredients (including myrrh, figs, date pits, dried pinecones, wormwood, ibis wings, and spring water) and the burning of those ingredients over fire - constitutes a particular memory “technology” related to worship of the Egyptian god Hermes Thoth.At least three other examples of such mnemonikai survive in the Papyri Graecae Magicae, and each demonstrates a similar set of temporally marked ritual actions - most notably, inscription, incantation, and ingestion. However, one also finds a diverse array of new implements and material ingredients. The first of these mnemonikai involves the creation of an amulet by engraving a silver tablet with a petition to Selene, the moon goddess, to “enter... into my mind, and grant me memory (μνημην).”[728] The wearer of the amulet is instructed to recite this formula while facing the moon on the first day of every month while prostrating him- or herself before the goddess and while eating twelve rolls of barley meal bread molded “in the shape of female figures.”[729] A similar but slightly elaborated incantation is recited in another memory spell, in this case directed to the sun god Helios: “[Enter,...] upon my heart, [having granted] memory (μνη[μην]) to my soul, to my eyes...
in order that, whatever I hear once, [I might remember it throughout] my lifetime.”[730] A third and final mnemonike is prescribed for cultivation of both memory and foreknowledge.[731] Despite its fragmentary state, enough material survives to indicate a complex procedure involving the ingestion of ground bird’s heart with honey and the recitation of divine names on the first fourteen nights of the lunar month. Taken from “a copy from a holy book,”[732] the spell enacts devotion to a range of divine and/or heroic figures, including not only Selene and Helios, but also Osiris, Mithras, Moses, and the Hebrew deity Iao Sabao[th]. In each of these cases, the successful completion of the spell was thought to grant the spell-giver a renewed or enhanced capacity to remember, a capacity particularly endowed with divine power and linked to specifically delineated ritual actions.D.