The Malleability of Memory: From Modernity to Antiquity
Before exploring specifically how memory language functions in the magical papyri, let me first make some brief, unifying observations about how memory has been theorized and practiced in modernity and antiquity.
Beginning with the state of the question in the contemporary social and physical sciences, I will then draw cogent connections with perspectives held in Graeco-Roman philosophy and rhetoric.If there is one thing that sociologists, psychologists, and biologists studying human memory agree on today, it is that memory is malleable. In her disciplinary survey of memory studies, sociologist Astrid Erll has defined Gedächtnis as a “changeable” cognitive structure.[718] For psychologists, it is this very changeability that facilitates therapeutic forms of healing: as Marcia Cavell explains, self-discovery in psychoanalysis is painful due to the very fact that emotional memory has to be relived and thereby “modified.”[719] Finally, biological study of brain function has confirmed the plasticity of the memory faculty in animals. In the mid-twentieth century, one Swedish researcher, Holger Hyden, conducted neurological studies on rats and rabbits that demonstrated how learned experience brought about “functional changes in the biochemistry of the nerve cells”; he concluded that “memory was stored in the brain in the form of such changed molecular structures.”[720] Biologist Steven Rose has followed up on these insights in his laboratory study of baby chicks, and his findings have reaffirmed the “plasticity” of memory mechanisms. The capacity of animals “to adapt and modify... in the face of repeated experience” is intricately related to alterations occurring at the synaptic and hormonal level - in other words, to the way that brains and bodies are wired for change.[721] [722] Such modern scientific insights into the malleability of memory would not have come as too much of a surprise to ancient Greeks and Romans. In certain quarters of the philosophical and rhetorical disciplines, there was a shared recognition that bodies and practices played determinative roles in the shaping of cognitive memory. However, at the same time that memory could be inhibited or suppressed by certain physiological conditions, it also could be cultivated - exercised and enhanced - through diligent repetition and practice. Examples abound in the field of Latin rhetoric where writers such as Cicero and Quintillian counsel those who would be great orators to train themselves in the ars memoriae. This training was seen as a means by which a speaker could call forth and develop his or her natural memory faculties. Thus, in his Institutio Oratoria, Quintillian argues (against Plato) that “the natural gift can be helped by reason, since training enables us to do things which we cannot do before we have had any training or practice.”[726] For Aristotle and for Quintillian, then, memory was a faculty eminently subject to alteration, whether inhibited due to one’s bodily condition or enhanced due to disciplined training. C.