We’ve argued [String Theory] that stellar alignments and geometric figures were used in defining the stars of the sky.
Here, we suggest that stellar alignments and geometric figures were also used to craft a mental map of the sky – a memory-palace of the stars.
Modern readers, with ready access to print volumes and online resources, don’t have to rely upon biological memory in the same way that scholars did before the printing press.
How did early astrologers and astronomers remember the stars of the sky?
Ptolemy’s table of stellar longitude and latitude and magnitude is scholarly and definitive,
but not useful to most viewers for regular observation.
We propose that ancient astronomers crafted a mental star-map, a memory palace of the sky.
Ancient scholars and students were limited in their ability to build a personal library,
so they developed tools and tricks to strengthen the memory.
One of the best-known of these is a visualization technique, the Memory Palace.
Briefly said: One crafts a mental image of a house, a mansion, a palace. A physical space.
Each room holds a particular set of memories,
each memory marked by a particular object or image or sound or other mnemonic.
The placement of a new memory in the memory palace is a conscious act,
an act which helps to reinforce the older memories near which the new memory is placed.
An active, ongoing envisioning of this memory-space is at the heart of this method.
To remember the nighttime sky, craft a mental map of the stars
as a collection of asterisms, starlines and geometric figures.
In mapping the starlines of VII.i,
we’ve identified hundreds of stars by dozens of alignments.
All of the stars for which Ptolemy provides measures of longitude and latitude
were initially defined by stellar alignments and local asterisms;
few had the skill or equipment to measure the stars by degrees,
but everybody knows the stars.
In setting these lines to memory,
we can imagine using the star descriptors to create mental images,
e.g. ‘the star on the line between the tail of the Bear and the tail of the Lion’,
or ‘the line from the heart of the Lion to the heart of the Water-snake’.
This mental star-map might occupy a separate room in a scholar’s personal memory-palace.
Examples of such starlines, and mnemonics to help remember them,
are scattered throughout the chapters of the Starlines of VII.i. [LINK]
We encourage you to explore.
Scholars, both ancient and modern, rely upon a shared understanding of material fact.
The ancients who studied the stars understood that the stars are the stars,
the earliest international scientific standard.
Tabular accountings like Ptolemy’s star catalogue were known
from Mesopotamia to the Levant to Mycenae.
(The Egyptians had their own traditions; and as to the Minoans, who knows?)
While scientists came to define the stars by measures of longitude and latitude and magnitude,
the stars of Ptolemy’s star catalogue were first defined by starlines and asterisms.