The objective knowledge we do have can be summarised very
briefly. The structure
was a wooden building, probably as large as a single room, constructed like a
Vitruvian amphitheatre. The visitor stood on the stage and gazed into the auditorium,
whose tiered, semicircular construction was particularly suitable for housing the
memories in a clearly laid-out fashion - seven sections, each with seven arches
spanning seven rising tiers. The seven sections were divided according to the seven
planets known at the time - they represented the divine macrocosm of alchemical
astrology. The seven tiers that rose up from them, coded by motifs from classical
mythology, represented the seven spheres of the sublunary down to the elementary
microcosm. On each of these stood emblematic images and signs, next to
compartments for scrolls. Using an associative combination of the emblematically
coded division of knowledge, it had to be possible to reproduce every imaginable
micro and macrocosmic relationship in one's own memory. Exactly how this worked
remains a mystery of the hermetic occult sciences on which Camillo based his notion.
