Sources for Sherlock’s Mind Palace
Sherlock’s mind palace is a kind of amalgam of Sherlock Holmes’s mind attic from ACD canon, Dr. Hannibal Lecter’s memory palace, as well as a kind of basic representation of Sherlock’s psyche. I’ll explore all that in a later meta but this post is required reading if you want to follow what I have to say about that. It’s… sort of complicated.
Mark Gatiss, ever the horror aficionado, lifted the basic idea from Dr. Lecter’s memory palace in Hannibal, the novel by Thomas Harris. And Thomas Harris learned about the ancient memory palaces from a couple of scholarly books: The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci by Jonathan Spence and The Art of Memory by Frances Yates.
I’ve used the above excerpt from Michela Fontana’s book about Matteo Ricci because it’s very clearly written and easier to follow than Yates or Spence. Ricci was born in 1552 in the current day Italian region of Marche. He was one of the founding figures of the Jesuit China Mission. Ricci adapted memory techniques from the Ancients to learn Chinese.
Mycroft you say? What’s HE got to do with this?
The mind palace technique is taught to Sherlock by Mycroft. Not only is he Sherlock’s super-ego mind palace tutor, we know Mycroft has mastered the technique because he picked up Serbian so quickly. To learn Serbian, Mycroft used associative memory techniques— just like Ricci learned Chinese.
SHERLOCK: I didn’t know you spoke Serbian.
MYCROFT: I didn’t, but the language has a Slavic root, frequent Turkish and German loan words. (He shrugs.) Took me a couple of hours.
SHERLOCK: Hmm – you’re slipping. (x)
Now. About Dr. Lecter’s memory palace:
THE DOOR TO DR. HANNIBAL LECTER’S memory palace is in the darkness at the center of his mind and it has a latch that can be found by touch alone. This curious portal opens on immense and well-lit spaces, early baroque, and corridors and chambers rivaling in number those of the Topkapi Museum.Everywhere there are exhibits, well-spaced and lighted, each keyed to memories that lead to other memories in geometric progression.
Spaces devoted to Hannibal Lecter’s earliest years differ from the other archives in being incomplete. Some are static scenes, fragmentary, like painted Attic shards held together by blank plaster. Other rooms hold sound and motion, great snakes wrestling and heaving in the dark and lit in flashes. Pleas and screaming fill some places on the grounds where Hannibal himself cannot go. But the corridors do not echo screaming, and there is music if you like.
The palace is a construction begun early in Hannibal ‘s student life. In his years of confinement he improved and enlarged his palace, and its riches sustained him for long periods while warders denied him his books.
Here in the hot darkness of his mind, let us feel together for the latch. Finding it, let us elect for music in the corridors and, looking neither left nor right, go to the Hall of the Beginning where the displays are most fragmentary.
… By our efforts we may watch as the beast within turns from the teat and, working upwind, enters the world.
-Thomas Harris, Hannibal Rising
Phew.
That’s a lot of homework. Do you have questions?