Ennever was not, as many people believe, the father of Pelmanism -- or of any memory system.

Although Ennever had early, likely formative experiences in the "memory systems" trade, promoting and selling the memory-training system developed by the well-educated lawyer and fraudster Marcus Dwight Larrowe (1832-1896, also known as "Silas Holmes" and "Prof. Alphonse Loisette"), Ennever achieved scale in his commercial efforts with a system based on the work of another nineteenth-century "memory system" lessons mage, of whom more shortly. Ennever's genius was: he made money at international scale, selling New Thought-influenced memory systems lessons to hundreds of thousands of people who felt they lacked the intellectual or psychology horsepower to succeed at a chosen profession, or even -- as the example materials below show -- to choose a profession at which to succeed. Money didn't want them, and Ennever claimed to solve that problem for them.

(The link between memory systems and New Thought should be apparent to all students of New Thought. Memory is a latent power, and a properly-developed memory, as Larrowe's ads were quick to point out, made for: success.)

Ennever's memory system -- the clue is in its name, Pelmanism -- was invented, to the extent that any actual invention was involved, by the German amateur psychologist Christof Ludwig Poehlmann (1867-?), also known by his Anglicized name, as Christopher Lewis Pelman.

As G. S. Fellows, the critic of "Loisette," was at pains to point out, in his expose of Loisette, systems of memory training are medieval -- which is to say classical -- in origin. Books like Frances Yates' The Art of Memory go some way toward providing a synoptic history of this curious parascience, although I can't find a good one-volume synoptic history of mnemonics or memory systems anywhere. In the nineteenth century, the social value of appearing clever and/or well-educated, combined with the relentless pressure both to cram for credential-granting examinations, and to monetize knowledge generally -- if only to provide the possessor of said knowledge with a sinecure of sorts -- produced dozens to hundreds of memory systems and teachers thereof, the most widely-referenced of which latter was Edward Pick, and the most fun of which former (in my opinion) was Fauvel-Gouraud's Phreno-Memnotechny. It's perhaps a measure of how far mnemonic systems have fallen in our collective estimation that Edward Pick has no Wikipedia page, and is, as it were, unremembered.

It's not in our remit here to explain why mnemonics is occult-adjacent, or why so many occultists dabbled in, or played with, memory systems. The so-called Loisette system -- really, we should call it the Larrowe system -- was an essentially bent and deceptive money-making scheme embraced by people who wanted to make bank selling lessons closely tied to commercial success to the tens of thousands of people who wanted to buy such product. The extent to which Ennever merged or melded Larrowe's system with Poehlmann's system to produce Pelmanism is worth some researcher's time, but -- however one looks at it -- Pelmanism was a commercial success, promising the same outcomes as mail-order occultists, and made successful by precisely the same advertising, promotion and distribution techniques pioneered by the mail-order occultists of the 1880s and after.

The gap between the decline in promotion of systems based on Larrowe/Loisette, and the rise of Pelmanism, is roughly ten years: Loisette is out of mail-order circulation by 1905, and lessons in Pelmanism begin circulating in 1916 (that is, three years after Poehlmann's publication of his lessons in Germany), in the UK, as part of the "practical psychology" subculture that was bringing various New Thought-flavored notions to an undereducated English-speaking populace possessed of disposable income and beset by dissatisfaction with their earning power. The Pelman Institute's advertising, initially, was largely -- perhaps exclusively -- by placed advertisements that looked, visually, like the articles in the newspaper that surrounded them, and which implied that the paper in which they appeared was either [a] communicating "news" or [b] endorsing the claims of the placed article.

After World War I, heavyweight advertising professionals like George Creel turned their newly-formed skills as propagandists in the war to the promotion of things people didn't need; Creel himself became involved in the Pelman Institute's advertising activities, and served as the President of the Pelman Institute of America, a fact his fans like to gloss over in their histories of their hero.

By the end of the Second World War, Pelmanism was everywhere, and floridly so.

Does Pelmanism work? Intrinsically, likely no better than any mnemonic system that came before, or after it, and advertising claims aside, there is no evidence that Pelman-style memory made for commercial success for anyone other than the principals in Ennever's operation. Its persistence, and its emphasis on memory and will as the twin engines of success, make it worthy of inclusion in any tour of the various parasciences birthed out of New Thought.

In the Archive, we have Pelmanism materials aplenty, as indicated below. Interested readers should also troll eBay, where Pelman materials are more or less continually on offer.

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