Assuming you made this range sight or voice, and target Room, seems like you would be able to memorize an entire library, or at least one room of it, reproducing it in your Memory Palace.
That's cool as heck!
I suspect one disadvantage is that it would probably get you marched, or at least killed in a wizards war, but I can't really think of any other downsides, especially if you managed to do it without anyone's knowledge.
Not a bad trade-off for the Dark Secret flaw, if I do say so myself!
If I spent a year getting mastery 3, with quiet mastery times two, and still mastery, can I just sit quietly in the library while I cast this ritual?!
Memory Palace of the Sage targets the caster, and it memorizes a book by having you read through it during the ritual. For something akin to the effect you're looking for, I'd suggest adding an Intellego requisite, as well as requisites to perceive the materials in the books, then several magnitudes for complexity too. Alternatively, a separate Intellego spell to perceive the entire library, mixed with a Memory Palace of the Sage effect with, again, far higher complexity than the one for a singular book.
The Target of the Me spells listed and described on TMRE p.26-27 is the individual whose Memory Palace gets enhanced, not the memory to be put into that Memory Palace.
Okay so the theoretic spell Memory Palace's Library should be Personal, Momentary, Individual, with, say, an extra 5 magnitudes for complexity (which I would otherwise be spending on range Sight, Target room)
The base Memory Palace of the Sage effect does not require requisites for the form of the book, so I would argue this one does not either.
Since you're not physically looking through each book in the library during casting, I do see the Intelligo requisite.
A less grandiose version, without the Intelligo requisite, could, I suppose, be effectively Target group, (so two additional magnitudes for complexity) but you'd have to page through each book during casting. Walk in, get a stack of books, cast quietly and silently, page through stack of books, leave.
You would need the Intellego requisite to let you read the contents of the books at a distance, and a single book is +4 magnitudes of complexity, I'd suggest way more than just one more. A P/M/I Memory Palace spell only lets you store the memory of reading the book, it doesn't read the book for you. If you just wanted to store a memory of what a library looked like, that would be way cheaper, but wouldn't let you later read the actual text.
One possible alternative would be if you decided that a memory of a book in that sort of "what the library looked like" memory could act like an AC, using a Range AC Intellego spell to read it later, but I would be very careful about letting memories act as ACs, especially if they could be formed en masse like that.
If you decide that multiple books can be stored with a single ritual, I'd suggest at most tripling the books memorized per additional magnitude of complexity, but I'm not sure you should do even that. You would still need to at the very least perceive all of the text over the course of the ritual, possibly actually read it too. Under no circumstances should you be able to go from singular book to the entire library of Durenmar with a single added magnitude of complexity.
I'm just here to point out that the following spell from 'Covenants' page 100 uses a lvl 10 spell to sort unread books in order by their first sentences:
Reorder the Contents of the Armarius
ReAn 10
Req: Intellego, Mentem (the latter optional, raises level to 15)
R: Touch, D: Mom, T: Room
This spell places books in a book chest or closet into a sequence. Sample sequences include the Art or Ability the books concern, the authors’ names, size through any dimension, the color of the covers, the binding material, the newness of the books, and their opening sentences. If the books are marked with acquisition or shelf location numbers, then those may also guide the sequence.
With a Mentem requisite the magus can shelve books based on whether he has read them or not, how much he liked the books while reading them, how he feels about the authors, or his emotional attachment to the people who gave him the books. Books in chained libraries need to be taken off their rails for this spell to be used.
(Base 1, +1 Touch, +2 Room, +1 requisite, +1 versatility)
So there is a spell which can read information from a book, of which the caster was previously unaware -- and it looks like a '+1 magnitude for versatility' covers it.
Yes. What Hermetic magic can do about reading books is explained in TME p.99f Magic Can Neither Read Nor Understand:
Words on a page are under the purview of the Form relating to the components of the ink used (mostly Herbam and Terram), or the page itself (Animal for parchment, other Forms for different media). Manipulating the words however gets no sense of the meaning therein.
This is because the mind that uttered a word can be interrogated for its meaning with Mentem magic, but written words are just artifices of ink and parchment that have no intrinsic thoughts behind them.
This makes also spells like Covenants p.100 Reorder the Contents of the Armarius highly dubious. Still, that spell has not yet been errataed.
So the updated Memory Palace's Library would be a Cr(In)Me level 55 ritual
(25 is the level for Memory Palace of the Sage, +3 magnitudes for effectively increasing the range from touch to sight, then +2 magnitudes for effectively increasing target from a single book to a room, +1 for the Intelligo requisite)
That seems reasonable.
... in your saga. Have fun!
This isn't by RAW or RAI, but in your saga, if your ST and the Troupe agree, sure, go ahead.
Aside from how it all fits together- InIm can allow you to tell what a hidden page would look like. Add many levels of magnitude for complexity and size, and you could in essence look at every page in the library at once.
In principal a variation on memory palace of the sage would allow you to sore this information in your memory palace, again with massive magnitudes added for size and complexity
You would still require a Creo Mentem ritual which breaks current limits however in order to expand the memory pallace to actually hold all of that information- each locus ca store "one piece of information less than entire texts". Each room can hold 5 loci, and you can have a number of rooms equal to your ability in art of memory. So to hold 100 texts you would need art of memory at 20, and magic cannot imbue abilities.
Additionally storing the books in your memory palace is not the same as reading them, which would have to be done later, though at that point it could be read from memory rather than from a text.
All of the spells that produce magical memory loci only produce one per casting, even though one is a Ritual that only uses up 10 levels and has the note "minimum 20 for Ritual Magic" in its Formula. All of them also clearly define the target as the person cast upon rather than the memory.
While allowing things like Size to be added to "Constructing the Memory Palace" to create more than one memory loci per casting is a popular table interpretation, this is not supported by RAW. Otherwise such an inefficient ritual which could be expanded 2 Mags without change to its level would not be our example of the effect. Yes there are other inefficient spells but those are mostly all legacy spells which need to be a certain level no matter their effect (looking at you CtMT).
But the magical memory loci can contain more than the ones formed normally, so you could presumably create one containing the full input of an Intellego spell letting you perceive all of the text in the library simultaneously, it would just require a lot of additional magnitudes of complexity, and would probably be more difficult to read later than a memory of reading a book, which might manifest as a reduced source quality, or possibly the ability to reconstruct a particular text in a seasons work or something similar.
I would think you could do Group to get more memories (more books), and then + size to increase the number of the Group. That doesn't handle the issue of examining the books, but it is a valid way to create a bunch of memories.
Spells that create memory Loci are like stat boost spells. The Target is the person modified. Group allows you to create Loci in multiple people per casting rather than multiple Loci in a person because the person is the Target.
While some might use Group and Size at their table, they are stand-ins for Complexity. And if you use those stand-ins you have to be careful of situations such as the same spell allowing 10 Loci in one person, 5 Loci in two people, 3 Loci in three people, 2 Loci in five people, or 1 Loci in ten people per casting. Someone might even interpret it as 10 Loci divided up how they desire over up to 10 people.
Oh, shoot, you're right. I was thinking of it like de novo creation. But you're correct that that doesn't work with Mentem, more like Characteristic improvement. So forget my Group suggestion.