MNEMOSYNE—LESMOSYNE
On the Springs of “Memory” and “Forgetting”
When the material on our theme was last approached in an effort to sift through and order the ancient traditions concerning it, it was thought that the historical situation could be established as follows: The spring of “forgetting,” of “Lethe,” is a familiar term for us today which seems to belong to the permanent fund of Greek mythology. The classical period, however, was said not to have known of it. Rather, it was characteristic of the non-classical, “mystical” belief in the underworld, and it was the musings of the mystics of the post-classical era which first created the spring of “memory,” of “Mnemosyne” as a counterpart to forgetfulness.
Here we have an exemplary case of exclusively historical philology.1 But does such sifting and ordering suffice, indeed can it really succeed, if one does not even inquire as to what is being sifted and ordered. For even the layman can see at once why a humanistic philology that is more sympathetic to general human concerns must be dissatisfied with an exclusively historical approach.
In the “historical” version, not even the spring of Lethe is classical. The classical period does not know of it: it speaks only of the “fields of Lethe” or of the “house of Lethe,” where the dead disappear … This scientific method rests upon a curious axiom: “not mentioned” means “not there.” This argumentum ex silentio, inferring from silence, lacks legitimacy where the silence is that of a field of ruins. An argumentum ex silentio is valid only when an unbroken body of material is at one’s disposal. That is out of the question here.
So how is it when one asks: what for the Greeks was Lethe, which we so facilely translate with “forgetting”? Forgetting has to do with a clearly psychic [seelisch] process, no matter whether we are those who are forgetting or those who are forgotten. The Greek word and its entire family originally mean “being hidden,” “to hide oneself,” and “not noticing that which is hidden.” Such are the dead in their “hiddenness”; and this “being hidden” is the “fields” or the “house” of Lethe. Both of these mythological images, house and fields, are well suited for this no-longer-flowing condition which for the dead—or more especially for their former Gestalt—represents finality. We thereby pass beyond the chance elements of a tradition and arrive at the meaning, a meaning which confirms what has been handed down by chance, yet also calls attention to the fact that in Greek mythology nothing would make less sense than a flowing spring as a symbol of the death-state.
Hence again it does not suffice to ascertain who mentions flowing water in connection with Lethe, and when and where, and in that historical way to classify the evidence! This evidence must be examined instead as to what it signifies. The evidence is to be found in the final myth of the Platonic dialogue on the state (Republic). In this instance there is not much danger that “only” Plato will respond without an older tradition also present at the same time. The great teaching which Plato wanted expressed throughout the entire narration—i.e., “he who chooses bears the guilt: God bears no guilt”—was stated in the main part of the myth and was founded in an event in the extra-temporal and extra-spatial pre-existence of the soul. Of concern to us is only the concluding section, where the state of the transition to earthly existence from placeless and timeless being is depicted. The account here is so succinct that Plato must have assumed that the rest was already known from earlier myths of the soul. This pertains especially to the “thirst,” which he expressly omits mentioning, even though his depiction implies it.
The souls which find themselves in this transitional state have already done obeisance before the throne of necessity, of “Ananke,” and have thereby fallen under the laws of that earthly human existence situated underneath the planets. At first—and here the transition begins—they wander “all together into the plain of Lethe through dreadful torridness and stifling heat; for it is devoid of trees and of everything at all which sprouts from the earth.” In this barren desert the souls camp for the evening at a river. It is clear that even there, given over to the refreshing river, they are still in the realm of Lethe. That is explicitly confirmed in the summarizing words of Socrates: “This myth saves even us,” he says, “if we obey it: happily we shall cross the river of Lethe and we shall not defile our souls”—that is, afterwards, in the subsequent earthly life. Entry into life is preceded by the “crossing of the river.” This ensues, however, in the final myth of the Platonic “state,” only after the souls had drunk from the river and were deep in sleep: at midnight, to the accompaniment of thunder and earthquakes, by leaps and bounds, in the form of falling meteorites. Drinking from the water of the river and falling, like a shooting star, into birth are the mythological images here for that which Socrates expresses in another image as the crossing of the river of Lethe.
The river whose water is drunk and that desolate plain of Lethe, with its void and its liquid-craving parchedness, belong together in meaning. But Plato first designates the river with a special name as the “river Ameles.” Not only is the name Ameles in itself transparent, meaning about the same as Lethe, with particular emphasis upon heedlessness; it also awakens a quite definite recollection of a contrary nature. It was at the river Meles, indeed through it, that there entered into earthly human existence a man of the Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, the Goddess of “memory”—a man who as no other understood how to render Lethe ineffectual: namely Homer. So ran a popular tradition about him as “Melesigenes,” the one who was born at or of the river Meles. Thus the river at and through which the mortals who have fallen to Lethe are born is rightly also called A-meles—the opposing river, as it were, to the Meles. The flowing water symbolizes the transient. As water that springs forth, it is a primal image of the origin of life and—of memory. But this is not to say that Plato, or whoever reported before him of the river Ameles, actually reflected upon the two opposites in this image—i.e., the river Meles of Asia Minor and the experience of “welling up” recollection!
The water of the river Ameles expresses the negative, the transient, and the disappearing. It is water, so Plato tells us, which no vessel can contain and hold fast. All who are to be born must drink a certain measure from this non-retainable water. The astute ones keep to the measure, the others drink more. “And each time that someone drinks, he forgets everything.” This aspect of Lethe is not inconsistent with that other aspect expressed through the stifling heat of the plain.
Desert and thirst require an outflowing. The experience of what is an utter flowing-through, something not to be held fast, is that of an eternal void and thirst. But this experience first becomes unbearable when the flowing-through ceases. Thus the void becomes a compulsion to seek out new inflows and outflows. Does this compulsion demand precisely what we call “forgetting”? Or indeed “forgetfulness,” which in Hesiod (Theog. 227) appears under the name Lethe as a daughter of Eris, “Dissension”? What was that Lethe, whose essence is identical with such a passionately desired outflowing? In Plato she has the function of impeding recollection of the Ideas. But with him too she can only be something which characteristically is constantly disappearing and being forgotten, and thus not really forgetfulness itself. And prior to Plato?
A flowing-through which is passionately desired because it is identical with life itself was described before Plato by Heraclitus. It is surely no coincidence that the quotation which probably preserves for us the original words of the philosopher is handed down in the context of his soul-teaching: “Unto those descending into the selfsame rivers there flows ever other waters” (Fr. 12). According to Heraclitus, the changeable basic substance of all appearances is actually not water but fire. If he speaks nonetheless of river and water, he is reporting in figurative language about an experience which most resembles the nature of Lethe, as it is discernible in Plato. Heraclitus, the archaic philosopher, speaks in images just as mythology did before him, and he thereby shows us how precisely that experience of utter flowing-through could be expressed as image in a mythological narration. The fragment quoted above, moreover, bears witness to the fact that the possibility of apprehending life itself as an utter flowing-through was already present at a rather early point in Greece, at least in the sixth century B. C.
In that mythological range of images to which the river Lethe also belongs we are told of an utter flowing-through in still another way. In the representation of the underworld with which Polygnotus embellished the Hall of the Cnidians in Delphi around the middle of the fifth century, four persons were visible who carried water in small broken jugs to a larger container. A picture upon an amphora in Munich shows us this same scene with four archaically-winged souls in the same role. On a southern Italian vase with pictures of the after-world from a somewhat later period it is the Danaides who empty their water jugs into the great earthenware receptacle. This great receptacle is the “leaky cask” known from Plato’s Gorgias, into which those so condemned originally—as also became proverbial—"carried water with an equally leaky sieve" (493b). These are distinct images of a ceaseless outflowing whose meaning is clearly and reliably ascertainable.
According to our source, the travel account of Pausanias, the scene in the mural painting of Polygnotus bore an Inscription which indicated that those so punished were the non-initiated, those, Pausanias believes (10.31), who did not take the Eleusinian mysteries seriously. In Plato’s Gorgias this punishment refers more generally to the uninitiated and the imprudent, whose soul is “leaky” and can hold nothing, also because of “forgetfulness” (493c). This interpretation does not, to be sure, lead us back to the origin of the image, but it does prove that the river Lethe and the jugs of the Danaides are related in their mean-ing. One would rightly look for this meaning in that which is held in common both by those not initiated into the mysteries and by the daughters of Danaos, the murderesses in the wedding-night. The pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus calls their jugs “unfulfilled water pitchers” (371e). For the Greeks, marriage is telos, “fulfillment,” and the mysteries too are tele, “fulfillments.” Both, marriage and mysteries, are fulfillments of a life which, without them, flows out. “Unfulfilled” are the uninitiated as well as the girl who, in the wedding-night, became a murderess instead of one who is “fulfilled.” In this regard one ought to think not of some special, moralizing teaching of the mysteries, but rather of mysteries such as the Eleusinian, with their contemplation of the telos, of life fulfilling itself and fulfilled in procreation, birth, and death. Outflowing life is likewise life, but not such that is genuine and fulfilled: it is like “carrying water in a sieve,” an image of the life of the unfulfilled which appears among the punishments of the underworld.
Thus the preachers of moralizing local mysteries, appealing to Orpheus and Museus, logically taught that all sinners and the unrighteous “carry water in a sieve.” According to the Orphic doctrine of the transmigration of souls, everyone who remains banished in the “woeful circle” of rebirths is engaged in carrying the jug of the Danaides, letting it run out instead of being fulfilled. This view of life as something running out like water through a sieve is actually not a doctrine. It is the perceivable form of an immediate experience which speaks of itself in mythological images and narrations. To this experience also belongs the knowledge that that flowing-through is incessantly desired and is pursued with an unquenchable thirst; to it belongs as well the fear that there remains for us in death only the torment of thirsting for the same “water.”
This apprehension, molded into a steadily recurring experience of death, turns up in sepulchral texts of Orphic religiosity. “La soif des morts,” as it is called in the history of religions, is certainly neither just Orphic nor just Greek. Were it not, however, based upon an experience of the Greek soul, it could not have reached Greece from abroad. In the drink of Lethe we come across a specifically Greek form of this experience—the experience of life desiring itself, together with its incessant experiences. The painful thing about this experience is that one does it in vain: what one drinks passes away unremittingly. Yet one drinks it avidly, and in this relish one forgets the special big and little pains of life. It is a drink and a stream at the same time, characteristically directed towards disappearance and forgottenness. Named after this direction, its image appears as the “river of Lethe” in the Greek other-world, which is filled with images of our earthly experiences. One drinks its water, and it is just this property of being a river which one drinks that seems to be the essential and original characteristic of Lethe as expressed in the image of water. (As has been rightly noted, usually in Greece one did not drink from rivers.)
In later mortuary epigrams the “drink of Lethe” is still prevalent, but its meaning has paled into a languid conception of the peace-giving waters of death. Here the similarity of a narcotizing drink dominates, with which sleep follows upon self-forgetting. Finally, the earlier “drink” and “river” turn into a “harbor,” indeed an expansive “sea of Lethe.” This is a complete change in key, over against which we meet in Vergil, as befits a great poet, the original fullness of meaning. He depicts the river of Lethe, “which flows by the tranquil fields” (Aen. 6.705): Lethaeumque domos placidas qui praenatat amnen. But then, in a clear allusion to the river Ameles (Latin: securus, “unconcerned”), he devotes an entire verse to the drink of the souls: securos latices et longa oblivia potant.
“The liquid of ‘unconcern’ and long forgetfulness are drunk there”—as water of life: it leads back into life. In the preceding description, Vergil puts in bold relief not “thirst” but “security,” which is present in the original meaning of Lethe as hiddenness. It is only with the drinking, according to him, that “will” commences—in corpore velle reverti, in order that they want to re-enter the body. Originally thirst served as the prerequisite for drinking: such was its meaning. The “thirst” of the dead is nothing other than the “will” of the living, a fundamental experience of life, for the invention of which mankind did not first need Schopenhauer.
The assertion that the spring of Lethe was characteristic only of the non-classical, “mystical” beliefs in the underworld is more precisely to be understood as meaning that in Greece that experience of life which is articulated in such images as the drink and the river of Lethe proves to be the pre-classical foundation of mystical teachings and narrations. For the Greek form of this experience—the greedy drinking of an incessant stream, which the designation “river of Lethe” best approaches—not only has something negative about it in its orientation towards passing away and disappearing. No: in this experience the normal human thirst for life itself acquires a negative seal; the temporal being of man is understood from the point of view of Lethe. The ‘mysticism’ which is based upon this is not identical with the mysticism of older—let alone the Eleusinian—mysteries! The water of life, become the water of Lethe, brings about no “fulfillment,” no telos, as does Eleusis. Nonetheless, this “mysticism” is also old, older than Heraclitus, who fought the priests of the local mysteries. Accordingly, we may likewise take as archaic the water of Lethe, understood as outflowing life. The image of the “spring of Lethe,” which first appears upon Orphic gold foils in the post-classical period, probably belongs in this same mythological tissue as a secondary formation in relation to the “river” which is drunk. One might ask from the outset whether it was not more likely fashioned after the “spring of Mnemosyne” than vice versa. Just as Lethe is the spring which is drunk and flows through, so accordingly Mnemosyne can originally have been that which springs forth.
The parallelism of the two springs is in fact present on the gold foils mentioned above, which were buried with the dead as a guide in the underworld. Yet the descriptive details in the longer and shorter forms of this Greek book of the dead do not correspond. In the former the deceased in the underworld finds the spring of Lethe to the left, with a white cypress tree next to it. This spring is not mentioned by name, but the dead should beware of even coming into its vicinity. He then finds another spring—it is seen on a vase of the underworld flowing through a mask—and this cold water originates in the pool of Mnemosyne (Fr. 32a). In the shorter version the correct spring is recognizable to the right of the cypress tree. Mnemosyne is not explicitly spoken of; instead someone speaks in the first person of the spring. The dead person complains of unbearable thirst: “I am parched and dying from thirst.” Who offers him drink? Only the one to whom the spring belongs can answer as follows in the text: “drink you then from my eternally flowing spring to the right …” (32b). On the above-mentioned vase the spring stands under the care of a feminine figure, who has been randomly interpreted as Megara, the wife of Hercules. The Goddess Mnemosyne herself seems to be present here in image and word—an important goddess in Greece, from whom came every recollection, not only the “mystical” ones. But of the latter it is explicitly said on one of the gold foils that they are a gift of Mnemosyne (Fr. 32g). Thanks to her the dead person in the after-world can show himself to be a son of heaven and of earth, like the Gods themselves.
It is again Pausanias (9.39.8) who, in the second century A. D., gives us an account of a spring of Mnemosyne in Greece. On the way to the oracular cave of Trophonios at Lebadeia was a spring of this name, with another one next to it: the spring of Lethe. Whether this designation of both springs was not present before that later period cannot be demonstrated. It is especially improbable that precisely in that district Mnemosyne would not already have had a cult, and within the cult a sacred spring, at a very early point, possibly in archaic times. Lebadeia is located in the Boeotian countryside between two cultic sites: the one belonged to Mnemosyne, and the other to her daughters, the Muses. The latter were worshipped on neighboring Mt. Helicon, and there, as elsewhere on Greek soil, they were as closely connected with sacred springs as if they would be but spring Goddesses. Some cultic monuments show that Mnemosyne, together with her daughters, enjoyed religious veneration. Their special cultic site lay in the opposite direction as Mt. Helicon, but likewise not far removed from Lebadeia. It is Hesiod who names this place when he mentions in his Theogony the mother of the Muses for the first time (53):
Upon the Pierian heights with Zeus the father united,Begat Mnemosyne her, the ruler of the fields of Eleuther,Comfort to be to hurt and balm to every affliction.
So read the lines in the translation of J. H. Voss. The place was called Eleutherai. The hero of the area, Eleuther, after whom Hesiod avers the place to be named, was according to a Boeotain tradition the brother of Lebados, the founder of Lebadeia. The two little towns were connected with each other also through their mythical founders.
In his travel account Pausanias says nothing about a special sanctuary of Mnemosyne in Eleutherai, but he does speak of a cave and a spring there which, through a mythological tradition, were linked together and were hallowed. According to the tradition of that place, it was in a cave at Eleutherai that Antiope gave birth to the twin sons of Zeus, Amphion and Zethos, whom a shepherd found and bathed in the water of the nearby spring (1.38.9). Antiope was, like Mnemosyne, a spouse of Zeus. But Mnemosyne, by virtue of the Theogony, was considered a great and primordial Goddess, according to Hesiod one of the six and according to Orphic tradition one of the seven female Titans from whom all the Gods were descended. As one of the acts in his creation of the world Zeus begat the Muses with her. This, and everything else in Hesiod’s Theogony, that oldest didactic poem of Hellenism, constitutes in fact “the permanent fund of Greek mythology,” but that does not rule out other names for the participants in the same events. Thus in a tradition deviating from Hesiod we are also told that the mother of the Muses was called Antiope.2
This tradition is expressed in a form which is characteristic for a mythological variant that is subordinate to the dominant version. In the Macedonian district of Emathia there are supposed to have been nine maidens, called the Pierides after their father, the autochthonous king Pierus. The father gave each of them the name of a Muse, and the daughters themselves foolishly wanted to compete with the Muses in song. They were defeated and transformed into birds. These counterfeit, defeated Muses were, according to a variant source, the daughters of Antiope, who in the same context was considered not the beloved of Zeus, but the wife of Pierus. Yet Pausanias’s report from Thespiae (9.29.2), according to which Pierus the Macedonian determined the number of the Muses, shows how highly regarded, even in the area around Mt. Helicon, was this genealogical history, which contains a very archaic identification of Goddesses and birds. Antiope appears in Eleutherai just as she is usually known in Boeotia: as mother of the Theban Dioscuri, Amphion and Zethos. It is not by chance that a cave, to which belonged a sacred spring, played a role in her myth and probably also in her cult there. According to Hesiod, Mnemosyne dominated this corner of the land running from Boeotia into Attica. In keeping with the accounts of Pausanias and the mythographers concerning an Antiope who was served by cave and spring at her parturition and an Antiope who was the mother of the Muses, the possibility cannot be denied that the spring belonged to the same Goddess—called in Hesiod Mnemosyne, at other times also Antiope.
In Hesiod there is evidence that it is more likely that a spring of Lethe could have arisen in the realm of Mnemosyne, than conversely a spring of Mnemosyne as a replica of Lethe. The Goddess Mnemosyne, whom the poet celebrates as the mother of the Muses, is for him precisely in this quality the source of that negative blessing which her daughters, together with all their positive gifts, also signify: “comfort to be to hurt”—as it says in Voss’s translation—“and balm to every affliction.” Hesiod, however, uses another word here at the point of “comfort” as a consciously antithetical construction to the name of Mnemosyne: lesmosyne te kakon ampayma te mermeraon.
“Lesmosyne” derives from the same root as “Lethe” and means exactly the same thing. The sphere of the Muses, which arises from the primordial Goddess Mnemosyne, also has the benefit of Lethe, who makes everything disappear that belongs to the dark side of human existence. It is only both the elements—giving illumination and letting disappear, Mnemosyne and her counterpole, Lesmosyne—that make up the entire being of the Goddess, whose name comes solely from the positive side of her field of power. This union of the opposites under the dominion of the positive characterizes that older Greek religiosity which must, if one disregards the natural mysteries, appear “unmystical.” It was another sort of mysticism which gave rise to the split into two, not easily re-united, possibilities for man: a divine state with Mnemosyne, and another state which was deadly yet unceasing, whereby one flows away with the stream of Lethe. Seen from the perspective of this stream, the ancient divinity of Mnemosyne appeared with a new luminosity that stood in sharp relief to the darkness of Lethe. None-theless, her light has always broken forth out of her own depths, and it is these which have to be uncovered through research into the archaic strata of Greek mythology in its concreteness.
NOTES
This translation by Jay Stoner, approved by Magda Kerényi, has been made from “Mnemosyne—Lesmosyne: Über die Quellen ‘Erinnerung’ und ‘Vergessenheit,’ ” in Karl Kerényi, Humanistische Seelenforschung, Werkausgabe, vol. 1 (Munich and Vienna: Langen Müller, 1966), pp. 311–22. It appeared earlier in German in Schweizer Montatshefte 24 (1945): 678–87, and in the volume Die Geburt der Helena, Albae Vigiliae III (Zurich, 1945), pp. 91–104.
1. M. . Nilson, “Die Quellen der Lethe und der Mnemosyne,” Eranos 1943, p. 62ff. (Opuscula selecta III, Lund, 1960, p. 85ff.).
2. Cicero, De Nat. Deor. 3.21.54., and for what follows: Ant. Lib. 9 and Ov., Met. 5, p. 295ff.
Spring: An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (1977): 120–30
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