Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne means 'memory'. Remembrance is this Goddess's gift to us, memories of all the wonderful moments of our lives. In Greek tradition, Mnemosyne also gave birth to the Muses today - the nice creative spirit children that give our lives so much beauty: song, stories, tradition, humor, dance and sacred music. Greeks sometimes worshipped Mnemosyne in the form of a spring, alluding to her profuse, flowing energy.


The Goddess Mnemosyne is sometimes credited with being the first philosopher, Her gift the power of reason. She was given responsibility for the naming of all objects, and by doing so gave humans the means to dialog and to converse with each other. The powers to place things in memory and that of remembrance were also attributed to this Goddess.

Make no mistake about this. Memory was of the utmost importance at the time of Mnemosyne. Long before the invention of the alphabet and the written word, it was critical to the well-being of an individual or a society who had to rely solely on the lessons passed on in an oral history.

Besides, we're not talking about memorizing shopping lists or the times tables here. The memory of Mnemosyne was much more than that -- it was the memory of the rules and energies of the universe, the cycle of life, the memory of how to live in the world.

The ancients believed that when one died and crossed into the Underworld one would be given a choice . . . whether to drink from the river Lethe where you would forget all the pains and terrors of your previous life (and with them, the lessons they brought), or whether to drink from the Mnemosyne, the spring of memory.

Those who chose to forget had to be reborn, to return to earth to learn the lessons they needed. Those who had chosen to remember were admitted to the Elysian Fields where they would spend eternity in comfort and peace.

The esteem in which the memory was held was made clear in the initiation rites of the ancient gnostics, who were required to consult with an oracle.

Before being brought to the oracle, initiates were taken to a place with two pools lying next to each other. They were instructed to first drink from the pool of Lethe, the Goddess of forgetfulness, in order that they might forget their previous lives. Then they were taken to the spring of Mnemosyne to drink so that they would remember all that they were about to learn from the oracle.

The initiate would then be 'buried alive' (i.e., placed in seclusion) for a few days in the 'tomb' of the earth god, Trophonios to await the arrival of the oracle. If the initiate had been properly prepared and was found worthy, the mysteries of life would be told to him by the oracle. And when he was brought back into the realm of the living, the priests would set him upon a special seat, called the Throne of Mnemosyne. While seated there, he would remember and tell all that he had learned below.