Mnemosyne
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:43 am (History, Myths and Fables, Philosophical Issues, Poetry)
How paradoxical — and how typical of human beings — that the goddess who personifies memory is the least known of all the principal Greek gods and goddesses : I even had to look her up in Wikipedia to find out something about her. She was apparently a Titaness, thus belonging to an earlier genus of immortals than the upstart Olympians. Mnemosyne was the daughter of Gaia, the mother of all life, and became herself the mother of the Muses via the archetypical serial philanderer and rapist, Zeus.
It is not clear how many Greeks believed in reincarnation though Plato certainly did : we have occasional tantalizingly vague suggestions in later Greek texts that the ideas of Indian ‘Gymnosophists’ filtered through to the West, though it is hard to imagine any actual Hindu ascetics making the trip prior to Alexander the Great’s excursions into India (which were much later than Plato’s time). Anyway, to judge from certain fourth century BC funerary inscriptions, it seems there existed a Greek tradition that souls, after physical death, drank from the waters of the river Lethe in order to forget their previous lives when reincarnated . However, those who aspired towards wisdom and self-knowledge, on the contrary, preferred to know where they were in the cosmic evolutionary process and, instead, drank from the waters of the river Mnemosyne.
I am indebted to Stephen Owen for ‘reminding’ me of Mnemosyne, perhaps the most important of all the Greek divinities — for what would humanity be without memory? The following beautiful poem comes from the magazine he edits, Fourth Dimension (No. 20 Jan 2010), contact address PO Box 2155, Warwick CV34 5ZF
Mnemosyne
How we have forgotten you
sweet keeper of the past
whose hands wander over the scroll shafts
your hair straying in faded headbands
How we have for gotten you
O whisperer in the wind
and wild brook’s call
your alabaster couch garlanded
with rosemary for remembrance
and blue forget-me-not.
Perhaps your violet eyes
still see the changing seasons,
but your slender lips are shut
and your full throat is silent
how noble were the Epics,
that once flowed from your pen
like cities breaking the green surface
borne up from the cloudy depths.
Stephen Owen