User:Whatifidontwannabe/Lethe

In Greek mythology, Lethe /ˈliːθiː/ (Greek: Λήθη, Lḗthē; Ancient Greek: [lɛ́:tʰɛː], Modern Greek: [ˈliθi]), also referred to as Lemosyne, was one of the five rivers of the underworld of Hades

Mythology

River

John Roddam Spencer Stanhope's The Waters of the Lethe by the Plains of Elysium.

The river Lethe was said to be located next to Hades' palace in the underworld under a cypress tree. Orpheus would give some shades (the greek term for ghosts or spirits) a password to tell Hades' servants which would allow them to drink instead from the Mnemosyne (the pool of memory), which was located under a poplar tree. An Orphic inscription, said to be dated from between the second and third century B.C. warns readers to avoid the Lethe and to seek the Mnemosyne instead. Drinkers of the Lethe's water would not be quenched of their thirst, often causing them to drink more than necessary.

Goddess

Although some sources have mistakenly identified her as the daughter of Oceanus, the father of other river goddesses, Hesiod's Theogony identifies her as the daughter of Eris ("strife"). Lethe is often compared to Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory. Roger Brooke describes their dynamic in his 1999 book Pathways into the Jungian World: Phenomenology and Analytical Psychology stating "Rather than only constituting disaster and darkness, Lethe also presents their obliteration- something like the withdrawal of life...".

Role in religion and philosophy

More recently, Martin Heidegger used "lēthē" to symbolize not only the "concealment of Being" or "forgetting of Being" but also the "concealment of concealment", which he saw as a major problem of modern philosophy. Philosophers since, such as William J. Richardson have expanded on this school of thought.

The goddess Lethe has been compared to the goddess Meng Po of Chinese Mythology, who would wait on the Bridge of Forgetfulness to serve dead souls soup which would erase their memories before they were reincarnated.

Real rivers

Amongst authors in antiquity, the tiny Lima river between Norte Region, Portugal, and Galicia, Spain, was said to have the same properties of memory loss as the legendary Lethe River, being mistaken for it. In 138 BCE, the Roman general Decimus Junius Brutus Callaicus sought to dispose of the myth, as it impeded his military campaigns in the area. He was said to have crossed the Lima and then called his soldiers from the other side, one by one, by name. The soldiers, astonished that their general remembered their names, crossed the river as well without fear. This act proved that the Lima was not as dangerous as the local myths described.

In Cádiz, Spain, the river Guadalete was originally named "Lethe" by local Greek and Phoenician colonists who, about to go to war, solved instead their differences by diplomacy and named the river Lethe to forever forget their former differences. When the Arabs conquered the region much later, their name for the river became Guadalete from the phrase وادي لكة (Wadi lakath) meaning "River of Forgetfulness".

References in literature

Main article: River Lethe in popular culture

• In 29 BCE, Virgil wrote about Lethe in his didactic hexameter poem, the Georgics. Lethe is also referenced in Virgil's epic Latin poem, Aeneid, as the title protagonist travels to Lethe to meet the ghost of his father in Book VI of the poem.

"The souls that throng the flood

Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow'd:

In Lethe's lake they long oblivion taste,

Of future life secure, forgetful of the past."

• In 8 AD, Ovid, includes a description of Lethe as a stream that puts people to sleep in Metamorphoses,.

• In Purgatorio, the second cantica of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy, the Lethe is located in the Earthly Paradise atop the Mountain of Purgatory. The piece, written in the early 14th century, tells of Dante's immersion in the Lethe so that his memories are wiped of sin (Purg. XXXI). The Lethe is also mentioned in Inferno, the first part of the Comedy, as flowing down to Hell from Purgatory to be frozen in the ice around Satan, "the last lost vestiges of the sins of the saved" (Inf. XXXIV.130).
• William Shakespeare references Lethe's identity as the "river of forgetfulness" in a speech of the Ghost in Act 1 Scene 5 of Hamlet: "and duller should thoust be than the fat weed / That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf," written sometime between 1599 and 1601.
• In John Milton's Paradise Lost, written in 1667, Satan describes how "The associates and copartners of our loss, Lie thus astonished on the oblivious pool", referencing Lethe.
• The English poet John Keats references the river in his famous poem “Ode to a Nightingale”, written in 1819. The first four lines of the poem being:

"My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:"

• The French poet Charles Baudelaire referred to the river in his poem "Spleen", published posthumously in 1869. The final line is "Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé" which one translator renders as "… in whose veins flows the green water of Lethe …" (the reference offers a few more English translations). Baudelaire also wrote a poem entitled "Lethe".
• In 1956, Allen Ginsberg referred to the river in the final line of his poem "A Supermarket in California".
• Throughout Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence, 'Lethe' is used as an exclamation from the early 21st century onwards.

References in visual art

Le Lethe by Cyrus Dallin

• In 1880 John Roddam Spencer Stanhope painted The Waters of the Lethe by the Plains of Elysium, depicting pilgrims traveling to the Lethe River.
• Romaine Brooks' 1930 sketch entitled Lethe depicts genderless figures surrounding a woman dipping her foot into the river of forgetfulness.
• Cyrus Dallin's plaster sculpture Le Lethe, 1903, depicts the goddess Lethe asleep upon a bed of poppies and a truncated tree.