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Mnemosyne

Domain: Memory; the remembered word, the ground of poetry Symbol: The pool of remembrance, the raised veil, the poet's recalled song Roman Equivalent: Moneta

Overview

Mnemosyne is the Titaness of memory — her name is simply the Greek word for it — and she is memory understood not as a private faculty but as a cosmic power, the keeping of what has been against the forgetting that would erase it. Daughter of Gaia and Uranus, she is the ground of poetry and of all the arts that depend on remembrance; in an age before writing, when the whole inheritance of a people lived only in what could be recalled and recited, Memory was the mother of every song. To remember was to make the past present again, and Mnemosyne is the goddess of that resurrection.

She is best known as the mother of the nine Muses, whom she bore to Zeus over nine nights, and through them she is the source of epic, history, music, dance, astronomy, and every inspired art. The poet who calls on the Muse is calling, behind her, on Mnemosyne herself — for the Muses give what their mother keeps. In the mystery cults she was a power of the afterlife too: a pool of Memory stood beside the water of Forgetting in the underworld, and the initiate who drank from hers rather than from Lethe kept the self intact beyond death. To remember, in her keeping, is to remain.

Key Myths

Mother of the Muses. Zeus lay with Mnemosyne for nine consecutive nights, and in time she bore the nine Muses — Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia, and Urania — who preside over epic and history, love-song and tragedy, sacred hymn, dance, comedy, and the stars. Every inspired art descends from this union of the king of gods with Memory, so that all poetry is, at root, remembered: the Muses sing what their mother holds.

The wellspring of the singer. In the old world the poet did not invent so much as recall, drawing the deeds of gods and heroes out of the deep store of Memory. Hesiod tells how the Muses breathed their song into him on Helicon, and behind that gift stands Mnemosyne, the source they draw from. She is the reason the past can be spoken at all — the keeper of the tradition that would otherwise fall into silence.

The pool of Memory in the underworld. In the Orphic mystery tradition, the dead came to a place where two waters ran: Lethe, the stream of Forgetting, and the pool of Mnemosyne, the water of Memory. The uninitiated drank Lethe and lost themselves; the initiate, instructed, drank instead from Mnemosyne and kept knowledge and identity through death into the life beyond. Here Memory is nothing less than the continuity of the soul — to remember is to survive.

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