The Cup of Lethe

Lethe means “oblivion” in Greek, and in Greek mythology, she was the daughter of Eris (Strife) and the personification of oblivion. Lethe is also the name of a river or plain in the infernal regions.

Participants in the Orphic mysteries (a Greek mystical religious movement), believed that the newly dead who drank from the River Lethe would lose all memory of their past existence. The initiated were taught to seek instead the river of memory, Mnemosyne, thus securing the soul’s memory. At the oracle of Trophonius near Lebadeia (modern Levadhia, Greece), which was thought to be an entrance to the underworld, there were two springs called Lethe and Mnemosyne.

Aristophanes’ play, The Frogs mentions a plain of Lethe. Plato, in The Republic, Book X, asserts that the souls of the dead must drink from the “river of Unmindfulness” before rebirth. In the works of the Latin poets, Lethe is one of the five rivers of the underworld.

Modern mystics who walk the Via Christa have noted that the Cup of Lethe is an example of God’s loving kindness in blocking our memory of Heavenly Realms while we work out our own salvation in soul conquering of the self. By the time a soul conqueror realizes this truth, it (he or she, depending on the embodiment) has become so accepting of God’s grace that despair and resentment have faded into the dead past of illusion and delusion.