Lethe (mythology)
Lethe ( ancient Greek ἡ Λήθη ē Lḗthē , German 'forgetting' ) is one of the rivers in the underworld of Greek mythology .
meaning
The name means forgetting , oblivion , also in the sense of concealment , too ancient Greek λήθω lḗthō , German ' to be hidden' . The Greek word for truth , ἀλήθεια Aletheia , derives from the same root here and actually means unconcealment .
In ancient Greece it was believed that if you drink the water of the Lethe, you lose your memory before entering the realm of the dead. According to another tradition, souls had to drink from the river so that they would not remember their past life in order to be reborn. As it is said in Virgil's Aeneid : "The souls for whom fate determines other bodies / draw cheerful water from Lethe's wave, so they drink long oblivion."
Another river of the underworld, the Mnemosyne, was known . Those who drank from it remembered everything and were then endowed with the gift of omniscience. So here things were brought out of oblivion the other way around - the truth, a-lḗtheia , is formed from the negation of oblivion.
She was often equated with the daimon Lethe of the same name .
Orphicae Lamellae
The Orphicae Lamellae ("death passports") from the 4th century BC, found in southern Italy, northern Greece, Crete, Sicily and Rome, come from a Bacchic or Orphic cult . BC, which were placed in the graves. They contained written instructions in verse that should serve as a passport for the dead and as proof to the underground ruler Persephone that he had been beatified by a secular judgment of the dead in the name of Bacchus. One of the gold leaves from near Lebadeia shows the two springs Mnemosyne and Lethe. And in the document of the Mnemosyne (leaves from Petelia, Pharsalus, Hipponion and Entella) it says:
“You will find a spring in the house of Hades on the right with a white cypress tree next to it. There the descending souls of the dead cool themselves. You should not come near this source. You will also find the cool water that flows out of the pond of the Mnemosyne. There are guards above it. They will ask you why you are coming there. Say: I am a son of earth (G≤) and of the starry sky (Uranus), but my generation is heavenly, you know that yourself. But I am dried up from thirst and perish; so quickly give me the cool water that flows from the pond of the Mnemosyne. Then the kings under the earth will have pity on you, and they themselves will give you to drink from the divine spring. And when you have then drunk, you can walk the holy path that the other famous mystics and Bakchoi also walk. Then you will be a ruler together with the other dead heroes ... "
The saying found in a hero's grave near Thurioi , southern Italy, also warns the dead not to drink from the Lethe river.
Later references to Lethe
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- At the end of Plato's Politeia - the so-called myth of Er - the souls who arrive at the Lethe plain , through which the river Ameles ( Carefree ) flows, are told .
- The Lethe and Mnemosyne rivers can also be found at the Shrine of Trophonius in Boeotia , from which believers should drink before receiving oracular advice from the gods.
- The River Lethe is mentioned in the Divine Comedy . Its upper course is located near Dante in the Earthly Paradise on the top of the Purification Mountain and flows from there down to the center of the earth. The hero of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri , has to wash in the Lethe river before he can enter paradise.
- In Shakespeare's drama Julius Caesar , Antonius calls the Hell River Lethe when he sees the hands of the murderers soaked in Caesar's blood. In Shakespeare's comedy What you want , Sebastian says: "Fill my cup, Lethe, dark river, so that I don't have to wake up from the dream."
- The Lethe river plays a role in Friedrich Schiller's poem Hector's Farewell . It is sung to the old moor in Schiller's drama The Robbers of Amalia.
- In Goethe's drama Faust II (1st act, Graceful Area), Ariel asks the spirits to bathe Faust "in the dew of Lethes flood" so that Faust can forget his memories of the pact with the devil and his sins from Faust I.
- There is also a mention of Lethe in Hölderlin's letter novel Hyperion . There the protagonist Hyperion describes his relationship with Diotima as follows: “She was my Lethe, this soul, my holy Lethe, from which I drank the oblivion of existence, that I stood before her like an immortal, and joyfully scolded myself, and how after heavy dreams I had to smile at all the chains that I was holding. "
- Conrad Ferdinand Meyer wrote a poem called Lethe .
- In Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in der Unterwelt , Hans Styx , the servant of the underworld god Pluto , drinks copiously from the water of the Lethe River. Accordingly, he forgets everything.
- The French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote a poem called Le Lethe in which a popular but cruel woman is used as a metaphor for the forgetfulness emanating from the Lethe River.
- The composer and friend of Friedrich Nietzsche , Peter Gast (actually: Heinrich Köselitz ), composed his Opus 3 for baritone and orchestra in 1896 based on a text by Conrad Ferdinand Meyer and named it Lethe .
- Wilhelm Busch indicates in his poem Abschied that his death is imminent by writing to hear the Lethe flow.
- In 1908, the sculptor Wilhelm Wandschneider modeled the figure of a drinking woman whom he called Lethe .
- In his drama Baal, Bertolt Brecht has the protagonist hold a monologue to a liquor bottle, which he calls "Lethe".
- The American author Perry Pirsch wrote a novella called The River Lethe.
- In the string quartet Arcadiana, Op. 12 by the composer Thomas Adés , the seventh and last section is entitled Lethe .
- In Sarah Ruhl's play Eurydice , all souls have to drink from Lethe, whereupon they become like stones, speak in their inaudible tongues and forget everything. The Lethe River is the central theme of the piece.
- The Russian author Sasha Sokolov describes in his first work школа для дураков (' School for Stupid '), which appeared in the USA in 1976, the Lethe as a place of self-dissolution, of the protagonist forgetting himself.
- In their song Lethe, the melodic death metal band Dark Tranquility alludes to the loss of memories as a result of drinking from the mythological river.
- The black metal band Nocte Obducta refers to the river Lethe in their 1999 album Lethe (Gottverreckte Finsternis) .
- In Stephen King's novel The Image , the protagonist Rose McClendon has to cope with a difficult task; In doing so, she has to cross a river, the water of which she must not drink in order not to lose all memories. Since she has been mistreated for years in the past, she even thinks for a moment about tasting it all the more.
- In Dan Simmons ' book Hyperion , Sol is Weintraub's story, entitled The River Lethe's Taste is Bitter. ("The Lethe River tastes bitter."). Sol's daughter has contracted a mysterious disease called Merlin's Disease , which causes her to age back to the stage of birth and forget about her life when she sleeps.
- In the episode The Central Nervous System Manipulator (English: Dagger of the Mind ) of the first season of the television series Starship Enterprise, there is a young woman named Lethe. Lethe is a criminal whose memory is being erased.
- As part of a happening in 2009 , the Center for Political Beauty used so-called " Lethe bombs " to remind people that the Allies had not carried out any air raids against the extermination camps in Nazi Germany.
literature
- Harald Weinrich : Lethe. Art and criticism of oblivion. CH Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-406-45647-2 .