The water that takes the weight off by taking the thing
Warning
She does not return what she is given
Resonance
Those who need relief and those who fear losing what they keep
Symbols
The riverThe cupThe waterThe plain of oblivion
Mythology Summary
Lethe is a river, a place and a power of forgetting at once. Hesiod makes her one of the children of Strife (Theogony 226-227), a sharp genealogy: forgetfulness is born of quarrel. In Plato the souls in the myth of Er camp beside the river of Forgetfulness, the Ameles, and drink, and lose what they were (Republic X.621a-c); Virgil has the souls drink from Lethe before they are born again (Aeneid VI.703-751). At Lebadeia the water of Forgetfulness was drunk first and the water of Memory second, before the descent to Trophonius (Pausanias 9.39.7). The Orphic gold tablets warn the soul away from her.
Modern Practice
Lethe is worked with where something has to be put down: a grief, a name, a version of the self being carried past its usefulness. The practice is the deliberate putting-down and not the pretence of amnesia, and it is done knowing that what is given to her is not returned. She is worked beside Mnemosyne, never instead of her.