HoneyMilkWaterBay leafA name spoken aloudA story retold
Invocation Approach
Tone
Quiet recalling
Address
MnemosyneMother of the MusesRememberer
Relationship
The memory that is kept on purpose
Warning
What is handed to her is kept and what is refused is simply lost
Resonance
Those who keep records students the grieving
Symbols
The springThe tabletThe bay laurelThe bee
Mythology Summary
Mnemosyne is a Titaness, named among the six daughters of Earth and Sky in Hesiod's Titan list (Theogony 135), and the mother of the nine Muses, whom she bears to Zeus after nine nights in Pieria; Hesiod calls the Muses a forgetting of ills and a rest from sorrow (Theogony 53-64, 915-917). At Lebadeia her spring stood beside the spring of Forgetfulness, and the man going down to the oracle of Trophonius drank from Lethe first and then from Memory so that he would remember what he saw (Pausanias 9.39.7-8). The Orphic gold tablets send the dead soul to the spring of Memory instead.
Modern Practice
Mnemosyne is called on wherever something has to be kept: a record, a name, a testimony, a body of work that outlives the one who made it. The practice is the deliberate keeping - write it down, say it aloud, give it to someone else - because in her account memory is not storage but a gift that has to be handed on.