The Cup of Lethe

  Lethe was a “mythical river of Hades (whose water caused forgetfulness of the past), in Homer, a place of oblivion in the lower world the infernal region; from Greek lēthē, literally ‘forgetfulness, oblivion,’ and related to lethal, ‘causing death.’ Lethe, also related to lēthargos ‘forgetful,’ is the name of a personification of oblivion, a daughter of Eris (Strife).” Participants in the Orphic mysteries of Greece 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 (now 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, among the Elect who walk the Via Christa, have noted that the Cup of Lethe is an example of God’s loving kindness in veiling our memory of Heavenly Realms while we work out our soul’s salvation in conquering the self. By the time a conquering soul 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.