Mnemosyne

The account

Mnemosyne lay with Zeus for nine consecutive nights and bore the nine Muses, and the arithmetic is the argument: memory, repeated, produces the arts. In a culture with no widespread written literature, this is not a metaphor. Poetry was the technology for holding on to the past, and Hesiod says so directly — the Muses are Mnemosyne's daughters and they are a forgetting of evils and a rest from cares, and a poet who has them can make a grieving man stop thinking about his grief. Her cult at Lebadeia makes the relationship physical. Anyone consulting the oracle of Trophonios first drank from the spring of Lethe to forget everything they were carrying in, then from the spring of Mnemosyne so that they would remember what they were shown below. Two springs side by side, and the whole procedure turns on knowing which is which.