Editing Lethe (section)

==Role in religion and philosophy==
Some ancient Greeks believed that souls were made to drink from the river before being reincarnated, so that they would not remember their past lives. The [[Myth of Er]] in Book X of [[Plato]]'s ''[[The Republic (Plato)|Republic]]'' tells of the dead arriving at a barren waste called the "plain of Lethe", through which the river ''Ameles'' ("careless") runs. "Of this they were all obliged to drink a certain quantity," Plato wrote, "and those who were not saved by wisdom drank more than was necessary; and each one as he drank forgot all things."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/republic.11.x.html|title=The Internet Classics Archive - The Republic by Plato|website=classics.mit.edu}}</ref> A few [[Greco-Roman mysteries|mystery religion]]s taught the existence of another river, the [[Mnemosyne]]; those who drank from the Mnemosyne would remember everything and attain [[omniscience]]. Initiates were taught that they would receive a choice of rivers to drink from after death, and to drink from Mnemosyne instead of Lethe.

These two rivers are attested in several verse inscriptions on gold plates dating to the 4th century BC and onward, found at [[Thurii]] in Southern [[Italy]] and elsewhere throughout the Greek world. There were rivers of Lethe and Mnemosyne at the oracular shrine of [[Trophonius]] in [[Boeotia]], from which worshippers would drink before making oracular consultations with the god.

More recently, [[Martin Heidegger]] used "lēthē" to symbolize not only the "concealment of Being" or "forgetting of Being", but also the "concealment of concealment", which he saw as a major problem of modern philosophy. Examples are found in his books on [[Nietzsche]] (Vol 1, p.&nbsp;194) and on [[Parmenides]]. Philosophers since, such as [[William J. Richardson]] have expanded on this school of thought.<ref>{{Cite book|last=Babich|first=B.E.|title=From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J.|year=2013|pages=267–273}}</ref>

The goddess Lethe has been compared to the goddess [[Meng Po]] of Chinese Mythology, who would wait on the Bridge of Forgetfulness to serve dead souls soup which would erase their memories before they were reincarnated.<ref>Murdock, Jacob M. ''Lethe and the Twin Bodhisattvas of Forgiveness and Forgetfulness''. Pacifica Graduate Institute, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2017. 10258489.</ref>