Indo-European texts variously depict the afterlife as a celestial heaven or a subterranean underworld full of fires, but most often as a place reached by crossing a body of water, a river, an ocean, a lake . . . most frequently, the water is a river. The hidden river. The river Lethe.

Lethe is mentioned in various sources, but the fullest account is in Plato's The Republic, within the framework of his myth of Er. Er was a soldier of Pamphylos who was taken for dead, but who returned after twelve days to relate what he had seen in the otherworld. Here is Plato's passage concerning Lethe:

He went to the throne of Necessity, and when he and the others had passed through, they all crossed to the Plain of Forgetfulness (Lethes pedion) through fearful stifling heat, for that plain is bare of trees and all that the earth brings forth. When evening fell, they encamped beside the river Without Memory (Ameleta, also called Forgetfulness, Lethe) whose water no vessel can contain. Then it was compulsory for all to drink some measure of that water, and men do not understand that which would save them, but drink that full measure and those who drink, are caused to forget everything forever.

And after they were asleep, in the middle of the night, there was thunder and an earthquake, and suddenly they were borne up thence this way and that to their next birth, like shooting stars.

Now Er himself was prevented from drinking of that water. How, and by what means he arrived at his body, he did not see. But suddenly, upon opening his eyes, he saw himself lying on his own funeral pyre at dawn.

And thus, O Glaukon, the story was preserved and not lost, and it will save us if we trust in it, and we will cross over that River of Forgetfulness and we will not sully our soul . . .

Plato's theory concerning Lethe was one about learning; he held that men could not learn, only be reminded of what they had known before (but forgot). But knowledge must come from somewhere. It does not spring new into the minds of men, because nothing new is possible; everything has already been created (?). So Plato theorized that knowledge was imparted to men's souls in the otherworld, in the pause between death and rebirth. This realm was where archetypes dwelt - it was the locus of all Platonic ideals, the perfect forms which cast imperfect shadows upon the world we know. Men learn while they are in that place, and they learn from experiencing and observing perfection. After dying (according to Plato) their souls spend a thousand years in interregnum there, and then are reborn into Earth, the cave. But before they come back into rebirth, they have to cross a scorching-hot dry plain, so that they come thirsty to the brink of the hidden river, are unable to resist the water of Lethe. They drink, and forget everything.

The vital step, the key to bringing back knowledge of perfection from the otherworld, is to abstain from drinking the water of Lethe. However restraint is all but impossible; only the disciplined mind and self-control of a true philosopher will save a man from drinking deep, and only a true philosopher will be able to cross the river and bring back some understanding of the world of true things.

From an Orphic grave text found in Italy, circa around 300 BC:

You will find a spring to the left of the house of Hades,
and standing beside it is a white cypress.
Do not approach.
You will find another, flowing cold water
From the pool of Memory, and before it there are guards.
Say to them: I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven,
But my lineage is heavenly.   You must see this yourselves.
I perish and am withered with thirst.   Give me quickly
The cold water flowing from the pool of Memory.
They will give you to drink from the divine spring,
And you will reign among heroes thereafter.

In the Upanisads of India, the soul after death travels through the underworld, and must cross first a pond named Ara (which can only be traversed by the mind) but those who know only the obvious sink in this pond and drown. Having won past the pond of Ara, the soul passes flying moments (ie, wins free of Time) and comes to the river "Apart from Old Age" which, again, must be crossed by the mind alone. After crossing this river, all good deeds and bad deeds are washed away from the soul. The good deeds and bad deeds wash back to the upper world, to the relatives of the deceased; all those whom the soul loved, receive the good deeds as gifts, and all those whom the soul detested, are struck with the weight of the deceased's bad deeds.

In Norse mythology, this notion of the hidden spring crops up yet again. And this time, the spring is at the root of a tree. The tree is the world-tree Yggdrasill, and the spring which wells out of its root is Mimir's Spring. And that is the spring in which knowledge and understanding are hidden, but he who drinks from it is filled with wisdom. According to some versions, Mimir's Spring ran with mead, not water, and it intoxicated (ie, brought its own forgetfulness).

Mimir's name derives (possibly) from the proto-Indo-European reconstructed verb *(s)mer to think, to recall, to reflect, to worry over" and might be translated as Memory. This compares to the Celtic goddess Rosmerta, patroness of memory, whose name also derives from PIE *(s)mer. It is also specified that when Mimir drinks from his spring, he drinks with a horn called the Gjallarhorn, that is to say the Cup of the River Gjoll . . . and this river, Gjoll, is one of the major rivers of the Norse underworld. The Gjoll, in fact, runs right past the gates of Hel. Mimir's Spring bubbles up from the waters of the Gjoll.

Mimir drank from the spring every morning. Few others tasted the water; Odin himself drank just once, and paid for it by forfeiting one eye.

In Roman mythology, the river between the lands of the living and the dead was the Styx, and souls were ferried across it by the ferryman Charon or Kharon. The ferryman himself crops up in other legends; he is Thanatos, Odin, Mors, the Morrigan, ie Death. From a Slavic funerary song:

A river runs here, a fiery river,
From east to west,
From west to north.
Over that river, the fiery river
Drives the Archangel Michael, the light.
He transports souls, the souls of the righteous.
The righteous souls, the soul rejoice.
... But the twisted, sinful souls remain.

So only the souls of the righteous could cross the river to death.

The root of the tree will divide in two, they will drink from the hidden river. The symbols are code: a tree, a hidden river, a cup. The cup is the Grail, but a draught of water from a hidden river at a tree's root is associated with death and rebirth, the soul's journey, wisdom and forgetfulness, and the washing away of karma on the way to samsara, Nirvana.

What is the tree?

In an ancient Persian motif, the sun is a woman and the queen of Heaven, Inanna; she sits enthroned beneath the Tree of Life, and two riders come to her, carrying a cup. According to Mesopotamian legends, the Tree of Life is also a black pine tree growing at the summit of a crystal mountain, but its roots stretch to the center of the earth. Throughout the Middle East, dead trees are venerated. They're considered sacred, magical; every locale with trees has its magical trees. Rags (like flags) and bones are hung on their branches, and skulls are left at their roots. In modern Afghanistan and southern Russia, the folk belief is that the bones of heroes (and their horses) are hung in holy trees; come the end of the world (which is the Apocalypse) those bones will come to life, and the heros will mount their steeds and ride.

In Mongol superstition, the north pole is literally a pole. It's a tent-pole thrust through the core of the earth, and stars hang at its top. The trunk of a tree, in other words.

What is the river?

In Spain, pools are called eyes. Eyots. They are the eyes of the earth. In Islamic lore, water is the great purifier, it heals and it washes clean. There are different degrees of water, "bright" water being the best; artesian water like the Zamzam spring in Mecca is the brightest sort of water. The brighter the water, the better it is to drink and to wash with.

What does the Grail cup have to do with the hidden rivers of Indo-European mythology?

The English word grail descents from the Greek word krater, mixing bowl. The word passed through Latin into old French and Italian; "kra" becomes "grai", the suffix "ter" is dropped and the letter "l" added; that's its etymology. The legend of the Grail itself, the heavenly cup, has also been traced. Its descent is through gnostic and hermetic Christianity, but the origin is thought to be Plato's legend of the river Lethe.

Hermeticism, a pagan branch of gnosticism, stems from about the second or third century AD: its tenets preach a religio mentis, a religion of the intellect, presided over by a God of Intellect. Intellect, in these teachings, is the highest quality of man, and those without intellect are as animals (and they are described much as Aristotle in his work on motion describes the animal kingdom). The Hermetic writings are preserved as a series of treatises, some in master- pupil dialogue form, and all attributed to Hermes Trigmegistus; hence the sect's name. They were the pop psychology of their time. One of the hermetic treatises is The Krater, and it deals (naturally) with the Grail.

It is cast in the form of a dialogue, between Tat, a myst (or student upon a spiritual journey) and his mystagogue or instructor, Hermes:

Tat: Tell me then, father, why did God not impart intellect to all men?

Hermes: It was his will, my son, that intellect should be placed in the midst as a prize that human souls may win.

Tat: And where did he place it?

Hermes: He filled a great Krater with intellect, and sent it down to earth; and he appointed a herald, and bade him make proclamation to the hearts of man: "Dip yourself in this Krater, you who are able; you who believe that you will ascend to Him who sent this Krater down; you who know for what purpose you have been born." Now they who have heed to the proclamation and were baptized in intellect, those men got a share of gnosis [ie, the knowledge of God], and they became perfect men because they received intellect. But those who failed to heed the proclamation, those are they who possess the gift of communication and reasoning, to be sure, but not more, since they have not received intellect and know not for what purpose they have been made, nor by whom they have been made. The sensations of these men are very close to those of beasts without reason, and since their temper is in a state of passion and anger, they do not admire the things worthy of contemplation; they give heed only to bodily pleasures and desires, and believe that man has been born for such things as these. But as many as have partaken of the gift which God has sent, these, O Tat ... they see the Good ... Such, O Tat, is the science of the intellect, which provides an abundant possession of things divine and the comprehension of God, for the Krater is divine.

Tat: I too, father, would like to be baptized.

So this hermetic Krater, in which souls dip themselves in wisdom, descends from heaven to earth, and is a cup in the tradition of the "underworld river" legends, in which souls drink of the water of wisdom or lethe. Elsewhere in the same treatise, the Grail is also called a magnet or loadstone: a stone which guides the wayfarer.

According to Macrobius (fourth-fifth century AD), disembodied souls drink oblivion or lethe from the constellation of the Krater or Bowl of Bacchus, after which they are drawn down purified and reborn upon Earth:

... the location of the constellation of the Bowl of Bacchus in the region between Cancer and Leo, indicating that there for the first time intoxication overtakes descending souls with the influx of matter; whence the companion of intoxication, forgetfulness, also begins to steal quietly upon souls at that point.

A third-century Gnostic treatise, the Pistis Sophia, describes vessels of wisdom and forgetfulness:

And there comes Ialouham, the receiver of Sabaoth, the Adamas [ie, Hermes] who gives to the souls the cup of forgetfulness, and he brings the water of forgetfulness and gives it unto a soul [and it drinks it], and it forgets all things and all places unto which it had gone. Afterwards there comes a receiver of the little Sabaoth ... and he himself brings a cup filled with understanding and wisdom, and sobriety is found in it, and he gives it to the soul and they cast it into a body that will not be able to sleep nor to forget, because of the cup of sobriety which is given to the soul, but the body will lash the soul's heart continually to seek after the mysteries of the Light.

Or from the fourth-century Syriac, a passage by St. Emphraim Syrus:

... there was a bowl, filled with whatever it was filled with, and ... there are souls excited by desire, and they come down beside it, and, when they have come close to it, in it and by reason of it they forget their own place ... Hermes teaches that the souls desired the bowl.

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