Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

xi] Mnemosyne and Anamnesis 513
sensuous world with its other and almost alien reality he needs
a rite de segregation.
That Memory, the mere remembering of facts, should be the
Mother of the Muses is a frigid genealogy. The usual explana-
tion offered is that memory is the faculty which enables you to
remember and repeat long epic poems. But the Mnemosyne of
initiation rites, the remembering again, the avd/xvrjcns, of things
seen in ecstasy when the soul is rapt to heavenly places, she is
surely now, as ever, the fitting Mother of all things musical. We
are told again and again that Plato 'borrowed much of his imagery'
from the mysteries, but it is no external borrowing of a mere
illustration. Plato's whole scheme alike of education and philo-
sophy is but an attempted rationalization of the primitive mysticism
of initiation, and most of all of that profound and perennial mysticism
of the central rite de passage, the death and the new birth, social,
moral, intellectual. His borrowings of terminology, his