Waking up from unmindfulness

Here’s a bit of Greek mythology that I discovered the other day.

In Greek legend, Lethe is the River of Unmindfulness, one of five rivers in the Underworld. The river winds around a cave where a character called Hypnos lives and anyone who drinks from Lethe’s waters forgets everything that went before. As is the way with Greek legend, the river Lethe also doubles up as the spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion. It’s from these names that we get the words lethargic and hypnosis.

Roman mythology also helps us with modern words too. Somnus is the Roman version of Hypnos, and the personification of sleep — from where we derive the word ‘insomnia.’ Somnus’s brother is called Mors (death) creating the words ‘mortician’ and ‘mortal’ in English and ‘mort’ in French.

We have our own River of Unmindfulness in modern life. We sup from it every­ day, lulled into a sense that everything will be alright. Someone will fix the problems — we just need to sit tight. We are rocked like babies until we fall into a waking sleep.

Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher, born in Dublin in 1729 and wrote this: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of…