The river Lethe from the Greek mythology has appeared many times in various works of culture since the times of ancient Greece.
In the Japanese manga Saint Seiya, written and illustrated by Masami Kurumada, the river Lethe appears in the third act, the Hades arc. The river Lethe is mentioned several times as the boundary between the Underworld and the Elysion, the paradise of the Greek deities and heroes. It also appears in the anime adaptation of the manga, depicted in the same manner as the source material.
In the Japanese manga Sailor Moon, written and illustrated by Naoko Takeuchi, the "River of Forgetfulness" appears in act 56, the seventh act of the Stars arc. Sailor Lethe, guardian of the planet Lethe, is the watchman of the river. Sailor Lethe's much less aggressive sister, Sailor Mnemosyne, is the watchman of the "River of Memory." When the main character, Sailor Moon, falls into Lethe's river, she loses all sense of her memory, as do the rest of her allies when they fall in. Sailor Moon is able to regain her memory, but Princess Kakyuu must drink from Mnemosyne's River of Memory in order to snap out of Lethe's spell.
Dan Simmons' Hyperion contains a chapter titled "The River Lethe's Taste is Bitter", so named because the daughter of main character of the chapter suffers from a malady which causes her to age backwards, thus forgetting her life and family one day at a time.
In Rick Riordan's novels, The Heroes of Olympus series and the short story Percy Jackson and the Sword of Hades in The Demigod Files reference and portray this river in their plot.
The unnamed narrator of Sasha Sokolov's novel, A School for Fools, has a significant habit of referring to the river running through his neighborhood in the Russian countryside as Lethe.
In Stephen King's novel Rose Madder, Rose, in preparation for retrieving the title character's child from a labyrinth, is warned not to drink from the water from a river she must cross. Later in the story, a few drops of that water, mixed in a soft drink, is used to remove Bill's memories of the latter part of the book's events.
In Piers Anthony's With a Tangled Skein, Niobe accompanies her daughter and granddaughter on a questto acquire an enchanted paint brush and a harp. During the quest, the trio must cross an illusory representation of the Lethe. Later, in Hell, Niobe must again cross a river, and wonders if it might be the actual Lethe.
In Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice, the river Lethe is a central theme of the play. All the shades must drink from Lethe and become like stones, speaking in their inaudible language and forgetting everything of the world.
Metastasio's opera libretto Artaserse references the River Lethe in one of Artabano's arias, Su le sponde del torbido Lete, originally set to music for a tenor voice by Leonardo Vinci. In the aria, Artabano sings of the recently murdered Serse as waiting for revenge on the banks of the turbid Lethe.
In Haydn's opera Orlando Paladino, Orlando is so consumed by his unrequited love for Angelica that it drives him to insanity and in order to rid him of his insanity, and the sorceress Alcina sends him to the underworld and orders Caronte to bathe him in the waters of the River Lethe to make him forget about Angelica and regain his sanity.
In Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld, the character John Styx drinks the waters of Lethe in a deliberate attempt to forget things. His forgetfulness is a significant factor in the plot of the last act.
Walter Savage Landor transforms into substance the metaphor that time takes flight when he places a few drops of Lethe's waters on wing:
On love, on grief, on every human thing,Time sprinkles Lethe's water with his wing.
In The Divine Comedy, the stream of Lethe flows to the centre of the earth from its surface, but its headwaters are located in the Earthly Paradise found at the top of the mountain of Purgatory. Souls about to enter Heaven drink from it to forget their sins.
In John Keats' poem, "Ode on Melancholy", the first line begins "No, no! Go not to Lethe". In his Ode to a Nightingale the narrator sinks "Lethe-wards," that is, into the "drowsy numbness" of the river.
The fourth stanza of the fourth canto of Byron's "Don Juan" reads:
"And if I laugh at any mortal thing,In his poem "The Sleeper," Edgar Allan Poe describes a 'sleeping' "universal valley" that includes a Lethe-like body of water.
'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep,
'T is that our nature cannot always bring
Itself to apathy, for we must steep
Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,
Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep:
Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx;
A mortal mother would on Lethe fix."
"Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake."
Charles Baudelaire's poem "Spleen" ends with the lines
"II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébétéBaudelaire also wrote a poem entitled "Le Léthé" ("Lethe"), in which an adored but cruel woman serves as a metaphor for the oblivion of the river Lethe.French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine refers to the Lethe river in "Le Vallon" (The Vale)
Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé"
("He failed to warm this dazed cadaver in whose veins
Flows the green water of Lethe in place of blood.").
J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie;Je viens chercher vivant le calme du Léthé.(I have seen too much, felt too much, loved too much in my life;I come to seek, still living, the calm of Lethe.)
Pushkin's verse novel "Eugene Onegin" also contains three separate references to the Lethe (Лета) including this most poignant one in Lensky's soliloquy in Chapter 6, Stanza XXII as he awaits his fate at the dueling ground:
А я, быть может, я гробницыСойду в таинственную сень,И память юного поэтаПоглотит медленная Лета,Забудет мир меня;
but I perhaps will be declining into the tomb's mysterious shade; the trail the youthful poet followed by sluggish Lethe may be swallowed, and I be by the world forgot;
In Hymn to Proserpine (1866) by Algernon Charles Swinburne, the line "We have drunken of things Lethean..." laments the decline of pagan tradition and beliefs in ancient Rome following the endorsement of Christianity as the official religion.
The river is also mentioned in at least one of the poems of Victorian classicist and poet A. E. Housman (XXIII from More Poems).
"Crossing alone the nighted ferry
With the one coin for fee,
Whom, on the wharf of Lethe waiting,
Count you to find? Not me.
The brisk fond lackey to fetch and carry,
The true, sick-hearted slave,
Expect him not in the just city
And free land of the grave."
Here the role of the Lethe as the final barrier to be crossed before reaching Elysium is invoked (NB "Lethe" is better rhyme for "ferry" than is "Stix") and the poem as a whole seems to reflect the associations of the Lethe with forgetfulness and escape from ones former life.
The Edna St. Vincent Millay poem "Lethe" describes the river as
"the taker-away of pain,In "The Scarlet Woman", a poem by African-American poet Fenton Johnson (1888–1958), a young woman resorts to prostitution in order to avoid starvation. The poem concludes with the lines
And the giver-back of beauty!"
"Now I can drink more gin than any man for miles around.
Gin is better than all the water in Lethe."
Sylvia Plath has alluded to Lethe in multiple poems, particularly in those written for Ariel. For example, both "Amnesiac" (21 October 1962) and "Getting There" (6 November 1962)[1] reference the river: "Getting There" ends with the lines
"And I, stepping from this skinwhile the final stanza of "Amnesiac" ends with
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces
Step up to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby."
"O sister, mother, wife,
Sweet Lethe is my life.
I am never, never, never coming home!"
The river Lethe is mentioned in Allen Ginsberg's poem "A Supermarket in California".
"Ah, dear father graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America did
you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking
bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?" (Berkeley, 1955)
Billy Collins, in his poem "Forgetfulness", refers to
"a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall".
in "" Charlotte Smith asks the river Lethe for forgetfulness:
"As to the sea your limpid waves you bear,Also mentioned in Byron's poem "Remember Thee! Remember Thee!".
Can you one kind Lethean cup bestow,
To drink a long oblivion to my care?"
In the Aeneid by Vergil, in book 6 Aeneas sees the future Roman heroes drinking from the River Lethe. "The drink the soothing fluid and long forgetfullness"
Emily Dickinson mentions the "Lethe" in her poetry (#1730 by Thomas Johnson editing).
In the Andromeda seadon 1 episode "The Banks of the Lethe", a black hole enables communication between a pair of separated lovers.
In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Tabula Rasa", Willow uses a flower called Lethe's Bramble as a material component to a spell that temporarily erases the memory of her friends.
In , the waters of the Lethe are used in two episodes: "Hercules and the Pool Party", where Hades uses a Lethe Pool of Forgetfulness to erase the memories of the other Olympian gods, and "Hercules and the Aetolian Amphora", where a young Megara steals an amphora full of waters from the Pool of Forgetfulness to erase bad memories of a date with Adonis, encountering and then forgetting Hercules in the process.
In Peaky Blinders season 5, episode 6: "Mr. Jones", Tommy Selby, who (along with his brother Arthur and their fellow WWI combat veteran Barney) has been shown to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, visits the Margate, Kent home of Alfie Solomons, whom he had shot on the beach in the season 4 finale. Prominently written on Alfie's tile doormat is the word "LETHE".[2]
The river is featured in the season 3 finale episode of the Disney Original series So Weird, titled "The River".
In the episode "Dagger of the Mind", one of the penal colony residents who is blank and emotionless is introduced as "Lethe". This is a reference to her memories' having been wiped by the neural neutralizer, a supposed medical device that is only later shown to be extremely dangerous.
"Lethe" is the title of Season 1, Episode 6.
In Final Fantasy VI, a river area in the game, on which the party first encounters the octopus character Ultros, is referred to as the "Lethe River".
The fourth act of Kentucky Route Zero is set on Lake Lethe, where a pair of scientists are studying memory loss.
In Cultist Simulator, the House of Lethe (also known as the Ordo Lamiae or the Obliviates) are an insular society of immortals who hide themselves from the gods and the rest of the world. They drink from the River Lethe, in order to be forgotten by outsiders and obscure their identity. They have branches in Thebes, Aleppo, and Damascus, and are also associated with Hispania Gallaecia - implying that the River Lethe might be the River Limia, as the Romans believed.