Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne is the Titaness of Memory, and mother, by Zeus, of the nine Muses — for all art and knowledge, the Greeks felt, are born of remembrance. To the Orphics she was more still: their gold funeral tablets instruct the dead soul to shun the spring of Lethe (Forgetting) and to drink instead from the cold pool of Mnemosyne (Memory), and so to keep its identity and win a better fate beyond death.

The theme runs deep into philosophy. Plato taught that learning is recollection, the soul's remembering of what it knew before birth — so that Memory, the mother of the Muses, becomes the very key to knowledge and to the soul's recovery of the divine.