River Lethe in popular culture

The river Lethe from the Greek mythology has appeared in various works of culture since the times of the Ancient Greece.

Music

• The Society of Orpheus and Bacchus, a men's a cappella group from Yale University, released an album in 1992 entitled "Drinking from Lethe."
• In Tony Banks' first solo album, A Curious Feeling, where he tells the story of a man who makes some kind of pact with the devil and finishes by losing his memory, the ninth song is called "The Waters of Lethe".
• In composer Thomas Adès' String Quartet, "Arcadiana," Op. 12, "Lethe" is the title of the work's seventh and final movement.
• American rock supergroup The Company Band, also featuring Neil Fallon of Clutch, have a song called "Lethe Waters" on their eponymous debut album.
• The Swedish melodic death metal band Dark Tranquillity, released the song "Lethe" in their album "The Gallery" in 1995.
• Black metal bands Nightbringer recorded a song called "The River Lethe" and Nocte Obducta an album "Lethe".
• The Swedish/Finnish melodic death metal supergroup Solution .45 released the song "Lethean Tears" in their album "For Aeons Past" in 2010.
• Gothic Metal band Tristania recorded a song called "Lethean River", from their album "Beyond the Veil" in 1999.
• Norwegian rock band Motorpsycho have an instrumental song called "La Lethe" on their album The Death Defying Unicorn.
• American experimental rock band Kayo Dot recorded a song entitled "Lethe," featured on their 2012 album Gamma Knife.
• French doom and depressive black metal band Lethian Dreams also take their name from river Lethe.
• Kristin Hersh has a song titled "Lethe" on her album Possible Dust Clouds.

Novels

Dan Simmons' Hyperion contains a chapter titled "The River Lethe's Taste is Bitter", so named 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.

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.

Plays

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.

Other

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.

In Hercules: The Animated Series, 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 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".