Mnemosyne and the Muses: The Role of Memory in Education

Insights from Greek mythology on how to approach education

"Mnemosyne," c. 1876-1881, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Public domain

In Greek mythology, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the nine muses, who were goddesses of the arts and sciences. As usual, the Greek poetic-allegorical mind teaches something true and important about the concepts personified in the story.

In their narrative of these divine beings, the Greeks communicated that, in a very real sense, memory is the generator and preserver of human knowledge and culture—and, by extension, education.

The Realness of Myth

Too readily, I think, our modern, post-scientific revolution mindset discards mythology, such as that of the Greeks, as unenlightened and uninteresting because it isn’t real and quantifiable in the literal sense, in the way that, say, the chemical composition of a leaf is real. Yet, as James Sale recently pointed out here in The Epoch Times, mythology explores and explains those aspects of reality that are deeper than what’s easily quantifiable, those truths that are constant, timeless, transcendent, and often mysterious.

Myth or poetry can tell us much more about human nature, love, death, war, destiny, beauty, and the like than scientific analysis can. Realities such as these form the core, the essence of our lives. Consequently, mythological or poetic thinking, rather than being “not real,” is in some sense more real than mere data or obvious facts. We might say that great myths and poems are “supra-real” insofar as they deal with the most important, universal, timeless, and mysterious realities of our existence.

Memory, Art, Science, and Education

So it is with the story of the Titan Mnemosyne, who bore nine daughters to Zeus. Each of the nine muses, in Greek thinking, inspires and directs a certain art or science. A common but non-definitive list runs as follows: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (love poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polymnia (sacred poetry), Terpsichore (dancing and song), Thalia (comedy), and Urania (astronomy).

Greek epic poetry always begins with the invocation of the muse, a prayer offered by the poet in which he calls on the divine assistance of Calliope to grant him poetic inspiration in the telling of his tale.

The Greek depiction of these personified arts and sciences reveals to us their indissoluble link with memory. And if education is largely about initiation into subjects such as those listed above, then education, too, remains fundamentally dependent on memory.

What’s the nature of this link between memory, knowledge, art, and education? I think that this Greek allegory can be taken in two main senses: First, it’s obvious that, on a practical level, we can’t know or learn anything new without memory. The epic poet must have an excellent memory to retain and perform his verses, the historian must remember his dates, the astronomer must recall his constellations, just as the modern algebra student needs to remember certain formulas and the order of operations and how to use his Texas Instruments calculator. What’s known paves the way for what’s to be learned as well. All knowledge builds on what was in the mind before, and memory is in charge of that process. This is on the individual level.

But in a second and more profound sense, the Greek myth reveals to us that, on a societal level, true art and science grow out of a collective remembrance of and reverence for the cultural past. To be truly skilled, one generation of painters must learn from those who went before. The poet must humbly receive the poetic tradition that predated him—as well as his society’s myths, heroes, and histories, of which he is, in part, to be a keeper—before he can begin to really compose. Imagine a scientist who refused to believe any of the facts, experiments, or theories that had gone before him and insisted on proving everything himself. He would make no scientific progress whatsoever.

Like a tree chopped at its roots, arts and sciences cut off from the tradition that preceded them and gave them life become shriveled, dry, and dead. (I think of modern visual art’s propensity to reject traditional techniques of painting and notions of proportion and how this leads to many banal, ugly, and lifeless pieces).

The Nature of True Education

So the first task of the student is to humbly inherit the Memory (with a capital M) of his or her culture in general and his or her specific subject in particular. If the student wants Clio or Urania in his life, he must first let in Mnemosyne. That Memory can then give birth to new knowledge, creativity, and discovery. It isn’t just a matter of the practical need to train the memory for pragmatic purposes, so that the student can remember test answers, email passwords, grocery lists, and phone numbers (although who remembers phone numbers in this age of smartphones with contact lists?). It’s a matter of allowing oneself to be shaped by the best that the past has to offer, and to be shaped by it, we must bring it into our memories, make it part of us.

True education, after all, means more than mere knowledge of facts or skills. True education means the formation of the whole person, including one’s character, one’s way of thinking, one’s actions, one’s morality. The further we go, the more deeply it appears that memory informs our lives and education. We’re defined, in part, by our memories—not just our personal experiences, but also the things that we have read, watched, listened to, seen, heard. All that we have consumed becomes, via our memory and imagination, part of us, and therefore shapes who we are.

Aristotle tells us in Part 8 of “On the Soul” that whenever we think about something, we think of it along with an image of some kind. For instance, when we think about cows, we immediately call to mind the look, smell, or even feel of a cow (in this example, easier for country folk!). That image, in turn, affects how we think about the subject at hand. Those images are stored in our memory and imagination. Reasoning, memory, and imagination are thus intimately linked.

With this in mind, we see how memory and imagination are critical for thinking well (one of the major goals of education). Memory of past experiences and knowledge provides us with the raw material for our reasoning to work on. If we provide our reasoning with poor material, we‘ll think badly. If we provide it with a rich array of sensory images, on the other hand, we’ll think well and truly. The great educator John Senior taught that if someone’s memory and imagination were poorly formed, their reasoning process would end in error. He struggled to reshape what he saw as the “diseased imaginations” of his students.

The question of what makes for good material to store in our memory and imagination will have to be the subject of a future article, but for the apex of the present consideration, we can say this: The most important work of the memory in education is—drawing on sources such as the collective cultural Memory—to store up images and ideas of the good, the true, and the beautiful to help in the formation of the person and to lay the foundation for future learning, thinking, and creating.