Thin leaves of gold, folded small and buried with the dead, give the soul its directions: pass by the first spring, drink from the lake of Memory, and tell the guards, 'I am a child of Earth and starry Sky.'
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About forty of these tablets are known, from graves in southern Italy, Sicily, Crete, Thessaly and Rome. Some carry a single line or only a name. The longer ones read like a map and a script: where to walk in the underworld, which water to refuse, what to say to the guards, and what the soul will become. The press starts with the tablet from Petelia in southern Italy, now in the British Museum. Nothing is readable here yet; support it and it will be.
The oldest, from Hipponion in Calabria, was buried around 400 BC; the latest, made for a Roman woman named Caecilia Secundina, dates from the 2nd or 3rd century AD. Scholars call them Orphic or Bacchic and still argue over which cult made them. The Petelia tablet came to light in the 1830s, and more keep turning up: a pair shaped like ivy leaves was found in a woman's grave at Pelinna in 1985.
The thirsty soul is told to pass by the first spring it sees and drink only from the lake of Memory. At the end of Plato's Republic, souls about to be born again drink from the river in the plain of Forgetting; the tablets tell the initiate to drink from Memory instead.
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