The Orphic Hymns

Of Mnemosyne. Incense: frankincense. I call Mnemosyne, consort of Zeus, queen, who bore the Muses, sacred, holy and clear-voiced, and who always keeps memory free of the deception that harms the mind,

Mnemosyne is Memory in person. In Hesiod she is a Titan, a daughter of Earth and Heaven, and Zeus lay with her for nine nights; she bore him the nine Muses. So the goddesses of song are the daughters of memory, which made sense in a world where poems were carried in the head long before anyone wrote them down. The address to Musaeus already named mother and daughters in one breath, and the Muses have the hymn just before this one (76). The third line, as this edition prints it, says that Memory keeps memory free of apatē, the deception that harms the mind. That reading rests on three corrections by later editors. The manuscripts say something different: that Memory herself is "free of evil memory." Either way the line keeps memory apart from harm, much as Hesiod does when he says that the daughters of Memory bring "a forgetting of evils and a rest from cares."