Oops, I didn't mean to end that last post. I pressed the wrong key.
As I was saying, Jane Harrison thought Dante's word resembled a word in a verse on a gold tablet:
"But so soon as the Spirit hath left the light of the sun,
To the right-----------------------of Ennoia.
Thou must man--------------------being right wary of all things.
Hail thou who has suffered the suffering.
This thou never suffered before.
A kid thou art fallen into milk.
Hail, hail to the journeying on the right.
----Holy meadows and groves of Persephoneia."
(Harrison p. 584).
Dante just changed the vowels, Eunoe to Ennoia, Harrison says. Fair enough, although we don't have any record of anyone in Dante's time knowing about "Ennoia." But Harrison might not have known the other thing, the similarity of Eunoe to the Gnostic Ennoea, which would have been common knowledge for anyone who read Irenaeus on heresies. Dante's couldn't use that word, of course, because it would imply a sympathy for heresy, and his book would be banned.
Ennoea or Grace is the start of a series of feminine emanations, all on the "love" side of the series, a stream of grace and forgiveness of sins, just the ticket for admission into Paradise, as it is in the Zohar, which says, after referring to Venus, that all punishments are annulled above there.
The other stream, Lethe in Dante and the one headed by Only-Begotten or Will in the Gnostic systems, is that which sends one back to a new incarnation, as in Plato's Myth of Er in the Republic. It is the stream of punishment and judgment: you haven't learned your lesson, so back you go to try again.
This is not to deny that Dante was also thinking of Orphism. The two streams, issuing from two springs, was known from Pausanias, describing an initiation into an ecstatic state for prophecy purposes:
"He is led by the priests, not at once to the oracle, but to certain springs. Here he must drink what is called the water of forgetfulness, in order that he forget everything he has hitherto thought of. Then he drinks from another water, the water of Memory, that he may remember what he sees below..."
(
http://www.theoi.com/Titan/TitanisMnemosyne.html)
But there is no "Ennoia" here. Another interesting thing for Beanu is the password the soul must give in order to be allowed to drink from the all-important spring of Memory, on the gold tablets. "I am the son (or child) of Ge (Earth) and starry Ouranos (Heaven)." This is a sentence that occurs repeatedly in Paul Christian, too, in his analysis of the tarot trumps (Paris 1863). He might have gotten it from the gold tablets already translated--or more likely, from Hesiod, who uses it.
Well, more later. I have to go.