Named for the river of forgetting · Agent memory layer

Your agent reasons, decides, acts — then forgets. Lethe keeps the reasoning alive. Persistent memory across sessions, crash recovery, and a human review layer for every decision your agent makes.

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The river that makes
souls forget.

In Greek mythology, the underworld was crossed by five rivers. The darkest of these was Λήθη — Lethe, the river of oblivion. Every soul that drank from it lost all memory of their former life. Identity, knowledge, everything — dissolved into the current.

Souls were not supposed to drink from Lethe. The Orphic gold tablets — buried with the dead for two thousand years — contained a single instruction: avoid the river on the left. Drink instead from Mnemosyne, the spring of memory.

We named this project for the river — not to honour forgetting, but to build its opposite. Your Docker container is the vessel floating on Lethe. The water flows around it. Nothing is lost.

lethe-server v0.1.0 · :18483 ΛΉΘΗ · THE RIVER OF LETHE
ΛΉΘΗ · Lethe

The river of forgetting

Souls drank from Lethe to forget their past lives entirely. We named our project for the thing it defeats — the forgetting your agents experience between every session.

ΜΝΗΜΟΣΥΝΗ · Mnemosyne

The spring of memory

The Orphic tablets told souls to seek Mnemosyne instead — the spring whose waters preserved all memory. Lethe's session summary is your agent's draught from Mnemosyne.

ΧΑΡΩΝ · Charon

The ferryman

Charon carried souls across the river for an obol. Your Docker container is the vessel he carries — floating on Lethe, passing through it untouched, memory intact.

How it works

One import.
Persistent reasoning.

01

Install the plugin

One command adds the Lethe skill to OpenClaw. It registers as a context engine — no config, no code changes to your agent.

02

Session init loads context

Every session start runs two-stage retrieval: previous session summary first, then recent events. The agent has context before it processes a single message.

03

Agent logs as it works

The system prompt preamble conditions the agent to call memory.record(), memory.log(), and memory.flag(). No explicit tagging needed.

04

Heartbeat checkpoint every 60s

A background process writes a snapshot every 60 seconds. If the container crashes, the next session resumes from the last checkpoint automatically.

05

Review flags in the dashboard

Every uncertainty your agent surfaced appears in the review board. Mark it resolved — the next session knows what was approved.

Session resume payload
{
"session_summary": {
"decisions": [
"Docker Compose v2 — profiles needed",
"Traefik over nginx — service discovery"
],
"open_threads": [
"healthcheck interval unverified"
]
},
"resume_flag": true,
"interrupted_at": "2026-03-24T05:10:00Z"
}
Delivered before the agent processes its first message. No query needed.
Features

Everything memory
needs to be useful.

Reasoning persistence

Stores what the agent decided and why — not just facts. The full reasoning chain survives session boundaries.

Crash recovery

Heartbeat checkpoints every 60 seconds. If the container goes down, the next session resumes automatically from the last snapshot.

Flag review board

Agents self-report uncertainty with confidence scores. Humans review and resolve before the next session continues.

Two-stage retrieval

Session summary first for continuity, then recent events fill the token budget. Precise, never overflowing context.

OpenClaw native plugin

Installs as a ClawHub skill. Full bootstrap, assemble, compact context engine hooks wired out of the box.

Immutable audit trail

Every event is append-only, threaded by parent_event_id. Reconstruct exactly what the agent was thinking at any point.

Lethe sits above
all others.

The five rivers of Hades each carried a different fate. Lethe — the river of forgetting — was the most powerful. Your agent's memory floats above them all, untouched.

The five rivers — by weight of memory
ΛΉΘΗ · Lethe
ΣΤΎΞ · Styx
ΑΧΈΡΩΝ · Acheron
ΦΛΕΓΈΘΩΝ · Phlegethon
ΚΩΚΥΤΌΣ · Cocytus
"The container floats on Lethe. The water flows beneath it. Nothing is lost."
— The idea behind openlethe.com
Deployment

Self-host free.
Scale when ready.

One environment variable separates the two tiers. Start local, move to managed when you need it.

Self-hosted
Free forever
LETHE_ENDPOINT=http://localhost:18483
  • One Docker container
  • SQLite with WAL mode
  • No account, no internet required
  • Full REST API + dashboard
  • OpenClaw plugin included
  • Unlimited sessions and events

Running in
two minutes.

One container. No account. No configuration. The memory layer your agents have been missing.

Self-host $docker run -p 8080:18483 -v ./data:/data ghcr.io/openlethe/lethe
OpenClaw plugin $openclaw skills install lethe-memory