Apate

Apatē (ἀπάτη) is the archaic Greek name for deception — the negative pole that pairs with aletheia-archaic in the configuration of archaic speech. In the Hesiodic catalogue of the Children of Night, Apatē stands beside Lēthē and the Pseudeis Logoi, the Words of Deception; she is also the shadow of Aphrodite’s Peithō, the persuasion of “whispered endearments” given by hermes to Pandora, “the femme fatale who is the shadow of the woman of gentle pleasure” (Detienne 1996).

Detienne’s load-bearing claim is that Apatē and Alētheia are, in archaic thought, complementary rather than contradictory. “The antithetical powers Alētheia and Lēthē are not contradictory: in mythical thought, opposites are complementary” (Detienne 1996). The same god who cannot lie is the god of enigmas: Nereus speaks truly and speaks in riddles; Proteus, questioned by Heracles, becomes water and fire; the dreams that issue from the gates of horn and ivory are alēthes and pseudes at once. “The master of truth is also a master of deception. To possess the truth entails the capability to deceive” (Detienne 1996).

The philosophical settlement transforms this pair. Parmenides, writing under the demands of the polis, confronts Alētheia with Doxa and Apatē as its contradictory opposite rather than its complement. At this level — where “ambiguity is no longer a combination of complementary contraries” but a contradiction between incompatibles (Detienne 1996) — the archaic configuration dissolves.

For the Lineage, Apatē is the classical antecedent of what depth psychology names the shadow of speech: the fact that the same faculty that tells the truth can deceive, that hermes is psychopomp and thief, that the trickster is the archetype of the complementary pair Detienne recovers in its archaic register.

Relationships

• aletheia-archaic
• masters-of-truth
• hermes
• metis
• trickster

Primary sources

• detienne-masters-truth-archaic (Detienne 1996)