The Master of Truth is the Master of Deception

The deepest structural finding of Detienne’s Masters of Truth is not that archaic aletheia-archaic was opposed to Lēthē — that is the book’s opening move — but that the figure who holds the true word is simultaneously the figure who can deceive. “The master of truth is also a master of deception. To possess the truth entails the capability to deceive” (Detienne 1996). Alētheia and apate in archaic thought are complementary powers, not contradictory ones. Nereus cannot lie and is the god of enigmas. Proteus cannot be held. The dreams of the gates of horn and ivory are both truth-bearing. The same Hermes is patron of the oath and patron of the lie.

The Jungian tradition knows this structure as the trickster: the figure whose intelligence is metis, whose speech carries both revelation and ruse, whose archetypal shadow is the shadow of speech itself. What Detienne supplies is the classical register in which the depth tradition is already speaking. When carl-jung and paul-radin note that the trickster is psychopomp and thief, when james-hillman reads hermes as simultaneously guide and liar, when depth work learns that the unconscious speaks through slips and symptoms as well as through epiphanies, the pattern is the one Detienne recovers in its archaic Greek form.

The philosophical tradition — Parmenides first, then Plato — dissolves the pair into contradictory opposition. Truth, henceforth, excludes deception. The cost of the philosophical gain is the loss of the archaic insight that the same faculty serves both.

Sources

• marcel-detienne: Alētheia and Apatē are complementary in archaic thought
• aletheia-archaic: the un-forgotten, sanctioned by religious function
• apate: deception as the shadow of the sanctioned word
• hermes: god of oath and lie alike
• trickster: Jungian name for the complementary pair
• metis: the cunning intelligence that holds both poles