Sylvia Gorelick

Veiling, Veracity, Maternity:

Feminine Practices of Truth-Telling in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

In Early Greek Thinking, Heidegger figures ἀληθέα, or truth, as a simultaneous unveiling and

veiling, which he positions in an essential relationship to the movement of φύσις, or nature. In

Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche presents truth both as a woman and as a play of veils. In this

paper, I will undertake a reading of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, a text which demonstrates

that the notion of a truth which can only be spoken through a practice of veiling is figurally

inseparable from the feminine. “Nature” as φύσις is also gendered female; this feminine noun,

which refers to nature or origin, has the equally strong signification of birth, as is show by its

verbal form, φύω, meaning “to bring forth, to beget—or in the passive: to grow, to come forth, to

be begotten or born.”1 This alliance between ἀληθέα and φύσις, rooted in the feminine, is

expressed in the Homeric Hymn, a mythic, pre-philosophical text in which the relationship

between ἀληθέα and femininity is staged in terms of veiling, and where the force of φύσις is

demonstrated to be that of birth as well as nature. Both Nietzsche and Heidegger frame the

concept of “truth” as a movement of veils; yet Heidegger excludes the feminine from his

discourse on truth, and Nietzsche excludes maternity from his. As I will argue, the Homeric

Hymn shows truth as veiling to be inextricable from both the feminine and the maternal. This

relation, I will suggest, is disavowed in the work of these philosophers, who claim the position of

woman with respect to truth for the male philosophical subject. Following the thread of the

maternal, I will end by gesturing toward the possibility of a feminine philosophical reclamation

of both φύσις and ἀληθέα.

1
John Sallis, The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016), 45.

1
 In his essay on Heraclitus titled “Aletheia” in Early Greek Thinking, Heidegger identifies

the essence of φύσις with revelation and concealment. Although he claims that any “appeal to the

meaning of ἀληθεσία accomplishes nothing”2 he states that the “literal meaning” of this word

could be anachronistically supplied by the term “unconcealment.”3 Yet this translation is

inadequate, for while “unconcealment” implies the absence of concealment, Heidegger claims

that ἀληθεσία is a simultaneous movement of unconcealing and concealing—an unveiling that is

always necessarily a veiling. Analyzing Heraclitus’s fragment B123, “Φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ,”

conventionally translated as “Nature loves to hide,”4 Heidegger claims that here, “φύσις and

κρύπτεσθαι, rising (self-revealing) and concealing, are named in their closest proximity.” He

therefore translates the fragment as “Self-revealing loves self-concealing.”5 This double process

describes the movement of what Heidegger calls “presencing,” defined as “luminous self-

concealing.”6 Internal to presencing is “lighting,” which allows the “revealing-concealing” game

to play out under the aegis of φύσις.7 “Lighting” is described in the language of veiling: “the

shining of the lighting is in itself at the same time a self-veiling (Sichverhüllen)—and is in that

sense what is the most obscure.”8 In his reading of Heraclitus, he thus identifies ἀληθέα as a

process of unveiling and veiling internal to the self-revelation and self-concealment of φύσις.

2
Martin Heidegger, “Aletheia,” Early Greek Thinking, trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A. Capuzzi (New York:
Harper & Row, 1975), 102–123, 103.
3
Ibid., 104. The translators note that T. Gaisford’s Etymologicum Magnum (Oxford, 1848) “describes ἀληθές as that
which does not sink into λήθη, the source of oblivion. Liddell-Scott translate ἀληθές as ‘unconcealed.’” Given that
ἀληθεσία is a substantive of this adjective, they assert that “ἀληθεσία might be rendered as ‘unconcealment’” (Ibid.,
103).
4
Patricia Curd, ed., A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia, Second Edition, trans. Richard D.
McKirahan and Patricia Curd (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), 42.
5
Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking, 113.
6
Ibid., 108.
7
Ibid., 122.
8
Ibid., 123. Heidegger, “Aletheia,” Vorträge und Aufsätze, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften
1910–1976, Band 7 (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 2000), 263–288, 288.

2
 In the preface to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche famously asks: “Supposing truth is a

woman (dass die Wahrheit ein Weib ist)—what then?”9 Here, he discusses what he calls

“dogmatic philosophy,” figuring woman as the “truth” sought by its adherents. In section 232,

woman is presented as indifferent to truth, valuing instead “adornment (Putz)” and loveliness,

never departing from the economy of appearances in which she deals. Nietzsche claims that “she

does not want truth (Wahrheit),” and that “her great art is the lie (Lüge).”10 These references

seem to present a contradiction regarding woman as the figure of truth: woman is truth, and she

is indifferent to truth. Yet if we consider that, for Nietzsche, woman is both truth and the artist of

lies, the contradiction is resolved. His figuration of woman entails a concept of truth as a play of

veils, comprised of appearance and illusion. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche consistently

addresses the problem of truth in an elliptical manner that reveals the groundlessness and

historical contingency of anything valued as truth; he also claims appearance to be superior to

truth.11 Thus, the philosopher affirms the treatment of truth that he associates with woman.

Nietzsche assumes woman by “not want[ing] truth,” upholding the lie in its place. And although

he obscures the relationship between women and maternity, he inserts himself in the role of

mother, a role which he claims as proper to philosophers: “We philosophers […] have to give

birth to our thoughts out of our pain and, like mothers, endow them with all we have of blood,

heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and catastrophe.”12

The Homeric Hymn to Demeter tells the story of the ordering of seasons; it provides the

mythic foundations of the temporal movement of φύσις. The Hymn begins by recounting

9
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966),
“Preface,” 1. Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke une Briefe, dir. Paolo D’Iorio (Paris: Nietzsche Source,
2009–), www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB, eKGWB/ JGB-Vorrede.
10
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 232, 163. eKGWB/JGB-232.
11
See for example Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sections 34 and 211.
12
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “Preface,” section 3, 35–36.

3
Persephone’s abduction to the underworld by Zeus’s order and against her mother Demeter’s

will. As Persephone is playing in a meadow with the daughters of Ocean, she leans forward to

pick a narcissus, “which Earth (Γαῖα) grew (φῦσε) as a snare (δόλος) for the flower-faced

maiden.”13 With this use of the verb φύω at the opening of the Hymn, φύσις is marked as nature

through the agency of feminine Earth (Γαῖα). At the same time, φύσις is given the signification

of birth, generation, and growth. The double meaning of φύσις as birth and nature is thus at work

from the beginning of the text. The narcissus, grown to lure Persephone into the arms of Hades,

is qualified as a δόλος, that is, a bait, a form of deceit; it is a flower whose beauty disguises its

function as a trap. This is the first disguise the text offers, and it is explicitly feminized: the

deadly thing that will draw Persephone into the underworld and sever her from her mother is a

flower produced by Γαῖα, a dazzling narcissus to trick the “flower-faced maiden.” The beauty

accorded to the flower is thus extended to Persephone herself, marking her as a woman with the

potential for deception. As Persephone reaches for the flower, the earth opens up and Hades

comes to steal her away into his realm. Persephone cries out, but her voice is delayed in reaching

her mother. When Demeter finally hears her daughter’s call,

Sharp grief seized her heart, and she tore the veil (κρήδεμνον) on her ambrosial hair with

her own hands. She cast a dark (κυάνεον) cloak (κάλυμμα) on her shoulders and sped like

a bird over dry land and sea, searching. No one was willing to tell her the truth

(μυθήσασθαι), not one of the gods or mortals14

13
Helene P. Foley, ed., The Homeric Hymn to Demeter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 2, 3 (lines 6–
8).
14
Ibid., 4, 5 (lines 40–46).

4
Struck with grief at the distant call of her daughter, Demeter tears her veil—κρήδεμνον, defined

as a woman’s head-dress or veil15—only to replace it with another veil, a κάλυμμα, which,

combined with the word κυάνεον, is defined as a “dark veil worn in mourning.”16 With this

substitution of one veil with another—a light veil with a mourning-veil—Demeter is shown to be

a female goddess whose prerogative it is to hide and veil herself. The Hymn repeatedly refers to

the goddess as “Demeter, bringer of seasons (ὡρηφόρος) and giver of rich gifts (ἀγλαόδωρος).”17

The verbal form of φόρος, the word translated as “bringer,” is φέρω, meaning “to bear” or “to

carry,” and used to describe “a woman with child.”18 Demeter is named throughout the Hymn as

the originator and mother of the seasons, pregnant with the unfolding of φύσις. Adriana Cavarero

has demonstrated that “the name Demeter is one of the words used by the ancient Greeks to

designate the Great Mother.”19 In multiple ways, Demeter’s names situate her power in an

intimate relationship with nature and maternity. Demeter thus has a status that is both originary

and productive with respect to φύσις, giving her privileged access to the feminine potential for

disguise and deceit which the Hymn confers on φύσις.

After learning that Persephone has been captured by Hades, Demeter is enraged and

leaves Olympus to wander “among the cities and fertile fields of men, disguising her beauty for a

long time.”20 Her disguise is that of “a very old woman cut off from childbearing.”21 After her

changing of veils, Demeter thus changes her form yet again, this time diametrically: the goddess

15
Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, in Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University.
www.perseus.tufts.edu (accessed October 20, 2018).
16
Ibid.
17
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 12, 13, (line 192). See also lines 54 and 492.
18
Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon, in Perseus Digital Library, ed. Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University.
www.perseus.tufts.edu
19
Adriana Cavarero, “Demeter,” In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena
Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), 57–90, 57.
20
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 6, 7 (lines 93–94).
21
Ibid. (line 101).

5
of fertility assumes the appearance of an infertile elderly woman, the antithesis of her identity.

The performance of self-sterilization entailed by this disguise, moreover, prefigures Demeter’s

act of making the earth infertile. As Cavarero has written, “the central theme of the [Demeter]

myth […] is the power of the mother, which is inscribed in all of nature as the power both to

generate and not to generate.”22 This power is “founded on a sovereign subjectivity”; Demeter’s

maternal force lies in her ability not only to make the earth fertile but also to sterilize it.23

The word ἀληθέα appears only twice in the Hymn; in both instances, it is spoken by

women in decisive gestures of deception. I will now turn to these two moments. Arriving in

Eleusis disguised, Demeter meets the daughters of Keleos, ruler of the city, by a “Maiden’s

Well.”24 The young women address Demeter, asking her who she is. Demeter replies: “I will tell

you my tale. For it is not wrong to tell you the truth (ἀληθέα) now you ask.”25 Under the sign of

this claim to truth, she proceeds to weave an elaborate lie, calling herself “Doso,” a name,

meaning gift, which she says she received from her “honored mother,” and recounting a tale of

being kidnapped by “pirate men” and taken to Thorikos, where she escaped by running across

the mainland.26 In this fictive account, Demeter both enforces a matrilineal genealogy and spins a

tale of capture by men that reflects her daughter’s abduction by Hades. This mendacious use of

ἀληθέα is decisive for the myth; it leads to the foundation of Demeter’s temple into which she

retreats, in mourning for her daughter. There, she uses her power over φύσις to command the

earth’s sterility, threatening to destroy “the whole mortal race” and swearing not to “release the

seed from the earth, until she saw with her eyes her own fair-faced child.”27 This ultimatum

22
Cavarero, “Demeter,” 59.
23
Ibid., 67.
24
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, 6 (line 99).
25
Ibid., 8, 9 (lines 120–121).
26
Ibid. (lines 122, 124).
27
Ibid., 18, 19 (lines 310, 332–333).

6
results in the system of seasons, which both reunites her with and divides her from Persephone.

This rhetorical use of ἀληθέα thus proves generative within the Hymn in two respects; it both

spurs the narrative forward and produces the conditions for fertility to be restored to the earth.

In response to Demeter’s ultimatum, Zeus sends Hermes to the underworld, where he

advises Hades to return Persephone to her mother. Hades agrees, but before releasing

Persephone, “he gave her (ἔδωκε) to eat a honey-sweet pomegranate seed, stealthily passing it

around her, lest she once more stay forever by the side of revered Demeter of the dark robe.”28

On the reunion of mother and daughter, Demeter senses a “trick (δόλος)” and asks Persephone if

she consumed food in the underworld.29 Persephone recounts how Hades “stealthily put in my

mouth a food honey-sweet, a pomegranate seed, and compelled me against my will and by force

to taste it.”30 She seals her testimony with ἀληθέα: “I speak the whole truth (ἀληθέα), though I

grieve to tell it.” A scene of reunion ensues in which mother and daughter “soothed each other’s

heart and soul in many ways.” Zeus then decrees that “his daughter would spend one-third of the

revolving year in the misty dark and two-thirds with her mother and the other immortals.”31 The

division of the year into seasons, periods of earthly fertility and dormancy, thus takes place.

While in the Hymn’s objective account of Hades feeding Persephone the pomegranate

seed, the verb δίδωμι—to give—is used, in her own narration recounted in the Hymn,

Persephone uses language of coercion and force, in a distinct shift. She tells a different story than

the one recounted by the master text. The rhetorical use of ἀληθέα is once again ascribed to a

feminine figure who uses it in a strategic way that does not correspond with the sanctioned

discourse of the Hymn. This second “truth,” presented as a lie told by a woman and sealed with

28
Ibid., 20 (lines 371–374).
29
Ibid., 22 (line 391).
30
Ibid. (lines 411–413).
31
Ibid., 24 (lines 433–435, 445–447).

7
ἀληθέα, is the condition not only of the reconciliation between Demeter and Persephone but also

of the ordering of the seasons. Thus, ἀληθέα is again marked as a deceptive mode of speech used

by a woman, and is accorded a generative value with respect both to the narrative and the fertility

of φύσις. Here, a feminine practice of truth-telling appears as a necessary veiling; ἀληθέα

manifests as self-veiling in the mouths of women. Through a series of testimonies, lies told in the

name of ἀληθέα, the matrilineal bond between Demeter and Persephone is reestablished.

Cavarero claims that the “reciprocal visibility” of the two goddesses is the condition of the

functioning of φύσις.32 This visibility sustains the “maternal continuum” of life, and the feminine

“order of birth” that makes generation possible, which is opposed, in the myth, to the masculine

“order of death,” ruled by Hades.33 Both strategic uses of ἀληθέα in the Hymn serve to restore

this reciprocal visibility between mother and daughter, safeguarding the fertility of the earth and

the human race. Just as φύσις is endowed with the feminine power of deception, ἀληθέα as self-

veiling is inscribed in the maternal order, ensuring the generativity of φύσις.

The Hymn stages a scene in which ἀληθέα appears in a necessarily rhetorical function,

deployed by women to preserve the production and reproduction of φύσις. While this is a pre-

philosophical text, I claim that it prepares a philosophical engagement with the ideas of ἀληθέα

and φύσις, which will be subsequently thematized as concepts. Here we can glimpse the

Heideggerian model of ἀληθέα as a movement of veiling and unveiling within the concealment

and revelation of φύσις. Yet the speaking female subject is absent from Heidegger’s analysis; the

philosopher himself takes on the task of announcing the self-veiling character of truth, thus

excluding woman from the philosophical scene. Moreover, in claiming that the “full essence” of

φύσις consists in the φιλία, the mutual inclination, between “rising and self-concealing”

32
Cavarero, “Demeter,” 60–61.
33
Ibid., 60, 68.

8
Heidegger generalizes and essentializes φύσις as the movement of nature, obscuring the

dimension of φύσις as birth.34 From the perspective of the myth, we can also see Nietzsche’s

figuration of woman as both truth and as a creature whose “great art is the lie.”35 In Nietzsche’s

manipulation of woman, which allows him to assume the feminine voice, woman is disembodied

and becomes a conceptual tool for the assertion of truth’s status as mere appearance. Yet

throughout the Hymn and the myth that it founds, Demeter remains a powerful figure of

maternity, sovereign within the order of birth. This maternal power, as feminine, is suppressed in

Nietzsche’s discourse, such that the male philosopher becomes the privileged mother figure.

In the preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes: “We no longer believe that truth

remains truth when the veils are withdrawn: we have lived too much to believe this. […] Perhaps

truth is a woman who has reasons for not letting us see her reasons? Perhaps her name is—to

speak Greek—Baubo?”36 Sarah Kofman has argued that Baubo can be seen as “a female double

of Dionysus”;37 the basis for this alliance is to be found in the intimate connection that both

figures bear to the Demeter myth. Baubo originates in myths of Eleusis; she is said to have met

Demeter when she was in mourning for Persephone, disguised as a sterile woman. Baubo, an old

woman who represents female sexuality, lifted her skirts for Demeter, exposing her belly and

genitals, and thus made the goddess laugh, presaging the restoration of fecundity to the earth.

Dionysus is said to have been born in Nysa, at the place where Hades abducted Persephone.38 In

The Gay Science, Nietzsche describes the Dionysian as the expression of “an overflowing energy

34
Heidegger, “Aletheia,” 114.
35
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, section 232, 163.
36
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, “Preface,” section 4, 38.
37
Sarah Kofman, “Baubô: Theological Perversion and Fetishism,” trans. Tracy B. Strong, in Feminist
Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall (University Park: The Pennsylvania
State University, 1998), 21–49, 45.
38
Ibid., 44–45.

9
that is pregnant with future (zukunftsschwangeren).”39 Dionysus is thus a maternal figure for

Nietzsche, with the potential to give birth to new forces and futures. I would like to close by

suggesting that it might be in the complicity of Dionysus and Baubo around the myth of Demeter

that a space is opened, through Nietzsche, for a feminine reclamation of the power of maternity.

To begin this inquiry, we might consider Baubo, and her own play with veiling, as representing

another kind of “yes to life”40—that phrase which Nietzsche attributes to Dionysus—a self-

affirmation of woman that could start to bring φύσις and ἀληθέα back to their rootedness in the

order of birth.

Works Cited

Cavarero, Adriana. “Demeter.” In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy.

Trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, 57–90.

Crane, Gregory R., ed. Perseus Digital Library. Tufts University. www.perseus.tufts.edu.

Curd, Patricia, ed. A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia. Second Edition.
Trans. Richard D. McKirahan and Patricia Curd. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2011.

Foley, Helene P., ed. The Homeric Hymn to Demeter. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994.

Heidegger, Martin. “Aletheia.” Early Greek Thinking. Trans. David Farrell Krell and Frank A.
Capuzzi. New York: Harper & Row, 1975, 102–123.
— “Aletheia.” Vorträge und Aufsätze, Gesamtausgabe I. Abteilung: Veröffentlichte Schriften
1910–1976, Band 7. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, 2000, 263–288.

Kofman, Sarah. “Baubô: Theological Perversion and Fetishism.” Trans. Tracy B. Strong.
Feminist Interpretations of Friedrich Nietzsche. Ed. Kelly Oliver and Marilyn Pearsall.
University Park: The Pennsylvania State University, 1998.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random
House, 1966.

39
Nietzsche, The Gay Science, section 370, 329. eKGWB/FW-370.
40
Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), sections 4 and 5, 89,
91.

10
—. Digitale Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke une Briefe, dir. Paolo D’Iorio (Paris: Nietzsche
Source, 2009–), www.nietzschesource.org/eKGWB

—. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York: Random House, 1974.

—. Twilight of the Idols. Trans. Richard Polt. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Sallis, John. The Figure of Nature: On Greek Origins. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2016.

11