Eidolon

Greek εἴδωλον: image, shade, phantom. In Homer (Od. 11, 24; Il. 23) the eidola are the shades of the dead who inhabit Hades — not substantial bodies but visible appearances that “seem” rather than “are.” Achilles’s shade meets Odysseus in the nekyia; Patroklos’s eidolon visits Achilles in dream (Il. 23.65–107). The word carries from the beginning the ontological ambiguity Hillman exploits: the eidolon is real, but not the way waking bodies are real.

“For the Greeks the soul was an image” (Hillman 1979, citing E. R. Dodds). Hillman’s claim in The Dream and the Underworld is that the dream image is an eidolon in this precise Homeric sense — “they are not substantial, and so we may not use our convenient substantializing language. We may not just say they are this or that, or say that existence in the underworld is so and so. We may speak of eidola only as they ‘seem,’ ‘appear to be.’”

The philological concept grounds the archetypal refusal to reduce dream-images to signs. If the dream-image is an eidolon, then asking what it means is the wrong question; the right question is how to meet its appearing. The concept also clarifies why image-as-psyche is not metaphor but technical claim: Greek psychology already treated soul as image; Hillman is recovering a classical position, not inventing a modern one. The eidolon is the ontological unit of soul, from Homer through Plotinus through the Jungian archetypal image.

Relationships

• image-as-psyche
• dream-as-underworld
• nekyia
• psyche-breath-soul
• homeric-plural-self

Primary sources

• odyssey (Od. 11; Od. 24)
• iliad (Il. 23.65–107)
• hillman-dream-underworld (Hillman 1979)