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Eidolon as Shadow

Eidolon as Shadow

The classical ground of the Jungian shadow is the Homeric skia — the shadow-form of the dead in Hades. The Jungian term inherits both its name and its phenomenology from this ancient image.

In Homer the psyche after death is an eidolon, an image or likeness of the living person. “Of shades in general Achilles says: ‘in the house of Hades in some way psyche and eidolon are present, but phrenes are not there at all’ (Il. 23.104). Here psyche and eidolon are mentioned as parallel terms: ‘breath’ and the ‘image’ or ‘likeness’ of the individual remain after death. But phrenes are absent: the psychological activities a person enjoyed, namely, thought, emotion, will, are lost with the body” (Sullivan 1995). The eidolon retains likeness without vitality — the shape of the person, without the faculties that animated the living body.

The motion of these shades is specifically shadow-motion: “its motion is like that of a ‘shadow’ (skia). It may be that the shadow which a living person cast was the image the early Greeks had of psyche in the underworld. This shadow would have been thought to be made of dark air” (Sullivan 1995). When Odysseus attempts to embrace his mother in the underworld, “she flew away ‘like a shadow or a dream’ (11.207f)” (Bremmer 1983). The shade cannot be grasped, cannot be held, cannot be engaged; yet it is recognisably the person.

jean-pierre-vernant‘s work on the kolossos develops the complementary image: a roughly hewn stone can serve as the double of the dead, making the absent present through a carefully restricted visibility (Vernant 1983). The kolossos and the eidolon together form the classical vocabulary of the shadow as a presence that is also an absence — the exact phenomenological signature of what carl-jung would later call the shadow in the living psyche.

The Jungian inheritance is not merely etymological. When Jung writes that the shadow is met first on the inward turn, he is re-saying in the vocabulary of analytical psychology what Homer already knew: the soul, turned toward itself, meets its own shade first — unsubstantial, recognisable, ungraspable, and prior to any of its developed faculties.

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