The Figuration of the Invisible

Vernant’s long essays on the kolossos, the funerary stēlē, the divine statue, and the athletic body converge on a single classical-Greek operation: making the invisible visible without collapsing the distinction between them. The dead, the gods, and the hero are figured in stone, bronze, and the living body as presences that signify absences — that appear without being what they appear.

“By making himself visible in the stone, the dead man also reveals himself as being not of this world. It is a peculiar and ambiguous presence that is also the sign of an absence” (Vernant 1983). The kolossos with its “empty eyes” at Aeschylus’s Agamemnon 418 is the exemplary case: a figure that is not a portrait of the dead but their equivalent — a presence that is simultaneously absent. Teiresias, blinded by Athena, “stands there without sight, speech, or movement… Teiresias himself becomes a kind of kolossos, an image of death among the living” (Vernant 1983, citing Callimachus). The funerary kouros inscribed anti gunaikos — “in place of a woman” — operates by the same grammar: standing “in place of” what the living person was, while signifying that the dead person has acquired a new mode of being.

The same operation governs the classical statue of the god. What appears is not an anthropomorphism — not the god conceived in human image — but its inverse: “the human body became perceptible to Greek eyes when it was in the flower of its youth, when it was like an image or a reflection of the divine” (Vernant 1983). The athletic body at the sacred games, the kouros on the tomb, the kolossos at the pit — each is the figured surface of an invisible presence.

For the Lineage, the figuration of the invisible is the archaic Greek precedent for Hillman’s claim that soul is image. The eidolon that Homer calls a wisp of smoke and Hillman calls the dream-image is not a symbol of something else; it is the appearing of what cannot be directly seen. The archaic Greek handled the invisible with a grammar the depth tradition recovers.

Relationships

Primary sources

vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)