Kolossos

The kolossos is the rough-hewn stone, stele, or cippus erected in archaic Greek cult to stand “in place of” the dead. Vernant reads it as a psychic instrument rather than a mere marker: it is the dead person and it is not; it anchors the psyche and disperses it; it belongs to the visible world and to the beyond at once.

“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 functions as a double (eidolon), akin in structure to the phantom Patroclus who appears to Achilles in Iliad 23 — “a wisp of smoke that vanishes beneath the ground with a little cry, like a bat” — and to the kolossoi that haunt Menelaus’s palace in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon after Helen’s departure, named by the chorus as the form Helen’s presence takes in her absence.

The kolossos names a pre-psychologized stage of the soul. Before psyche becomes the interior seat of selfhood, the Greek dead are held in stone, in image, in the eidolon — in externalizations that the later tradition will interiorize. The concept is load-bearing for the Lineage because it shows what the psyche was before it became what the Jungian tradition inherits: a double, a shade, an image moving between worlds, not yet an inner depth.

Relationships

Primary sources

vernant-myth-and-thought (Vernant 1983)
iliad (Homer, 23)