The Seba library treats Kolossos in 7 passages, across 1 author (including Vernant, Jean-Pierre).
the kolossos represents a manifestation of the power of the underworld in the eyes of the living... the religious sign is not simply an instrument of thought... its intention is always also to establish a true means of communication with this power
Vernant argues that the kolossos exemplifies the constitutive tension within the religious sign: it must simultaneously bridge the human and sacred worlds and insist upon their incommensurability.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
the kolossos must be situated within the psychological context specific to the experience of the double and that the religious significance of the menhir is determined by the fact that the Greeks see it as belonging to this same category
Vernant establishes that the kolossos is intelligible only within the archaic Greek psychology of the double (eidolon), linking the ritual stone to the psuche and to the phenomenology of the absent beloved.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
Through the kolossos, the dead man returns to the light of day and manifests his presence in the sight of the living. It is a peculiar and ambiguous presence that is also the sign of an absence.
Vernant defines the kolossos's paradoxical ontological status: it renders the dead present while simultaneously declaring their definitive alterity and otherworldly nature.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983thesis
A gloss by Hesychius comments on the word alibantes by way of the terms nekroi and kolossoi, the "dried-up ones," or the dead.
Philological evidence from Hesychius links kolossoi directly to the dead as the desiccated, dried-up ones, grounding the term in the Greek phenomenology of death as coldness and rigidity opposed to the warmth and moisture of living flesh.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
Standing there without sight, speech, or movement (his legs are riveted together), Teiresias himself becomes a kind of kolossos, an image of death among the living.
Vernant extends the kolossos concept to Teiresias, whose blinding and immobilization render him a living embodiment of death's attributes — blindness, silence, rigidity — transforming him into a kolossos among the living.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
on the connections between the funerary stela and the kolossos, see Elise van Hall... On the ritual significance of the epiklesis, the three calls addressing the dead man by name in a case where the corpse of the dead man has not been recovered
Vernant's notes document the archaeological and ritual scholarship connecting the kolossos to the funerary stela and to the rite of the epiklesis — the triple calling of the unburied dead — establishing the broader mortuary context of the term.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting
by means of localization in an exact form and a well-determined place, how is it possible to give visual presence to those powers that come from the invisible and do not belong to the space here below on earth?
Vernant frames the broader representational problem of which the kolossos is one solution: the challenge of inscribing absence within presence and rendering the otherworldly visible within the human world.
, Myth and Thought Among the Greeks, 1983supporting