Revenant

called p'o, and written with the characters for 'white' and 'demon,' that is, 'white ghost,' belongs to the lower, earthbound, bodily soul, the yin principle, and is therefore feminine. After death, it sinks downward and becomes kuei (demon), often explained as 'the one who returns' (i.e., to earth), a revenant, a ghost.

Jung identifies the revenant explicitly with the Chinese p'o soul — the earthbound, yin, feminine soul-component that, unlike the ascending animus, returns to matter as demon or ghost after death.

Jung, C. G., Collected Works Volume 3: The Psychogenesis of Mental Disease, 1907thesis

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Till the second funeral is over, the dead man among the Hindoos is a preta, that is a fearful revenant: after that he can enter the world of Pitaras or fathers, the equivalents of the Alcheringa totem-ancestors. For this entry, rites of initiation, rites de passage, are necessary.

Harrison locates the revenant within a structural framework of incomplete ritual transition, arguing that the fearful returning dead persist precisely because the requisite rites of passage have not yet been performed.

Harrison, Jane Ellen, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912thesis

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That is why Glotz called Aeschylus 'ce revenant de Mycènes' (though he added that he was also a man of his own time)

Dodds deploys 'revenant' metaphorically to characterize Aeschylus as an archaic haunting presence within classical culture, illustrating how the term names a structure of temporal return and psychic residue.

E.R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational, 1951supporting

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While you mock them, one of them stands behind you, panting from rage and despair at the fact that your stupor does not attend to him. He besieges you in sleepless nights, sometimes he takes hold of you in an illness, sometimes he crosses your intentions.

Jung's Red Book renders the revenant as a psychic reality — the unacknowledged dead who haunt the living through compulsion, illness, and obstruction until they receive conscious recognition.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting

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The number of the unredeemed dead has become greater than the number of living Christians; therefore it is time that we accept the dead.

Jung articulates a collective dimension of the revenant problem, framing the unredeemed dead as an accumulating psychic mass requiring active reception and integration by the living.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting

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aside from an additional Pindaric instance of psyche which warns that a misanthropic man will pay his psyche to Hades without oboa (I. 1. 68) and a reference to Agamemnon's revenant in the Orestes, every other occurrence of psyche as 'shade' is either difficult to interpret or an intentional wordplay.

Claus traces the philological narrowing of psyche-as-shade, noting the revenant of Agamemnon in the Orestes as one of the few post-Homeric instances where the returning dead retains unambiguous dramatic force.

David B. Claus, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting

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Community with the dead is what both you and the dead need. Do not commingle with any of the dead, but stand apart from them and give to each his due. The dead demand your expiatory prayers.

Jung prescribes a disciplined relational ethics toward the revenant-dead: proximity without merger, recognition without possession, as the condition for mutual release.

Jung, Carl Gustav, The Red Book: Liber Novus, 2009supporting

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revenant, 39

The index entry in Alchemical Studies confirms the term's technical status within Jung's alchemical lexicon, pointing to the passage where p'o is glossed as a revenant.

Jung, Carl Gustav, Alchemical Studies, 1967aside

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When things are not properly buried, cremated or composted, could their souls remain as haunting and poisoning ghosts endangering the community, especially the most vulnerable, the children?

Hillman extends the revenant logic into an animist ecology, suggesting that improper disposal of the dead — or of objects — generates a diffuse psychic pollution analogous to environmental contamination.

Hillman, James, Kinds of Power: A Guide to Its Intelligent Uses, 1995aside

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