The term ‘Shade’ in the depth-psychological corpus occupies a liminal space between archaic Greek eschatology and modern psychological theorizing, functioning simultaneously as a literal image of the dead and as a metaphor for psychic dimensions resistant to conscious illumination. In Homeric scholarship, represented here by Claus and Sullivan, the shade (psyche in its post-mortem form) designates the surviving image-double of the deceased, possessed of diminished yet recognizable capacities — recognition, address, emotion, volition — which prefigure the later philosophical elaboration of soul. Hillman radicalizes this stratum: the shade is not a deficient remnant but an ontologically distinct mode of being whose natural habitat is the underworld, casting depth and duplicity onto day-world images as shadow gives visual form its relief. For Turner, working in an ethnographic register, the shade is an ancestor-force that afflicts the living, particularly through reproductive failure, encoding social tensions (matrilineal descent, virilocal marriage) in bodily symptoms. Corbin’s Iranian Sufi materials complicate the shadow/shade distinction further: the Guide of Light is explicitly not reducible to shadow or shade — transcendence, not negativity, is the operative category. Across these positions, shade marks the boundary between the living and the dead, between day-consciousness and its underworld double, and between the personal and the ancestral-collective.
Like any visual shadow, these images shade in life, giving it depth and not-light, duplicity, metaphor. The scene in a dream (the root of the word scene is akin to skia, ‘shadow’) is a metaphorical version
Hillman argues that shade functions as the constitutive darkening that grants depth, duplicity, and metaphorical dimensionality to dream images, rooting the very concept of scene in shadow.
, The Dream and the Underworld, 1979thesis
Isoma is thus a manifestation of a shade that causes a woman to bear a dead child or brings death on a series of infants.
Turner identifies the shade as an ancestral afflicting agent that expresses itself through reproductive catastrophe, linking the dead to the bodies of the living through ritual causation.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966thesis
This psyche of Elpenor is the first to meet Odysseus in the underworld… He recognises Odysseus (51) and is able to address him (59, 83). He feels sorrow (59). He wants burial
Sullivan demonstrates that the Homeric shade retains a substantial range of psychological capacities — recognition, speech, emotion, desire — which foreshadow the later philosophical concept of soul in the living person.
, Psychological and Ethical Ideas What Early Greeks Say, 1995thesis
‘shade’ had begun to acquire esoteric connotations. Apart from the frequent parody of the ‘shade’ in Aristophanes and a number of important cultic allusions to it in Pindar, only about twenty references to psyche as ‘shade’ occur after Homer
Claus tracks the post-Homeric narrowing of psyche-as-shade to esoteric and highly literary contexts, showing that the term’s underworld meaning receded into specialized poetic and cultic usage.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981thesis
a woman who has simultaneously ‘forgotten her [deceased mother or mother’s mother or some other senior deceased matrilineal kinswoman’s] shade in her liver,’ is in peril of having her procreative power tied up by the offended shade.
Turner shows that among the Ndembu the shade is an internalized ancestral presence lodged in the body itself, whose neglect directly imperils the living woman’s fertility.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
the victim is in various episodes and symbolisms often identified with the shade that afflicts her: she is being persecuted, one might say with fair legitimacy, by a part or aspect of herself, projected onto the shade.
Turner proposes a proto-psychological reading in which the afflicting shade is a projection of an aspect of the patient’s own psyche, anticipating the Jungian shadow concept within an ethnographic frame.
, The Ritual Process Structure and Anti-Structure, 1966supporting
its use as ‘shade’, psyche is clearly recognizable as a physical ‘life-force’ in Homeric death contexts: it can be ‘destroyed’ or ‘lost’; it has no decisive physical identification but is ambiguously ‘breath’-like and ‘blood’-like
Claus establishes that the shade-meaning of psyche in Homer coexists with a physical life-force identity, resisting reduction to either a purely spiritual or purely material entity.
, Toward the Soul: An Inquiry into the Meaning of Psyche before Plato, 1981supporting
separation from the shadow and the fall of the shadow, manifestation of the lights and of the Guide of light… the guide of light is no more the shadow than he is a ‘positive’ aspect of the shadow. This figure requires us henceforth to recognize another dimension of the person, not a negativity but a transcendence.
Corbin distinguishes the Sufi figure of the Guide of Light from both shadow and shade, insisting that transcendence — not negative remainder — defines this dimension of psychic reality.
, The Man of Light in Iranian Sufism, 1971supporting
there is another inborn tendency, though much less strong, to split off certain parts of the personality from the ego; and these parts create an archetypal aspect of the shadow figure
Von Franz situates the shadow’s archetypal core in an innate splitting tendency, providing the collective-psychological backdrop against which shade figures in myth and fairy tale operate.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside
the tailor represents the conscious side and the shoemaker the shadow, compensatory side… I think this is in a way true, but, in my experience, if you start with such a hypothesis you get stuck
Von Franz cautions against mechanical identification of fairy-tale figures with shadow or shade, urging interpretive openness beyond fixed Jungian labeling.
, Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, 1974aside