The Homeric Shade

[sdi]

For a couple years now, I've been trying to figure out what the Homeric shade is—you know, those pesky ghosts that Odysseus summons when he visits Hades—within the context of Neoplatonism. I think it just clicked!

So you have a soul, an imagination, and a body. When your imagination withdraws from your body, that's the "first death." The body is still there, but it no longer has a connection to its life-giving principle, and so it decays. We call this dead body a "corpse" and it's more-or-less like the living body except it no longer grows or changes, it just falls apart. You can still interact with it, but doing so is one-sided and kinda icky.

After your first death, you still have an imagination and a soul. If your soul is strong enough, this is sustainable, but for most of us, it isn't, and so your imagination will eventually die, too, which is called the "second death." Just like with the body, the imagination is still there, but it no longer has a connection to its life-giving principle, and so it decays. We call this dead imagination a "shade" and it's more-or-less like the living imagination except it no longer grows or changes, it just falls apart. You can still interact with it, too, but doing so is one-sided and kinda icky.

This is why both Homer's shades and modern ghost sightings have a repetitive or mechanical quality to them—the things being interacted with are stuck the way they are until they decay completely.