eidolon

plural eidola · plural eidolons · alternative eidôlon · alternative idolon

1. An image or representation of an idea; a representation of an ideal form; an apparition of some actual or imaginary entity, or of some aspect of reality.

   It was not hard to forge her image, her "eidolon", in the grey gloom of the little church.

   1974, Lawrence Durrell, Monsieur, Faber & Faber, published 1992, page 21

   3 more examples

   As a species it is extinct; as an eidolon it retains its corporeality – but only if maintained in a state of equipoise.

   1936, Henry Miller, Black Spring

   […]Kit was sitting up staring into the dark at this eidolon, inelegantly turned out contrary to a whole raft of public-decency statutes, which had come monitory and breathing in to violate Kit's insomnia.

   2006, Thomas Pynchon, “Bilocations”, in Against the Day, New York, N.Y.: Penguin Press, →ISBN, page 620

   In all my years of adventuring among the primitives and wild men of the world, I have never set eyes on a man who looked so savage, so elemental, so full of primal rage as the being that now climbed from the coffin; naked, sword in hand, its long black hair flowing behind it, its body covered head to toe in tattooes of eldritch imagery and ancient languages that resembled no script written by man. Sherman, the American general, is said to have told his enemies, begging for mercy, that they may as well appeal against the thunderstorm. What I beheld before me, I thought, was the very eidolon of the storm.

   2012 May 31, Smapti, “Lord Blackwood and the Great Tarasque Hunt of '83”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 30 Sep 2024

2. A phantom; a ghost or an elusive entity.

   Was Philippe d'Orleans seen, this day, 'in the Bois de Boulogne, in grey surtout;' waiting under the wet sere foliage, what the day might bring forth? Alas, yes, the Eidolon of him was,—in Weber's and other such brains.

   1837, Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, (please specify the book or page number)

3. An unsubstantial image; a spectre; a phantom.