Eidolon

Eidolons (/aɪˈdoʊlən/) are formidable entities of Interlife Earth that ghost (Interlife Earth)s and knowledgeable mortals can call upon for various services. While powerful, most eidolons seem to have little drive or agency of their own, and it's not clear where they reside when they're not being summoned. In fact, while some suspect that eidolons spend their "down time" somewhere in or beyond the Gap, others theorize that they aren't anywhere at all, that they only exist when called into being. When they are called upon, however, it doesn't seem they're limited to being in one place at a time; there are multiple accounts of several people in different parts of the Earth or the Spirit World availing themselves of the services of the same eidolon simultaneously, and even a few rare stories of an eidolon meeting another copy of itself. There are perhaps a hundred or so known eidolons, though some are known only from stories, the means to summon them long forgotten.

A ghost may become an eidolon when it is transformed by some momentous event. There's not one single way for a ghost to be turned into an eidolon, and there are no known cases of its being brought about intentionally, but it always involves some kind of violent disruption in the fabric of either the Mortal World or the Spirit World. There are eidolons that can't be matched up to a known ghost that existed before the eidolon first appeared, but it's generally assumed that this is because the eidolon's ghostly precursor is unknown, not because it had some other origin. Whether becoming an eidolon is a fate that a ghost should aspire to is highly debatable. Eidolons have great powers, and unlike ghosts they seem to be truly immortal—no eidolons are known to have ceased to exist—but this must be balanced against their being strictly bound in their behavior, not to mention the issue that staying forever in the interlife and never passing on to whatever afterlife exists may not be a desireable goal.

There are a few eidolons who are willing and able to converse with their summoners, and whose names are known because the eidolons themselves shared them. Usually, though not always, this is a different name from the one the eidolon went by when it was still a ghost, the eidolon having chosen a new name for itself when it transcended to its current state. Most eidolons, however, do not give their names, or perhaps have not bothered to name themselves, and the names they are known by are names conferred by ghosts and mortals. Naturally, this means the same eidolon may very well be known by completely different names in different countries and communities.

Etymology

The word "eidolon" derives from the ancient Greek εἴδωλον, which in turn comes from the word εἶδος, "form" or "appearance", related to the verb εἶδον, "to see", and ultimately traceable to the consignificant proto-Indo-European root *weyd-. The ancient Greek word was used to refer to spirits of the dead, but also more generally to anything insubstantial or ideatic. Indeed, in English too the word "eidolon" has other meanings; the Oxford English Dictionary traces its English use back as far as 1585, and as in Greek it has been used to refer to images and idealizations of various natures. It is only in the last two centuries that the word became the standard term for its current spectrological referent; prior to that the beings now called eidolons, when they were recognized as a distinct class of entity at all, were referred to by circumlocutions such as "transcended ghost" and "summoned spirit" or by idiosyncratic coinages that differed for each user.

The plural of the Greek word was εἰĭδωλα, transliterated as eidola. While the English word eidolon is sometimes pluralized after the Greek word as eidola (/aɪˈdoʊlə/), for whatever reason this pluralization never caught on for the word in its spectrology|spectrological meaning, and in spectrology it is almost always pluralized regularly—although the plural "eidola" is very occasionally seen.

The adjective for things related to eidolons is "eidolic" (/aɪˈdɒlɪk/).

Types

The majority of eidolons are roughly evenly split between apparitions, shades, and specters, with a few phantoms and wraiths. This does mean that shades and apparitions have a proportionately higher representation among (known) eidolons than they do among ghosts in general, a phenomenon for which spectrologists have no definite explanation, although it's commonly assumed that there is something about the conditions of arisal of shades and apparitions make these ghosts more likely to become eidolons. It could be, however, that the disproportion is simply a coincidental artifact of the small sample size. There are no known ghoul eidolons, though that's not to say that one might not exist somewhere, or that a ghoul may not become an eidolon in the future even if none have in the past.

For the most part, eidolons conform to the general characteristics and limitations of their ghost types, supplemented by whatever additional powers they were granted in their transformation. Shades cannot change their accouterments but heal quickly; specters can change their accouterments and may be capable of plasmofacture; et cetera. It is worth noting that all known phantom eidolons have residences; if there are any phantom eidolons capable of moving between different hosts, they have not come to wide attention.

Multiform Eidolons

A handful of eidolons have more than one ghostly frame, and had presumably been more than one ghost before their transformation. Nodubrada and Ureus are each composed of two ghosts, and The Amphitonics of three; Styrle technically comprises three ghosts, but in only two frames. Chornitak, Gletch, and the House of Bile are each also believed to include multiple ghosts, though the numbers are uncertain. In any case, while their components may have formerly have been distinct individuals, such multiform eidolons now seem to function as single entities. Their constituents generally cannot be summoned separately (The Amphitonics possibly being a partial exception), and they seem to have a single will and personality. Spectrologists' opinions differ as to whether the corpora retain their own individualities and consciousnesses and are merely in mental communication or whether multiform eidolons are effectively fully psychodetic, pleotic beings; it is, of course, not impossible that this differs between different such eidolons.

Arcession

Each eidolon is called by a different specific ritual, the details varying widely. In almost all cases, the rituals are complicated or unusual enough that nobody is likely to call the eidolon by accident. The ritual may involve the recitation of particular words, names, or phrases; it may have to be carried out in a specific place; it may involve specific motions or gestures. Usually one or more particular types of object are also required for the arcession: commonly the objects are offered as sacrifices, but they may be used in the ritual in some other way, or it may be that there's nothing specific the summoner has to do with them but their presence is still required.

The time it takes for the eidolon to show up after the ritual is complete likewise varies by eidolon. Some show up immediately, while others arrive only after a delay of a few minutes to an hour. Once the eidolon does arrive, in most cases the summoner can command the eidolon to perform specific tasks, in line with the eidolon's nature and powers. However, although no eidolon seems to have complete free agency, not all eidolons are constrained to obey their summoners. Those that are not instead engage in some other predictable behavior when they are called upon, which may or may not be to the caller's benefit. For instance, probably the most infamous eidolon, Bloody Mary, is known for attacking everyone present when she appears. It may be that in cases like Bloody Mary's the eidolon still can be bound to service with the correct ritual, and that its aberrant behavior is a result of the ritual being performed incorrectly or even of the performance of a different, more hazardous ritual, but if so the correct ritual that would force the eidolons to service is unknown.

Cults

Whatever else eidolons are, they are powerful beings, and eidolic cults have sprung up that venerate the eidolons as gods. There are a few scattered cults that worship eidolons collectively, but most eidolic cults choose one specific eidolon, or a small handful of eidolons they see as in some way associated, as the subject(s) of their worship. Some eidolons have more and larger cults associated with them than others; Diamater, in particular, has an elaborate religion formed around her—most of its membership made up of ghosts, of course, though she does have a nonzero number of living worshippers. The same is true of Gunabhartr, to a somewhat lesser degree, but most other eidolons have at best only small, scattered cults.

The cults' pretensions notwithstanding, eidolons are of course not gods, and it's unclear whether most eidolons are even aware of their worshippers. However, some cultists do seem to get some benisons and powers from their devotion. It's a subject of debate whether these are powers the cultists develop on their own and attribute to the eidolons they honor; whether the eidolons do have some subdivine ability to reward their votaries; or whether the reverence of their faithful, or some other factor, may indeed be in the process of raising some eidolons to some sort of true divinity.

Powers

All eidolons seem to have the ability to translocation to any location on Earth or in the Spirit World, though they seem to use this power only when responding to a summon or at their summoners' command. As previously remarked, they are also all capable of multipresence, existing in many locations at the same time. Aside from that, eidolons' powers vary widely, based apparently on their natures and histories and the details of their ascensions. Eidolons have demonstrated strange powers otherwise unknown to ghosts, including ylifaction, animation, and weather control. While the powers of different eidolons vary widely, however, a given eidolon always has the same powers in every manifestation.

One other feature all eidolons do seem to have in common is their indestructibility. This is not to say that a given corpus of an eidolon cannot be destroyed; they are much more durable and difficult to harm than other ghosts, but it's not impossible to damage their ghostly forms, and, with enough damage, to disable them. However, this does not prevent the eidolon from being summoned again later. If there is a way to permanently destroy an eidolon, no one has found it. Still, if an eidolon is causing problems, destroying the corpus responsible may be enough to stop, or at least delay, its baneful activity.

The Juventude Paradox

It has been noted that while the ages of known eidolons span a large historical range, they are skewed more toward recent origins than can readily be explained on the basis of current understanding. This observation is sometimes called the Juventude Paradox, and in its most common form can be stated as follows: If eidolons are truly immortal and imperible, and if the proportion of ghosts that become eidolons has remained constant over time, then we should anticipate on average that the number of eidolons that originated during any given interval should be proportional to the population of the world (or more precisely of the Spirit World) at that time. The ages of the known eidolons, however, do not match this prediction; there are proportionately more eidolons from more recent timespans than should be expected.

It is true, of course, that the populations of the Earth and of the Spirit World have increased over time and that there are simply more ghosts now than there were in earlier eras, but the increase in the general population is not sufficient to explain the increase in the number of eidolons. A number of hypotheses have been advanced to resolve the Juventude Paradox, but they can be divided into three main categories. These categories and these explanations are not mutually exclusive, and it could very well be that there is more than one factor at play.

The first category of explanation rejects the first premise of the paradox. Perhaps the reason we don't see the expected temporal distribution of eidolons is because contrary to mainstream belief eidolons are not everlasting; they linger longer than ghosts, but perhaps they do eventually fade away, or perhaps they can be and sometimes are somehow destroyed. The fact that we have no direct evidence of any eidolons expiring doesn't mean it doesn't happen—and in fact some spectrologists point to the Juventude Paradox itself as such evidence, although the existence of other explanations for the paradox makes it less than definitive.

Other spectrologists reject the second premise, and posit that the proportion of ghosts that become eidolons has increased over time. This could be tied to the increase in population; perhaps, for instance, the transformation of a ghost into an eidolon depends on some undetected emanation from other ghosts, and therefore the more other ghosts there are, the more likely it is for a ghost to become an eidolon, meaning that as the number of ghosts increases the number of eidolons increases nonlinearly. Or it could be that there is some other, hidden quality or factor on which the transformation into an eidolon depends, and which has been waxing over the years.

The third category of explanation accepts both premises, and therefore concludes that there must indeed be more eidolons from earlier periods than are currently known. This leads to the inference that there are a great number of unknown eidolons of early origin—that is, the paradox is resolved not by postulating some mechanism by which proportionately fewer eidolons exist that were formed in antiquity, but by proposing that there are many ancient eidolons which have simply been forgotten. That there are some lost eidolons now utterly unremembered is almost certainly true; old references to otherwise unknown eidolons have occasionally been discovered, and there is no reason to believe that there are no more to be found. Whether there are enough lost eidolons to explain the Juventude Paradox is, however, an open question. Nevertheless, this supposition has encouraged some ghosts (and a few mortals) to seek diligently to find some record of lost eidolons, and to recover the means to summon them. One ghostly organization, the Anamneseon, is famously devoted to this endeavor.

List of known eidolons

Some of the best known eidolons are listed below. This list is not exhaustive; many other eidolons exist besides those listed here. Note that in most cases the name given for each eidolon here is merely the most common name that eidolon is called by, or one of the most common names; as remarked above, most eidolons are known by many different names. Also, in many cases, the year of the eidolon's first appearance is unknown; where the year (or approximate year) is given in parentheses, this signifies that the given year is that of the first reliable report of the eidolon's sighting, but not necessarily of its ascension. A "c." after a number indicates a century; the year of "12c." given for the eidolon Bultungin, for instance, indicates that this eidolon was first reliably attested some time in the twelfth century (but the exact year is uncertain). A "c." befire the year stands for "circa", and indicates that the year is approximate (but within a few years, not a century). Years and centuries are CE unless specified otherwise.

Name	Ghost Type	Year of Appearance
The Amphitonics	Phantom	1989
Arlet	Specter	(1903)
Belial	Shade	(1550)
Bloody Mary	Specter	(1610)
Bultungin	Apparition	(12c.)
Chatterteeth	Apparition	(1300)
Chornitak	Wraith	(10c.)
Count Spatula	Specter	1982
The Creran Serpent	Apparition	c. 820
Diamater	Specter	(2c.)
Doctor Peppermint	Shade	(1721)
Faceless	Apparition	(10c. BCE)
The Flying Dutchman	Specter	(1674)
Gletch	Apparition	(923)
The Gold Fairy	Shade	1961
Gunabhartr	Phantom	(8c. BCE)
The Headless Horseman	Shade	(1125)
The House of Bile	Phantom	1870
Jindugita	Wraith	(5c.)
The Loping Beast	Specter	(2c. BCe)
Memsel	Phantom	1887
Nodubrada	Shade	(1552)
Professor Slate	Shade	1901
Smiles	Shade	2000
Styrle	Shade	1987
The Unseelie Hound	Specter	(13c.)
The Urchin	Apparition	(10c.)
Ureus	Wraith	(7c. BCE)
Whispering Bess	Apparition	(1410)
Will-o'-the-Wisp	Wraith	1550
Xecodius	Specter	(9c. BCE)
Xuenu	Apparition	(12c. BCE)