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Fire Escape Partners
3465 25th Street, Suite 17
San Francisco, CA 94110 | (noun)
[ie-DOE-lahn] 
1. a phantom; an apparition
2. an image or representation of an ideal: "According to the glowing testimonials of his new coworkers, Ramon's predecessor was an eidolon of wisdom and boundless productivity."
Origin:
Approximately 1828; from Greek, 'eidolon': image, idol, from 'eidos': form. In action:
"By a route obscure and lonely,
Haunted by ill angels only,
Where an eidolon, named Night,
On a black throne reigns upright,
I have reached these lands but newly
From an ultimate dim Thule--
From a wild weird clime that lieth, sublime,
Out of space--out of time.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). U.S. poet. "Dream-Land," Complete Poems and Selected Essays [Edgar Allan Poe] (1993).
"A flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever were the elements of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you know not whither; you can never discover nor re-collect them. But you can, by chemistry, out of the burnt dust of that flower, raise a spectrum of the flower, just as it seemed in life. It may be the same with the human being. The soul has so much escaped you as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may make a spectrum of it. And this phantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to be the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul; it is but the eidolon of the dead form."
Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. "VI. The Haunted and the Haunters: Or the House and the Brain," The Haunters and the Haunted (1921).
"This useful book seeks to explain the provenance and workings of the British political system, which consists of random bits of history and legal decisions tied together with string. The difficulty is not, Wright asserts, that we have no written constitution, but that there are so many heterogeneous parts of constitutional law scattered far and wide: 'A great accumulated jumble of statutes, common law provisions and precedents, conventions and guidebooks'. The author explains the tradition of 'strong government', and the much-invoked eidolon that is the 'sovereignty of parliament', which has not actually existed since 1975. He goes on to discuss the modern arena of party hegemony, three-line whips and spin - arguing that the media's obsession with the language of 'splits' and internal divisions works to shut down debate before it even gets started - and provides an overview of Blair's constitutional reforms, excluding the most recent. "
Steven Poole. "Non-fiction," [Book Review: 'British Politics: A Very Short Introduction' by Tony Wright] The Guardian (June 28, 2003).
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