Western thought, grounded in rational categories, in the criterion of truth and objectivity, has reduced imagination to the role of an epiphenomenon of consciousness and has approached its manifestations with objectifying criteria, aimed at assessing their dynamics through a descriptive and classificatory method.
In this way what eludes us is the search for the ontological and original meaning of images which still, to put it with Lucretius, «fly about, back and forth, through the air, and it is they that terrify our mind, appearing to us in waking or in sleep».
Made into an object, the imaginary, and whatever originates from an archaic, symbolic and mythopoetic level of thought, ends up being regarded as a «sin against the spirit» by Brunschvicg, a «regressive schizophrenic desire» by Sartre, or else, in the organicistic approach to mental processes established by Hippocrates, ascribed to a malfunction of the brain.
Symbols, metaphors and myths, as Pettazzoni intuited in taking up a thesis of Vico, would instead be creative acts proper to the fantastic condition of the spirit, ideas in a nascent state for Alain, who regards the imaginary as the childhood of consciousness.
A comparative study shows how, before the differentiation of body and psyche, the emotions, in the projection onto man himself of the perception of a living entity, were felt by the individual as an external factor, like those destabilizing entities, the spirits, which in time would take on the image of demons and gods.
As early as the end of the eighteenth century Novalis hoped: «The inner world ought to have with us the relation that the outer world now has», and posed the question: «How can a man have the sense of something if he does not carry its germ within himself?».
It fell to Jung to later work out this concept in the hypothesis of a common substratum, the collective unconscious, whose constituents, archetypes, develop through a symbolic mode into those mythological and religious motifs that Mauss called categories of the imagination.
Seized by romantic ardor, Walter Otto declared that the deities of Greece could not be interpreted, being ontological truths. This assertion becomes conceivable once we consider that, before the thought of consciousness divided the unity of man, the inner and the outer world were not sharply distinguished. Images, like the voices we call mental, had credit because, as Cassirer says, «whoever possesses a symbolic vision cannot at the same time perceive that, and to what degree, what he thinks is something symbolic».
On the stage of The Frogs two actors move about warily. They play Xanthias and Dionysus, just ferried by Charon into a deserted waste where there is darkness and mud and where, an instant later, Xanthias makes out a many-shaped monster that shifts this way and that, that is now «an ox, now a mule, now a most beautiful woman», and then takes on the semblance of a dog. Its face is aflame, one leg of bronze and the other of dung.
«So it is the Empousa!», Dionysus cries out in terror, turning pale, and while his robe is stained with fear he calls for help to his priest, seated among the spectators.
Of the figure of Empousa few iconographic images have come down to us, along with two literary testimonies, by Aristophanes and by Philostratus, which describe different aspects of her.
In the comedy The Frogs her fleeting appearance seems of little account. Yet, on a closer reading, it is easy to grasp a connection with the propitiatory rituals of the historical age to which Aristophanes evidently refers, the very ones for which, according to Rohde, the belief in souls in Greece had developed into institutions of state and of cult.
«Have you seen parricides and perjurers?».
Dionysus's question, which precedes the appearance of Empousa, is not asked at random, and to grasp its sense one must turn to Pausanias, who reports that the crime of matricide of which Orestes was acquitted had been tried on the Areopagus of Athens, the place where the trials for the most heinous crimes were held (cf. Pausanias, Description of Greece, I.28). The accused and the injured party sat facing each other on two unworked blocks of stone, lithos anaideias, the stone of implacability, and lithos ybreos, of violence. Menacing, over the place hovered the Semnai, venerable goddesses whom, as Pausanias specifies, Aeschylus calls Erinùs, the Furies. Together with them, the ghost of one who had died suffering a wrong wandered restlessly to obtain poiné, expiation.
In the Odyssey, Telemachus prays to the gods that, when Ulysses takes his revenge, the Suitors may remain nepoinoi, that is, that their slaying may not be followed, on the part of their kin, by the vengeance which, exacted in blood at that time, would later be replaced by a fine imposed by the judges.
It is easy to imagine the emotional tension that accompanied the holding of the trial between the two parties, with the guilty dread of condemnation on one side and the expectation of a liberating redress on the other; all the more since, as the Delphic oracle indicated, the soul of one who had died suffering a wrong wandered restless and wrathful until it had obtained vengeance.
So great is Dionysus's fear in the scene that it drives him to ask his own priest to intervene, which clearly recalls the purification of what is enaghes, accursed, as are the ghosts that Ulysses appeases with sacrifices in the eleventh book of the Odyssey.
The comparative study of the symbolic figures bound up with disturbing emotional contents leads to an identity of menacing gods and demons that hover in the sacred of every age and civilization, setting side by side the Mesopotamian Lilith, or the handmaid of Lilu who ensnares, and the cannibal spirits, whether the Lakuma of Tierra del Fuego or the Rimu of the Bantu.
All of them, without distinction, bringers of harm to the individual and to society, drawing off presence and stealing the soul as a vampire knows how to do, in the image of what, in more current terms, is a dominant idea which, with its affective charge, imposes itself and prevails over every other ideational content.
The characterization of Empousa in Aristophanes, ubiquitous, pantodapè, of manifold forms, now theriomorphic, now a woman, her face aflame, one leg of bronze and the other of dung, has made it possible to place her within the so-called “retinue of Hecate”, which brings together demonic entities such as the Erinyes, Eumenides, Lamia, Harpies and others.
The most common hypothesis is that these, originally divinities of local cults, as the figure of Hecate came to prevail, then became epicleses of hers, entering the roster of the complex world of daimonia with which the Greek religious world was peopled.

As regards Empousa, in fragment 515, it is Aristophanes himself who identifies her with Hecate; and what further unites the two figures is the foot of dung, asinine, according to Bachofen.
The etymology of Empousa recalls empodòn, hindrance, obstruction. Empodizo, the related verb, meaning to bind, to hold back, to obstruct, may of course be understood either in the concrete sense in which it is used by Herodotus when he tells of the seers whom the Scythians bind in order to sacrifice them, or in the more abstract sense of the daimones empodon reported by the Derveni papyrus.
If the etymology of a word points back to the conceptual nucleus that seeks to express itself within it, one may suppose that the thought of the most archaic age, concrete, poor in abstraction and able only to associate things by analogy, assimilated to the physical sensation of emotional blockage the idea of being bound, while from the unconscious, Foucault's unthought, there came, condensed in the symbolic image, the meanings of that binding.
To the multiplicity of effects wrought by unknown forces is linked the motif of metamorphoses.
The pantodapòn of Empousa, of Melinoe who shows herself in strange images, of the Erinyes of shifting forms, is no different from that of Lilith, of Dracula or of any vampiric entity of any age. Incorporeal, at times invisible, they pass in from everywhere and strike unpredictably, in the theriomorphic form that leads back to the coerciveness of instinct, when libido, not made conscious, rises from the chaotic magma of that inner world whose best image is offered by Aeschylus: «Hollow chasms where fangs throng».
If the Empousa of Aristophanes, terrifying, is the symbolic image in which the welter of negative, tormenting stirrings of the soul, bound up with the atrocity of a crime, takes form, that of Philostratus shows itself in an aspect which, though at first sight less fearsome, nonetheless represents another kind of danger.
In the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the young Menippus is snared by a female figure with a siren-like cast, Seiro, a leading astray. «Though he had embraced philosophy, he was nonetheless ruled by Eros», says Philostratus.
Enchanted as Ulysses was by Circe, he will drink from her a wine such as he has never tasted and will yield to the spell of seduction, at the risk of being caught in the snares of an idealized love, baleful and enervating like that of Sappho: «I glimpse you an instant, and I have no voice left […] sweat pours down, a trembling seizes me».
It will be Apollonius who lays bare the woman's diabolical design. He calls her a vampire and defines her as «one of those Empousai whom the people call Lamiae or Mormolykes», who trap those they wish to devour. In seduction, according to Carotenuto, the subject renounces his own subjectivity to become a phantasmal object before the image that stands before him and that, in the projection of anima, embodies the other face, the shadow, of his own personality.
This being carried off course, this deception which for Novalis is essential to our soul, can at the same time be an occasion to integrate those parts of oneself until then unknown, provided, however, that one does not simply give in to the abandon of the “shipwreck that is sweet to me in this sea” which so seduces Menippus.
It is for the Ego to catch the projection, to distinguish and consciously direct the forces that press within the soul.
Libido, made conscious and mediated, can be an occasion for a conscious enrichment of the personality, so that the idea of dynamism already inherent in the Indo-European root Kev may unfold into the two opposites of a positive force, as in the uranian of Kyrios, Kuros, sovereign and warrior, and not draw downward, into the chthonic world of Kuatos, the abyss.
«Affectivity – says the Manuale di psichiatria by Giberti Rossi – might be defined as the subjective coloring of psychic life, that is, the pleasant or unpleasant resonance that external facts, biological changes or thoughts arouse in the soul».
Affectivity of negative or positive tonality, then, which if not mediated chains and imprisons the individual, as the Empousa does, in the pathos of an agitated, elusive state of mind that wanders everywhere, unstoppable, like those gods which, to cite Jung, «no longer exist, but their effects continue».

Alberto Massarelli, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, lives and works in Perugia. A member of CIPA, the Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica in Rome, and of the IAAP, the International Association for Analytical Psychology, his Jungian training has led him to take an interest in the testimonies of archaic, symbolic and mythopoetic thought.