Eikōn

Image and original

An eikōn is an image, a likeness that depends on its original and points back to it. For the Platonist the entire sensible cosmos is an eikōn — Plato calls time itself a moving image of eternity, and the visible order an image of the intelligible model. An image is real, but its reality is borrowed: it is what it is only by participating in what it copies.