Originally Posted by chaotic_confusion

what> oh sorry... i thought you had enough chaos, so i'd throw in the confusion.

on a somewhat relevant note that brings me to raise the point that anything that we may have a lacking of knowledge or familiarity with, in the name of not only human nature, but animal instinct as well, our first response (conscious or not), is to either fear or question. The psychological approach would probably bring us more towards interpreting the "shadow" on multiple planes of "existence" (physical, metaphysical, metaphorical, etc...). people respond to even the sight of their shadows in some pretty obscure ways, fear being one of them.

post scriptum: if anybody does decide to take into the literature of Carl Gustav Jung, i think you could compare your concept, to a tangible degree of course, to the archetype of the scarecrow.