Soul

A postulated eternal entity assumed to be given to mortals by their creator, according to some religions. It is known by many names: psȳchē (Greek), animus (Latin), sæl (Gothic), siellu (Saani), duh (Romanian), rûaḥ (Hebrew), urvan (Zoroastrianism), just to name a few. The Gnostics called the soul “Aeon”—meaning “eternal”—and believed that our souls are emanations from God. In the OC the “soul” does not denote the person or the individual, which is called the Self, respectively the “Second Self” if we speak of it in substantiated form. Instead the “soul” is likened to a function, thereby closer to its original meaning before organized religion endowed it with standalone personhood or individuality. Kayin portrays the “soul” as nothing more than the link, conduit, or interface between the First and Second Self—which makes treating it as a self-willed entity redundant as we are already dealing with “Selves.”

(In the OC’s Book Two, Soul Engineer, the Vozhd character likens the “soul” to a “spy for God,” after learning that the Sky Lords might use it as a “remote viewing device.”) A number of late-classical systems, including some of the Gnostic and Neo-Platonic schools, adopted the soul’s intermediary function between the intelligible world and the physical realm. They were following older traditions, especially those animistic and shamanistic models that also relied on “spiritual” entities, a.k.a. “souls, “double-souls (including Chinese hun and po souls),” “jinns,” “kami,” “yakshas” and “demons” (which were originally not necessarily viewed as hostile or evil; see daimon) and their like, when some intermediate “office/function” needed to be filled or explained. For more, see the author’s essay, “The Soul Connection: Conceptual Interfaces for bridging Dualities.”