Souls & Related Matters

[DragonLancer]

In my games, animals do not have souls but spirits. Spirits get reincarnated on death (fits in with druidic faith a little), where as souls go to the relevant afterlife.

 

[Mercule]

In my games, animals do not have souls but spirits. Spirits get reincarnated on death (fits in with druidic faith a little), where as souls go to the relevant afterlife.

Ditto.

Elves, likewise, have spirits, not souls. This is, essentially, because they are celestials that originally came to the prime for a purpose, but have since devolved to the point that they are little better than any other race. Even if they remembered their original purpose, they are in no position to accomplish it. It does explain why elves have a non-religious society and their insufferable arrogance, though.

 

[Turanil]

Man, this socks. Let's talk about feets instead.

Excellent!

 

[Sejs]

In my games the way I handle things is pretty straightforward. There are 3 components, the Body, the Spirit, and the Soul.

The Body is pretty self-explainitory. It's the physical you. It eats, breathes, sweats, poops, gets hurt, grows old, dies - the whole ball of wax. The body manages itself - the brain (or whatever is equivalent for critters with strange anatomies like oozes) regulates breathing, hunger, and any of the other basic, natural processes that are required for a living body to perpetuate itself. The Body, and by extention, the brain, keeps house as it were.

The Spirit is half of what makes up the non-physical you. The Spirit represents (and in truth is) your animalistic self. Hunting prey, fighting aggressors, establishing territory, mating - things that an animal does without any need to be sentient, these are the realm of the Spirit. All living creatures have a Spirit, and while the Spirit is no more inseperable from the other components than the rest, the loss of the Spirit would prove fatal. Without the Spirit, your Body would know that it is hungry, for example, but it would not know to eat, or how to acquire food. Important to note also that the Spirit is selfish, in the purist sense of the word. Higher ideals and abstractions such as mercy, faith, honor, morality and the like are all beyond the remit of the Spirit. It simply doesn't understand those things, nor thinks about them. The Spirit instead understands things like anger, love, joy, sorrow, contentment, fear, etc. Base emotions. For sentient beings, the Spirit would seem like your darker self to most, because it is so base. The Spirit forms the foundation for the Soul. Without the Spirit, there is no Soul; you cannot have a river with no bed, but you can have a riverbed with no water.

The Soul is the other component of the non-physical you. The Soul is the seat of higher ideals, abstractions and the like. The mirror image of the Spirit. All sentient beings are possessed of a Soul, though not at birth. Infants are born with no Soul, and over the course of their growth as an individual, develop one. Of course, how it develops varies from individual to individual. Spells like Awaken germinate a soul where there wasn't one before, fueled by spark of their own energy that the caster provides in the form of xp.



... at this point my mind is starting to wander, and I'm losing focus. So uh yeah. Pretty much, heh. I'll post more later if it springs to mind.

 

[Roman]

Interesting... so some people separate a 'being' into body, soul and spirit, where the unitary conception of soul is divided into two: soul and spirit. Does anybody else do this to a greater degree and separate it into even more parts?

 

[Roman]

Just bumping this thread...

 

[Tinker Gnome]

heh, for me there is body and soul. The body is the physical body that does all the biological functions a body is wont to do. The Soul could be considered to be located in the brain, but it manifests itself in other parts of the body as well. The Sould is what the characters true most feelings and thoughts, and beliefs are. It is essentialy just an incorporeal body. Upon death the character will kepp all their memories and evverything they knew in life with them in their soul, even if the physical body dies. However, if the brain is preserved, and the sould chooses to stay in it, then mayhaps they could be ressurected in some way(brain in a jar).

I am not even sure what I typed really.

 

[Steverooo]

A person is comprised of body, soul, and spirit, as are most beings (vermin, animals, and undead being exceptions; animals & vermin have no souls, lower undead have none, either, and the higher undead have warped or replaced ones).

For most other beings, removal of any one of the three results in some form of death or disability. Disintegrate removes the body, causing death. Removing the soul results in a coma.

Souls are invulnerable to damage, in a physical sense, immortal, and cannot be harmed. They are the quintessence of who and what a person/being is, as opposed to what they do (which is spirit). Chaotic people may often have their soul and spirit in conflict...

Moorcock aside, souls cannot be destroyed. When Stormbringer/Mournblade/the brothers of the blacksword "eat" a soul, it is simply held, not destroyed, and can be freed (as happened in the last Elric book, IIRC). This varies from the modern view of fantasy, somewhat.

Also, you cannot "lose" your soul, as it is what makes you you... although the powers of evil will do their very best to convince you that you can, so that you will not take steps to secure it!

 

[barsoomcore]

In my Barsoom Tales Story Hour, Blood Sister Yasami Kagarasa defines the soul in the following way:

"At the moment of your conception, imagine that a chord was played. A set of notes, unique to you, never before played, began then and has been sustained until now. And will sustain until your death. That is your soul. The soul is a real thing, Arrafin, that can be identified and seen. And operated upon.

"It is the normal extrusion of Shadow into the Living World. Every sentient being contains a soul, a thin twisted strand of possibility like smoke from a stick of incense. It is what gives us our sense of identity. It is that within us that carries on from moment to moment. It is the origin of memory and it is the one irreducible atom of the self.

"That is Shadow's nature. It is unchanging. Constant. As we grow, everything about us changes. Our appearance, our opinions, our abilities. And yet we retain a sense that we do not change, that we remain the same individual throughout our life. Why is this so? Because within us, each of us, we carry a vestige of Shadow that never transforms.

"Upon our death, it is that vestige that makes the final voyage about which we can know nothing until our time comes. But while we live, we can draw upon the nature of our soul to work our will upon the power of Shadow."

Note that "Shadow" is a sort of plane of existence from which all sorcery draws its power.

People on Barsoom also have a "spirit" which is what connects them to the OTHER plane of existence, the Dream Worlds, which are all roiling chaos. Your spirit is your driving force, what gives you the creative urge, where your "new ideas" come from, while your soul is what makes you you -- it is your memory, your identity, it is that which never changes about you.

There are creatures that only have souls, and creatures that only have spirits. They are strange and horrible...

 

[Roman]

Interesting responses! As a sidenote, do you have any way to judge the value/worth of a soul for demons/devils/Gods or are all souls considered equally valuable? Would they consider a draconic soul, for example, a greater prize than a human soul?