Saturday, December 7, 2019

Difference between Soul and Spirit from a versus perspective

Soul and Spirits are very often used interchangebly, particularly when you are just going into a general concept and not specifics. That said there is a difference in what the terms meant initially. This might be important because a character could have resistance to one but not the other or you might beings that incorporeal "souls" or "spirits" and wonder what the distinction is.

First thing's first, a verse can specify what a soul or a spirit is and if that's the case then that's the verse's definition of soul or spirit regardless of anything, same way a verse can say that their universe doesn't have the laws of relativity. While the laws of relativity are proven true and the existence of souls and spirits is currently unfalsified the same general principle applies; that something that is different in a fictional setting, so long as it is coherent, is accepted by the suspension of disbelief.

But what about if the verse doesn't specify what a soul or a spirit is?

In classical terms soul is derived from the Greek "psyche". Souls were seen as the incorporeal essences of sentient beings. Incorporeal means immaterial or non-physical and essence means that which makes an entity uniquely them. So a soul is that which is non-physical and is unique to a being. Souls were said to contain all mental operations: one's termperment, memory, feelings, counciousness, perceptions, will, reason, etc.

Spirit comes from the Latin "Spiritus" and is closer to the Greek concept of "anima". Spirit was intiailly connected to the concepts of breathe or wind. Spirit referred not to a unique property of an individual but to the animating force of a person, IE that which gives the property of life to beings. Spirit is connected to the concept of "life force" or "life energy" or "Ki".

Removing a soul from a living being would then render it uncouncious or dead as you are removing from it the non-physical essence of it, all it's mental operations. Removing a spirit would also render them dead as one is removing the life energy from it. So how to tell the difference?

If you can see what is removed, you can likely tell which category it should belong in. Souls are unique and animate, meaning you would expect to see to a unique identification, such as the classic floaty partially transparent duplication of the body image that sometimes can speak and think as though they were not removed from body. Spirits are not neccesarily as such, and would probably look like one of fiction's depictions of energy draining, with a glowy plasma looking substance flowing away from the afflicted. Of course again, recall that a verse can always supercede this by explaining what "soul" and "spirit" is in verse. This is just stating what we would expect going by the real world concepts.

But what about beings that are solely on these planes? An astral plane being and a spiritual plane being, presumably on a higher plane then physical entities but below conceptual entities.

Most depictions of "ghosts" in fiction seem to be "astral plane" beings. An astral plane being is basically just a disembodied soul as expressed above. An astral plane being would be the non-physical part of a being's unique self without their physical component. Imagine you but just hovering there over your body without any connection to it or any physical body. In fiction this is usually "shown" by depicting as said earlier a semi-transparent version of the character floating around not interacting with the physical bodies.

A spiritual plane entity would be different. A pure spirit being would be similar to, if you know Dragon Ball Z, a being made of solely Ki. It would be something that is made of the force that grants animacy or life to beings, pure lifeforce. In fiction these are usually depicted as representatives of some part of nature as the representitive of the life force within. For instance the spirit of a sea would be a being made of the lifeforce of the beings residing within acting independently usually in defense of that sea. As that more fundamental spirits become the same as concepts themselves, or at the very least intertwined with them, for instance in common vernacular you might say "the spirit of the decade", "the spirit of music", "the spirit of good faith" to refy to the underlying force giving those things life and vibrancy.

In Shinto, spirits and concepts are both referred to with the term "kami", the underlying awareness of nature. However this is a good example of how there can be conflation between the terms "soul" and "spirit".

In Shinto honored family members can be referred to as "kami" as their presence still gives life to the family. This is not exclusive to the East at all. The Romans for instance worshipped "Di Familiares" or the deifications of one's anscestors who still resided as spirits. In these cases I think it would be best to treat it as being soul and spirit there at the same time, similar to how any human is a body and a soul at the same time.

In other words when talking about ancestral spirits, the best way for simplicty sake, is to say that there is a soul that is also being a spirit at the moment.

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