April Discussion: What Is a Soul?

LEO musings for April 2009
What IS The “Soul”?

As Masons we refer to the soul and the immortality of the soul. However, I was not sure what the soul meant. When I ask Brothers and others about what their concept of the soul, some said “I don’t know” and others each had different descriptions for the term. Indeed, when I looked in the dictionary, few words are more ambiguous than soul. Yet the concept of the body with an immortal soul is almost universal as is one’s concept of the soul and its relation to ethical decisions.

In this article I’d like to begin to share some things I’ve read which have helped me to better understand what the soul is.

In some early cultures the soul was conceived as an entity, which was the cause or vehicle of bodily life and the physical activities of the person. It was conceived as a spiritual substance in contrast to the material body. A spirit was a disembodied soul; idols and doubles were seen as living bodies; and ghosts or haunters were the spirits (souls) of dead ones. Blood was conceived as the strength of life (cannibalism); the heart as the seat of life (and later as the seat of love); life was breath and the soul was living breath (“and the Lord God formed man from dust, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living soul” -Genesis 7); and heat was considered necessary for the soul’s life (because a corpse grows cold). Some early cultures conceived the body’s shadow (visual), and or the persons name (auditory) as the soul. Other cultures believe death does not result in a complete separation of the body and soul. Some cultures believe in the transmigration of the soul to other animals or that the soul even during life may journey abroad (prophets and shaman made use of their souls as messengers to seek information in places far away). In cultures that believed in animism, everything had its’ own power and therefore its’ own soul.

Some cultures believe the soul has power. For example the power to keep the body in life; power to temporarily separate the body and the soul in sleep or trance; power to have the soul in hell and the body on earth; the power of clairvoyance; curative powers such as in suggestion or hypnotism; and or the power to inflict pain.

In the next Further Light I plan to continue to write about other concepts of what the soul refers to.