SOUL SURVIVORS Part II

Having spent waaaaaay too much time in my last blog entry establishing what the ‘soul’ is not on Earth: BUFFY, let’s try to take a look at what it actually might be. But first, a brief reiteration:

We’ve already brought up two powerful arguments against the conventional ‘soul as identity capsule and animating spirit’ concept. Another powerful argument against that model is the rationale behind the original Gypsy curse that initially restored Angel’s soul.

While Angel was originally, apparently, in a state of amnesia regarding his vampiric actions when the curse first took effect, his memories of those actions did eventually return. That was the whole point of the Gypsies' curse; they didn't want to cure Angel of being a monster, they wanted to torture him forever with guilt and remorse by giving him his soul back. To that extent, assuming Gypsy mystics have some actual knowledge as to what a ‘soul’ is, it doesn't sound like they were basically bringing back an entirely separate entity to live in Angelus’ body... why bother? That entity isn't guilty of anything, why torture him?... but rather, as if they were restoring the conscience, the higher moral reasoning center, of the entity that had wronged them, and that they hated.

Vengeance may be a living thing, but even Gypsies aren’t that irrationally passionate. If the soul were actually Liam’s essence, then Liam hasn’t done anything wrong in the century or so that he’s been dead and in the afterlife. Pulling him out of the ether and shoving him back into a body he hasn’t inhabited in a hundred years (or, arguably, ever) so that he can feel guilty once he starts experiencing first person memories of actions and behavior he did not actually have any part of committing is simply whimsical, senseless, and absurd sadism. They aren’t punishing Angelus, they’re tormenting the guy who lived in Angelus’ body before Darla killed him. Angelus don’t care.

In other words, it seems very much as if the Gypsies were aware that the absence or presence of a 'soul' does not actually change the identity of a particular sentient being, and that the 'soul' is not the spirit-body and essence of personality that most religions believe it is.

So... if all this is what the soul isn't... then what is it? What does it do?

What the soul does seem to provide is a faculty for higher moral reasoning, for empathy, for the capacity to see others as being real people, whose wants and desires and needs are as valid as one's own. Without a soul, most sentient beings seem to become textbook sociopaths, losing all ability to regard other beings as anything more than objects - tools, toys, or annoying obstacles. In fact, this seems to pretty much sum up the general demonic attitude towards life, the universe, and everyone... demons like and appreciate those who provide a useful function to them or whose continued existence gratifies them in some way, play with those they find interesting, ignore the vast majority, and will ruthlessly destroy those who get in their way.

In other words, those without souls regard themselves as the only valid and 'real' beings in existence. They are egoistic and utterly self centered; to them, the entire world is a subjective theater in which they are the center of the universe and everything else... including all other people/sentient beings... are simply objects, to be manipulated as they will. All relationships with other sentient beings are based on relative power level; to those without souls, it's all a dominance game, where one either rules or submits or is destroyed.

It’s worth noting at this point, if only briefly, (thanks, Scott, for bringing it up last time) that the presence or absence of a soul does not necessarily make a being ‘good’ or ‘evil’. For one thing, those terms are pretty much always defined by context. Even in terms of conventional human social structure, there are demons who behave in a very socially acceptable fashion, such as Clem, on BUFFY, and Lorne, on ANGEL. Various episodes have also referred to ‘peaceful’ demon species, as well. I posit that some demons, at least, lack natural bloodthirstiness, or an inclination to violently confront or prey on other species. In the absence of such a natural predatory instinct, it’s possible for soul-less species to still behave in a peaceful and socially positive fashion... just as, even with a soul, many human individuals are perfectly capable of behaving hatefully and violently. A soul is something that seems to provide a natural level of connection or empathy with others, but that intangible connection can be destroyed by spiritually corrosive experiences, or simply disregarded by someone who doesn't feel like being compassionate right that minute... and even without a sense of natural connection, some demons seem able to foster or learn basic empathy and socialization skills. A ‘soul’ provides a natural link of some sort to the gentler, more other-oriented emotions, but it does not guarantee that a human being will be selfless... nor does the lack of a soul guarantee that a demon will be selfish. Ultimately, with or without a soul, sentient beings have a choice about how they will behave, and that choice determines their essential character.

So what is the soul? What is that intangible spiritual artifact that changes all this, that allows an individual to see other individuals as worthwhile fellows, companions, brethren, kin, or comrades? What makes the very ideas of compassion, mercy, and love possible, feasible, acceptable, desirable, laudable?

My first hypothesis is that the soul is, basically, in the words of Rene Belloq, "a radio for talking to God". To put it less obscurely, the 'soul' is a psychic connection to the Higher Powers. I suspect its original function was probably something rather self centered on the part of the Higher Powers... a psychic or emotional umbilical cord through which the Higher Powers could feed on the psychic energy of lower, mortal beings, or perhaps, if we don't want them to have been quite that nasty at the beginning of time, then, at the very least, it was a connection through which they could communicate more clearly with these lower mortal beings, and perhaps help to protect them from the Demons (the big, non human Demons) that most likely preyed on them back in prehistory.

Or the soul may have originally been intended to be exactly what it seems to function as today... a link, a conduit, a shining, silvery rope by which the essence of a living sentient being can travel after death into a higher plane (the plane of the Higher Powers, perhaps).

Perhaps this was originally simply designed as an act of mercy by the Higher Powers, to allow the sentient mortal creatures preyed on and tormented by the Greater Demons to escape after the death of their bodies to another realm. However, this active link and spiritual lifeline works as a two way channel between the Higher Powers and the lower mortals who are gifted with it, and thus, those lower mortals who have 'souls' take on certain psychic attributes of the Higher Powers... respect for the lives, desires, feelings, and right to exist of other mortal beings, the capacity to bond with another sentient being whether it serves a pragmatic purpose to do so or not, the ability to identify with a social group. While the Higher Powers may have merely done the psychic equivalent of fixing a radio beacon onto certain mortal victims of the Greater Demons, what they may have ended up doing is providing consciences to these primitive, self aware mortals.

And in effect, they created the first race of 'humans', as distinct from 'demons'.

Under this mechanism, then, what is going on when the Gypsies, or Willow, manage to cast a spell and summon up Angel's 'soul' from wherever it is it went to when Angel became a vampire? In effect, Angel's higher spiritual lifeline is being restored to him, and with it, his connection to the Higher Powers is once more activated. His 'conscience' is restored, as is his empathy, his capacity to feel unselfish affection and friendship, and his ability to feel guilt and remorse over his actions.

Without his 'soul', Angel still exists, but like all sentient individuals untouched by the grace of some higher entity, he's an entirely self centered, egoistic, anti-social psychopath who does whatever he wants to... and Angel's brutal nature seems to have a natural capacity for the enjoyment of cruelty and depravity that is extraordinary. Angel has a dark side, like all of us, and in him, that dark side is a brilliantly malevolent evil genius. Without his connection to the Higher Powers, his humanity, his conscience, his soul, to keep his personal darkness in check, Angel is one of the most horribly evil sentient beings who has ever lived... and it's that knowledge that makes him sick with guilt and remorse, when his soul is in place. Angel at his most evil is just as 'real' as Angel at his most noble and heroic. His dark side is as much a part of his nature as his good side... and that certain self knowledge is Angel's chief torment.

So, what precisely does having a soul mean? Well, it seems to mean that there is an active link in place between some higher plane and the mortal, sentient being here on Earth. As long as that link is in place, the actual essence of the mortal being, upon the death of the mortal body, is drawn up the link to that higher plane, where, presumably, it is judged by the Higher Powers and sent to some appropriate place... heaven, Hell, a new incarnation down on Earth... whatever. But... and I've said this before, but I can't stress it enough... the soul is not, in any way, the actual essential identity entity of the individual that survives after death. The soul is a lifeline that guarantees that the immortal part of all sentient beings goes somewhere... a higher plane, probably... where it will be judged, and dealt with appropriately, based on its actions in its past, material incarnation.

That would seem to the primary purpose of the soul... although as a serendipitous secondary purpose, the presence of this 'connection' to a Higher Plane allows those sentient individual beings who have it to at least have the possibility of developing a higher moral philosophy than the 'me first' attitude otherwise typical to all lower orders, regardless of their relative intelligence.

In other words, the soul has the capacity to develop into and function as a conscience... that little voice inside us that tells us the difference between right and wrong. However, how much we listen to that little voice is still a matter of sentient choice, there are those who were raised since childhood to ignore that little voice, or whose formative experiences taught them to anyway, and there are probably even human beings born with the soul-attachment who, due to some unfortunate physical deformity, can't 'receive' the signals from the Higher Powers very well, or who intermittently lose their ability to pick up the transmission, and thus, suffer from occasional lapses into sociopathic behavior.

This is a very workable model, within what we know of Whedon’s metaphysical continuity. And we all hate it, don't we?

The idea that the 'soul', that thing which sets us, as human beings, apart from the rest of the mob, is some sort of artificial psychic device fastened to our distant ancestors back in antiquity by some hoity toity Higher Powers for obscure reasons of their own... no way, dude! That's just not happening. The concept that this essential psychic component to our individual identities that allows us to attain higher ethical development is imposed on us from above and not a 'natural' part of our human consciousness... that's just emotionally repugnant to us. So, let's take a look at an alternative theory, the "It Jest Grew There, Maw" Hypothesis, as follows:

In distant prehistory, back in the mists of antiquity, those hominids who would one day be humans began to evolve what can best be described as a 'psychic organ'. While this organ had no physical component, it nonetheless was a real adaptation in neo-mankind's non-physical consciousness. Call it a mutation if you will, but it was one that bred true, and proved its survival value, and thus, was passed on to succeeding generations.

What this 'psychic organ' did, basically, was allow each individual hominid who possessed it to form a rudimentary connection to every other hominid who possessed it. In essence, it allowed our remotest ancestors to form a sort of primal telepathic network between themselves. This network wasn't powerful enough for most to be consciously aware of, so it became a sort of mass racial subconscious... but it was enough to allow those protohumans to form, accept, and internalize various social concepts, like the family, the tribe, the race, and eventually, the nation... and also more individual social concepts, like friendship, trust, companionship... and love.

Were there other hominids around at this time not blessed with this random psychic mutation that jump-started the social evolution of proto-humanity? Perhaps. If so, the two groups would have rapidly grown apart, as those not gifted with 'souls' continued in their chaotic, egoistic, sociopathic, non-cooperative, doubtless violent and confrontational manner... and as those with them, humanity's direct ancestors, began to draw together into groups, teams, families, tribes, nations... social organizations aimed at mutual support and survival.

Several dynamics would have evolved between the two distinct groups. When the social protohumans with 'souls' could be caught alone, they made fine and easy prey, because their new 'empathy sense' weakened their naturally violent and viciously individualistic natures. They were naturally inclined to 'trust', to try to help someone they saw in need, and to behave in other completely irrational and utterly insane ways...which would allow a cunning soul-free hominid to trap them easily. In general, this dynamic would work to create, enforce, and exacerbate hostility and distrust between the soul-ful and soul-free populations, and to force the newly socialized proto-humans to draw together even more tightly, from outside predator pressure. The proto-humans might well be driven into migrations by such predator pressure into new geographic regions free of the attacking soul-free creatures, and certainly, the intense competition between the groups would impel the proto-humans to develop new innovations in defense... new technologies, new organizational techniques, better methods of communication, improved weapons... which would have a synergistic inter-relationship with the fact that the proto-humans, being already enmeshed in a psychic, racial subconscious/telepathy web, would already have a far better capacity for cooperating in the invention and implementation of such innovations.

The end result would be that human evolution... social, intellectual, technological, and even genetic... would tend to leap ahead of that of their soul-free fellows, and that humans themselves would be far more inclined to an orderly approach to their day to day life, with higher and higher levels of social organization arising from each preceding one. Increasing Order would successively rise from previous chaos, in a reversal of the normal entropic process.

In contrast, 'demons'... the soul-free populations... would continue to be mostly chaotic and unorganized, fighting amongst themselves for dominance and being able to, at best, organize themselves into mutually beneficial cooperative unions for a very short term. Those individual 'demons' smart enough to think up innovative and effective advancements in any area would keep them to themselves, and thus, the demonic race as a whole and as a collective would not benefit from the genius of its individual members.

Eventually, mankind, with its strange, unforeseen 'psychic organ' mutation, would come to utterly dominate the Earth.

Basically then, in this hypothesis, the 'soul' is a non-physical component of individual human identity evolved by our distant, proto-human ancestors that through a subconscious telepathic network links each human with every other human, giving us all a rudimentary social consciousness... a concept that we are not alone, that we belong to something greater than ourselves, that the group can be as important, or more important, than the individual, and most important of all, that another individual, or every other individual, is as important, and valid, as we ourselves are.

Demons don't have this, and given that, from their viewpoint, it causes humans to behave in frankly irrational manners that make them extremely vulnerable to exploitation and depredation by those without such an inherent psychic flaw and weakness, they don't want it. The enormous advantages given to humanity by our natural aptitude for organization and team work are things that demons themselves can only dimly grasp and not really comprehend; they understand that somehow humans have come to dominate the Earth, but they aren't sure how, although most or all of them probably are truculently sure that we cheated in some way.

Under this model, when a human being is converted to vampirism, their body would be transformed from normal flesh and blood into a near-exact duplicate composed of necromantic energy... but the soul, being an entirely immaterial, psychic organ, would not be duplicated. Thus, the human self still existent within the transformed body would now find itself without that vital aspect of its individual consciousness that it has always had, and as such, would no longer have any instinctive feeling of sympathy, empathy, or socialization. There would no longer be a capacity for true friendship or love in the human who now finds him or herself in a vampiric body; they are cut off from the telepathic racial subconsciousness. That sense of belonging to something greater would be gone.

In some vampires, this would result in a feeling of enormous relief from an oppression they had never really been aware of, and they would revel in their new freedom to do whatever they wanted to all the sentient beings around them without conscience pangs. Others would find themselves vaguely and incoherently missing the social connections they no longer really feel, and would strive to recreate them as best they could, although it would be something a like a newly blinded artist trying to draw by 'feel'. Still, this would explain why some vampires form relationships in a disgustingly human manner, as the Judge might put it, while others take on a more classically demonic standpoint, regarding everyone around them as objects to be bent to their will or destroyed... tools, toys, or annoyances.

Ah. Now this hypothesis we're all much more comfortable with. The soul isn't some silly thing shoved into our heads by a race of divine meddlers for reasons not our own; no, it is a product of evolution (we all love evolution) that gives us a huge psychic advantage over those scuzzy demon types. It isn't something handed out like candy from on high that distorts our natural patterns of thinking, oh no, it's a natural part of our intrinsic humanity! It's what makes us so cool! Isn’t that spiffy!

Of course, the problem with this hypothesis is that virtually all of mankind's metaphysical beliefs going back into prehistory have centered around the concept of the 'soul' being a gift from the gods or God, something give to us from outside that makes us better than the mere beasts of the field. We have an entire occult tradition built up around the concept of 'selling our souls', something that would hardly be likely if the 'soul' is just a freak psychic mutation that resulted in a social, intellectual, and technological advantage for humanity over those similar beings who didn't get it.

Still, all that, once more, could come from confusing the 'self' with the 'soul', which most human cultures seem to do. And that simply argues that when characters on Earth: BUFFY use the term ‘soul’, they do so in a sloppy and inaccurate manner, not knowing, or caring, that in fact, the ‘soul’ is one thing and the ‘essential self’ is something quite distinct. The ‘self’ is, apparently, very much what we instinctively think of the soul as being... an intangible, invisible energy-body that carries our memories and self awareness even after the deaths of our mortal shells. The ‘soul’, on the other hand, is simply a component of that intangible energy-body... one that can be removed, without destroying the ‘self’, but whose removal will profoundly affect the pragmatic perceptions and behavior of the ‘self’.

The 'psychic organ' hypothesis, however pleasing to our own human egos, does also have a problem when we consider it in light of the whole 'let's conjure up Angel's soul and jam it into his vampire psyche again'. After all, if the soul is just an immaterial mutation that proved to be a highly beneficial evolution for protohumanity, all this talk about 'conjuring up Angel's soul' is just so much mystic hooie. Angel doesn't have a particular 'soul', or if he did, it should have simply dissipated when he was turned into a vampire and that particular psychic organ was not duplicated.

However, mystic hooie is an intrinsic part of the supernatural. It's human nature to try to make things sound grandiloquent and mysterious, and unfortunately, there is a tendency to the pompous and the obscure in all of us. And it might behoove us now to remember that when the Rites of Restoration used to give Angel his soul back were discussed, mention was made specifically of using the sphere-thingie to 'conjure Angel's soul out of the ether'.

While this could mean nearly anything, including grabbing Angel's original, surviving, disembodied personality back from wherever it had wandered in the cosmos, it seems more likely to assume that the whole ritual, and the sphere itself, were simply meant to focus psychic energy in such a way as to create another 'soul' for Angel... basically, giving him the spiritual equivalent of a blood transfusion or a kidney transplant, except in this case, Angel's new 'soul' would simply be formed out of psychic energy drawn out of the ether.

Thus, Angel's 'soul', while it's just as good and functional as anyone else's in connecting him to the racial human empathic network and, well, making him feel guilty as hell over all the bad shit he did when he was free of its influence, is not the soul he was born with, or even the one the Gypsies made for him. It's just a fully functional psychic organ crafted for him by Willow when she cast the spell again.

So there we have two different mechanisms to explain the 'soul'... one of occult, divine, and supernatural origin for irrational, mystical, New Age 'fantasy' fans, the 'God Gave It To Us To Make Us Better' Hypothesis, and the other for mechanical, engineering type SF fans in the John Campbell/James T. Kirk school of thought, who believe that intrinsic human individuality is ultimately the factor that will lead us to the stars and let humanity conquer the universe, and that gives us a leg up on all other sentient beings, the "It Jest Grew There, Maw" theorem. You pays your money, and you takes your choice... at least, until some episode I haven't seen yet comes along and invalidates both of them, leaving me back where I began.

Next we tackle vampire spirituality on Earth-BUFFY... what lacking a soul means to your average bloodsucker. You may want to stock up on your caffeine fix of choice before reading that one, folks.