Soul and Spirit

The words soul and spirit are often used interchangeably, although they don’t really mean the same thing. They are, however, closely related.

Spirit is the all pervasive force of life and consciousness/awareness that flows through the universe and all things. Some have referred to it as the Great Mind; some as the Fire of Life. Soul is our individualized, personalized spark of this great spirit/mind.

The word spirit come from the Latin word spiritus, which means breath. Obviously, breath and life are intimately connected as most living things breathe or have respiration of some kind. So Spirit may also be looked as the Great Breath, as well as the Great Mind and the Fire of Life.

The Great Breath of Spirit breathes life into being, and Spirit manifests as substance, which possesses faculties of movement and animation. With life comes movement, and movement brings change; the cycle of life begins.

The word soul is derived from Old Germanic words which essentially mean quick moving in the sense of the movement of the wind. The dictionary defines soul as the vital, animating principle within human beings, possessing thought, action and emotion; an immaterial entity which enters the body when life begins and leaves at the point of death, going on to another life in the spirit realms. As such, it is seen as the central core of a person, from which one’s individuality derives.

The assignment of elements in the Western Mystery Tradition positions Air in the East, Fire in the South, Water in the West and Earth in the North. The Center of the circle is said to represent Spirit, but since Spirit permeates all, it is just as much the circumference and area of the circle as it is the center point.

In my book Wisdom of the Elements, I have assigned Soul to the Western Quarter of the Sacred Wheel of Life, while Spirit is represented at the Center, the place from which all that is manifest arises and to which it will return. For magical purposes, I choose to view the Center of the circle as representing Spirit Unmanifest, by which I mean the Great Mystery/Life Force (though perhaps it is more correct to say Spirit Manifesting, since this is an ongoing process), while looking at the rest of the circle as Spirit Manifest (the Life Force as manifested into form).

Spirit manifests itself into form through the agency of the Elements. Air gives us breath and mind; Earth gives us form and structure; we are formed within Water, which also gives us emotions, blood, lymph, and all within us that flows; and Fire infuses us with the power of spirit.

Our soul is our personal spark of that spirit, our personal piece of the Great Mind, whose Great Breath animates us and all life. The soul is also sometime referred to as the Inner Flame or Inner Fire.

It is through this personal spark of spirit, the soul, that we can access all other forms of life—animals, plants, trees, rocks, rivers, sea, land—since all have their own spark of spirit, and all these sparks are from that One Great Flame. It is with our soul (often called the spirit-body) that we are able to travel up and down the Great Tree of Life, communing soul-to-soul with other beings and other realms—from the stellar realm to the faery realm, to the ancestral realm. Our physical bodies and senses have their limits regarding where we can go and what we can do, but our soul, because it is a part of the Great Flame, the Great Mind, does not have these limits, and is capable of expanding into almost any place of which the imagination can conceive.

The human soul is an amazing thing, possessing, as it does, such a wide-ranging consciousness and capacity for depth and nuance of feeling and experience. It may be for these reasons that some schools of thought hold that humans possess more than one soul—as many as three, in fact. Other schools of thought hold that humans have but one soul, which possesses three modes of functionality that allow it to not only be aware and conscious in the normal day-to-day world, but in the invisible worlds of spirit as well.

In the Feri Tradition of paganism, the three souls are called the Fetch, the Talker and the Godself. This teaching was derived from Huna—a modernized version of the old Hawaiian esoteric lore, wherein the actual concept was one of the Three Selves—low self, middle self, and high self—that correlate to the well-known metaphysical concept of low, middle and higher selves, as well as to modern psychology’s categories of unconscious (subconscious), conscious, and super conscious.

These in their turn are related to parts of the human brain.

The subconscious is a function of the instinctual, reptilian, or primitive brain, which is regarded as oldest part of the brain, controlling a lot of bodily functions of which we are not aware, holding old forgotten memories, and having to do with our very survival by appropriate response to stimuli. When it feels threatened we become fearful, and take steps toward self-preservation.

The conscious is our normal everyday conscious awareness of the world immediately around us. The associated part of the brain is the mammalian brain (often called the limbic system), which has to do with emotions, feelings, and certain bodily functions—all having to do with our ability to navigate our way through daily life. It could be said that the subconscious is actually comprised of communications between the primitive and mammalian parts of the brains.

The super conscious is the transpersonal side of us, the part that can reach beyond the self into the bigger, more abstract picture. The associated part of the brain is the neo-cortex, the most evolved part of our brain, which governs thought, learning, problem solving, speech and creativity—allowing us to stretch beyond our instincts and basic emotions into transpersonal and abstract thought and decision making. This part of us functions best when we feel secure and unafraid.

All of these are part of us. All of these functions take place in our one brain, and to my way of thinking, are part of one, wonderfully complex, wide-ranging human soul. Of course, the brain and soul are not the same thing; the physical brain functions somewhat as a control panel for the functions of the soul—the mechanism which allows the soul to express itself in physicality.

All of this psychology talk may seem very far from Soul and Spirit, but in reality, it isn’t. We are Spirit in Substance—cells in the body of God; we are God experiencing Itself. As individuals, we partake of our divinity by the use of our wonderfully structured brain and body.

These parts of self are well known in the spiritual traditions, and have been given such names as spirit body, astral body, fetch, double, doppelganger, separable soul, and the like. All refer to our ability to send part of our consciousness to the other realms, the non-physical worlds.

There are times, however, when these parts of us become fragmented, and thus out of touch with the other parts of our self and the wholeness of self—so much so that they feel like separate beings, not part of us. Our job then is to reintegrate these parts of self, so we are whole again. Interestingly, this fragmentation can also occur in a wider sense, when we perceive ourselves as completely separate from either our natural environment or the other souls with whom we share the spark and breath of life.

While this reintegration process is often seen as the job of psychology, it is also, and perhaps primarily, the job of spirituality, particularly in the latter instance. The spiritual traditions by definition deal with the beings of the Otherworlds—Gods, Goddesses, ancestors, faeries, and the like—by means of ceremony, rituals, prayer, and offerings. When we become skillful in the application of these techniques, new links to the Otherworld are formed and nurtured, our fragmentation is rewoven into a healthy unity, and our soul begins to be healed.

It is with these different parts of our brain-soul system that we can access the states of consciousness that allow us to travel inward and find that sense of relatedness again.

I feel that the spiritual work of this moment in time is the work of Reunion with all our relations. It is to make those connections with the parts of self, but also, and especially, with the other beings of nature. I include the faeries in this category... but that’s another story for another day!