Representation of the Human Soul

The claim that the soul exists outside the body and manifests (though not exclusively) at the point of death is, of course, at odds with the teachings of the Abrahamic religions. However, belief in an external soul appears to have been widespread in ancient times and there are many references in folklore to a person’s soul being placed in safekeeping external to the body. The same belief in an external soul also appears, albeit in fragments, in the teaching of certain Far-Eastern faiths, but by far the largest body of evidence for an external soul comes from accounts of near-death experiences.

Common to almost all such experiences, a person’s soul appears in animal form to escort the spirit to the afterlife. Or rather, in the case of near-death experiences, to deny them passage because it is not yet their time. Only rarely, usually to herald great change or conflict, does the soul manifest outside of a near-death experience.

Bheathain’s soul appears as a stag. It is a common animal in the Scottish Highlands, but that is not the case with all soul forms and parapsychologists have spent much effort theorising why certain animals occur much more frequently than others and why some are rarely, if ever found.

The more harebrained parapsychologists (the pun cannot be resisted) such as Dr Lennart Östberg of Stockholm University, have argued for an astrological connection, but while many soul forms appear among the constellations, notably the antelope, whale, goat, bear and lion, many do not, and a great number of the constellations are not named after animals at all. Moreover, as detractors of Dr Östberg’s theory point out, astrology is a subjective discipline, and one cannot attempt to lever together two non-rational beliefs in order to create something more than the sum of their parts.

The Slovakian parapsychologist and ardent feminist, Professor Zukana Molnár, is much more reliable. She has drawn on the fossil record to show a correlation between the fauna of the late Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods and typical soul forms. This, Professor Molnár argues, explains why domesticated animals, such as the dog, never occur as soul forms and why extinct animals, like the mammoth, do. She then proposes that this is evidence of a race memory dating from the earliest development of mankind’s spiritual beliefs (universally assumed to be animist in nature) and connected to the Jungian concepts of Symbolism and Archetypes.

This is far too complex to elaborate further, but it is sufficient for the reader to understand that a northern European is as likely to have the soul form of a mammoth as a weasel, whereas a native Latin-American might have the soul form of a macaw or giant sloth.

Professor Molnár’s The Perception of the Ancients (Príroda, Bratislava, 2009) examines the depiction of human-animal hybrids, such as mermen, centaurs, minotaurs, and sphinxes, in the literature of the ancient world and concludes they are allegories of our dualistic nature, being half human and half beast, rather than descriptions of actual species. The acceptance of the dual nature of humans was, she argues, common to all beliefs until the advent of agriculture when we began to think of ourselves as distinct from all other species and concomitant with this distinction humans could only acknowledge their innate animal desires as sinful.

This, Professor Molnár argues, is the true nature of The Fall described in the Book of Genesis and she claims in Sexual Awakening: Freeing the Beast Within (Príroda, Bratislava, 2014) that the denial of our animal nature is the cause of almost every modern psychosis. The book created a scandal among parapsychologists and when the mainstream media picked up on the story, they portrayed her as a sexual degenerate with the morals of an alley cat.

Your editor, when an undergraduate at Israel College, Oxford, perhaps unwisely at the end of an evening in the Lamb and Flag, had his soul ‘read’ by a female student of whom he was somewhat enamoured and, after much hand waving, she pronounced his soul was a toad. Having babbled something about her confusing the Amphibia and perhaps he might be a frog—alluding to the fairy tale—she pronounced him, which is to say, me, too ugly to be a frog. The humiliations we suffer for love and its pretenders.

Although outside the remit of his task, your editor directs the interested reader to a piece in the winter 2012 issue of The Silver Trowel (Prisma Press, Woking) discussing the differing interpretations by archaeologists and archaeoparapsychologists of the prehistoric cave paintings at Altamira in Spain and Lascaux in France and, increasingly, all animal representation in prehistoric art. Do such scenes illustrate, as archaeologists argue, hunting rituals? Or, as proposed by archaeoparapsychologists, the ascension of the human spirit accompanied by the soul? The article in The Silver Trowel makes no definitive answer but provides an overview of the evidence.

In Scottish folklore and that from Wales, Cornwall, Eireland, Mannin, and Basse-Bretagne, accounts of the soul guiding the deceased’s spirit to the afterlife are widespread. In most tales, the soul travels by “green lanes”, or pathways to an afterlife named variously in Celtic lore as the Hesperides, Tir Na Og, Land O’ Leel, or the Summer Country. Often the green lane is described as sunlight reflected on the sea, in others it is a green ray seen at sunset, in yet more it is a shooting star or the aurora borealis.

Speaking as a practising Christian, your editor suggests the precise whereabouts and form taken by our soul is less important than listening to its demands, rather than demanding its tolerance of our indulgences. One only regrets not understanding this many years ago when one might have proved a more constant father to one’s son.