What’s in a Soul?

The soul is a complicated concept. There is very little agreement on even the existence of the soul, much less on its composition and features. Yet, humanity has agreed that the soul is the center of the spiritual life, a life which may or may not be different from our earthly existence but which does add considerable depth to it. For those who do not believe in its literal existence, the soul still symbolizes many important features of a meaningful life experience.

Thus the soul is ripe with potential for use in fiction, particularly speculative fiction, as a subject matter and as a symbol. Yet, that potential seems to have very little payoff in practice.

Souls as a Resource

Many fantasy ^[1] environments use souls as an energy resource, usually for magic. Much of the time, this resource mechanic is merely nominal, the connection between souls and magic being contained in ‘lore’ rather than through a direct, visible transactions. But in the very popular Skyrim, your character can actually take the souls of enemies you kill as fuel for your magical spells and powers. At first, this may seem like a simple ‘limited resource’ mechanic to balance the gameplay. But the main storyline of the game revolves around a soul-eating dragon and the fact that people don’t want their souls eaten. The soul here is neither simple nor merely a resource.

The World of Warcraft franchise (including its entertaining movie) and Fullmetal Alchemist ^[2] use a similar mechanic. In all instances, we have a mechanical premise confused by the moral narrative of the story. Warcraft narratives consistently focus on the dangers of Fel magic (magic based on stolen souls) playing as a Warlock (fel-based magic user) is a non-controversial occupation in the world. Fullmetal Alchemist reveals that the magic (‘alchemy’) in their world is made possible by souls arriving from other worlds (including our own). This fact only becomes an issue when people are deliberately killed in order to harvest their souls for magic.

The obvious conflict is found when the depictions of people’s souls as merely a unit of energy slams into depictions of souls as the essence of a person’s consciousness. After you’ve learned that people’s souls live on after death, using soul gems in Skyrim feels like a human-rights violation or worse. Are we tormenting someone hapless person so we could throw an awesome fireball at another hapless person?

So we have to ask: what do these stories think a soul is? We’re led to believe these souls represent a sentient consciousness. They are not eternal and in fact destroyed quite often, especially in their use as fuel ^[3]. If we view magic as just one form of the ‘physics’ of a world with no religious or spiritual aspects, à la electromagnetic forces, then perhaps there is not great mystery here. Even if the soul does contain some sense of an individual’s identity, it’s destruction is no different than the destruction of the brain.

But these stories routinely combine souls-as-resource with dramatic tales about the fate of characters’ eternal souls. These are evidently opposing ideas of the soul; they cannot exist together unless there are two ‘souls’ in these worlds. The stories end up saying nothing.

Greed

Of course when souls represent a resource, gaining and controlling that resource becomes a major factor in many of these narratives. Here we finally begin to address some of the moral questions surrounding the soul. In Fullmetal Alchemist, the Elric Brothers must grapple with the morality of using the Philosopher’s Stone after learning that it was created by the mass murder of thousands of people in order to harvest their souls. Narratives like Fullmetal Alchemist can then explore how far people are willing to go for power, whether use of such power is ethical in the prevention of greater atrocities, etc.

But the discussion never arrives at anything more than a proxy for physical human lives. The ethical questions are important for viscerally connecting the struggle for power to the cost of human lives. The use of the soul, however, could and perhaps should provide the potential to discuss ideas outside physical human existence. But it never arrives there.

The lack of such a discussion is, perhaps, an answer unto itself: that the misuse and abuse of human life, physical or otherwise, is the most repugnant action possible; the existence of a spiritual life beyond this physical one does not change that truth.

Disposability

When souls are disposable, as a resource or otherwise, all sorts of questions can be asked. How is the soul different from a physical life? Is our consciousness in our soul, our body, both, neither? What about our identity?

Disposable, or removable, souls also often become a ‘ticket.’ Certain creatures like vampires are depicted as humans who have lost their souls and thus can never reach their universe’s version of heaven. If someone’s soul can be stolen and used up as a resource, what does that say about the morality of said universe? Are people eternally punished for events outside their control, including the theft of their soul?

Characters often can then earn back their soul through some sacrifice. Are immortal or mortal physical lives exchangeable for eternal souls?

These are all very interesting questions, yet ones that narratives rarely ask or explore. The very concept of something as complex as a soul is often as disposable for the narrative as the soul itself in the story world.

A Mere Mechanic

For many storytellers, the soul is no more or less than a useful narrative tool. The 80’s syndrome requires sequels to be the same as their predecessors in every way except more. Did a beloved character die in the first story? Their eternal soul provides us with a convenient means to resurrect them and return their bubbly charm to the character list. But again, the use of the soul says very little about the storyteller’s or the world’s take on a spiritual life. This device merely plays on a vague sense of existing cultural norms to accomplish a goal without having to explain itself.

Agnostic Religion

The vague referencing of common human beliefs can also be a useful means to give stories greater weight by adding a sense of spirituality and spiritual consequence. In Harry Potter, many characters make vague reference to dangers of ‘dark’ magic on the soul and to the eternal existence of those we have loved. But these statements never make clear whether they are psychological analogies or literal truths about the story’s universe. Yet at the end, Harry sees that Voldemort’s actions have consequences for him beyond his earthly life. It is unlikely that Harry is the only person to come across this information. Is there no religion in the Harry Potter universe? Has no one done research into the life of the soul, despite the preponderance of friendly ghosts? If wizards can teach their students how to predict the future, why do they not teach them about the very real spiritual consequences of their actions, magical and otherwise?

Of course, Harry Potter is entertaining fiction. Despite discussing important topics, it is not a philosophical treatises or theological thought experiment. The books do not make concrete statements about the eternal life of Harry’s soul because such statements would not serve the narrative or the point of the story. Such details would thus be bad storytelling by being extraneous.

But this ‘vague referencing’ is extremely common among modern narratives, often to lazily produce an equally vague sense of depth and often coming maddenly close to ask such interesting questions but never arriving.

Unanswerable Questions

In most storytelling, the use of the soul is a matter of convenience. The soul is a narrative mechanic, a dash of aesthetic depth or a competent analogy for earthly moral questions. The soul’s presence in fiction is often vague and confused. Rarely does the soul say much about the soul.

But saying something concrete about the soul would require a hard set of rules, a physics for the soul. Such rules may have unsettling consequences or make the soul mundane and earthly. When the soul is a mere resource, how does it differ from any other resource?

For those who believe in a spiritual life in addition to this earthly one (myself included), a defining factor in that life is not earthly. Perhaps we cannot explain anything too specific about the spirit in earthly terms, just as one cannot explain music directly with the medium of paint. The translation must be vague and ambiguous to say anything accurately. Religion is often viewed by the religious as something that is given to humanity rather than created, that we are incapable of building anything beyond a complex of politics and ritual on our own. The true worth of faith cannot be replicated and any attempt to do so, even for the purposes of fiction, is merely vapid mockery.

And of course, perhaps the main reason storytellers don’t make many direct statements about the soul is because stories are often much better at asking questions than answering them.

Footnotes:

• ^[1] fantasy is basically using history as an aesthetic
• ^[2] I’m working mainly with the brotherhood anime here
• ^[3] Though some worlds make soul both destructible and eternal, calling souls back from another realm whenever convenient