Heathen Soul Lore #2 Winifred Hodge Rose The first step in pursuing a study of Heathen souls is to define what I mean by a ‘soul.’  There are two main approaches to this definition that I’m aware of.  One of them I’m calling the ‘psychological theory of the soul’: the study of the faculties, capabilities and qualities within a person, their ‘soul parts’, which interface systematically within an overall holism.  Examples are the faculties of Thought, Emotion, Will / Volition, as well as life-supporting functions, and in more religious or esoteric contexts an afterlife entity and perhaps a soul-guide.  In this view, these parts are subsidiary to the whole: “A person has a soul,” rather than “A soul has personhood.”  This approach started in a systematic way in the West, as far as I’m aware, with the ancient Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle, and has influenced the development of soul ideas in philosophical and religious streams of thought up to the present day.  The modern word ‘psychology’ meaning ‘science of the soul’, describes a field of study based on these premises, though their focus is more on the ‘Self’ in place of the ‘Soul.’ Modern Heathen thinkers have developed this approach further in very useful ways, which can support various methods of spiritual and esoteric practice within a Heathen context. My study of Heathen soul lore over the past several decades has led me to take a different perspective on defining what a soul is, one which is perhaps more ‘primitive’ from a modern perspective, especially a materialist one.  Part of the reason I have taken a different approach is because I began this whole enterprise by searching for linguistic and other evidence of shamanistic beliefs and practices in Heathen Anglo-Saxon England.  I found some interesting words, charms, and references, and published some of my results in An Anglo-Saxon Charm Against a Dwarf: Shapeshifting, Soul Theft, and Shamanic Healing, available on this website. But it made me realize this: I couldn’t pursue this path any further until I understood more of their beliefs about souls and spirits.  The entire focus and belief-system of any kind of shamanism depends on a deep, culture-based understanding of souls and spirits, because these are the ‘basic units’, if you will, of what a shaman works with.  Shamans make use of spirits, and / or are used by them, for healing, cursing and bewitching, and they work upon the souls of others, while strengthening their own soul-capabilities and protecting their own souls against the stresses and strains of such work.  Souls and spirits are the basic material of shamanistic activity. Without an understanding of a given culture’s beliefs about souls and spirits, one cannot understand that culture’s involvement with any kind of spirit work: shamanism, spiritual healing, religious practices, priestly work, afterlife beliefs, necromancy, etc.  So I put my exploration of traces of Anglo-Saxon shamanism on pause, while I explored for traces of Heathen beliefs about the soul.  I figured I’d spend a few months on that, then get back to the shamanism.  Almost twenty years after publishing the first article in my “Heathen soul lore” series, I’m still working hard on this, and have a great deal more in the pipeline!  After taking the first steps in this direction, an amazing and inspiring spiritual vista began to open up before me, which I try to share through my writing, and expect to explore with wonder for the rest of my life. One Soul per Person, or More? Coming toward the question of ‘what is a soul’ from the direction of shamanism rather than from the direction of formal philosophy, monotheistic religion, or modern psychology, leads to a different kind of understanding, in my experience.  In this view, souls are actual beings in their own right, not simply one soul with several dependent parts: here, a soul has personhood. In contrast to what I am calling the ‘psychological theory of souls,’ where we have one soul comprised of several dependent parts, I take an approach that I call the ‘existential theory of souls’, meaning that humans are comprised of several distinct souls that exist in their own right, interacting with each other and the body to form a living person.  Hence, “souls take on personhood,” rather than “a person has a soul.”  While they interact to form a living person, linked with a physical body in Midgard, distinct souls each have their own nature, their own abilities, behavior, functions, afterlife fate.  Some of them are capable of independent action, such as giving us advice, knowledge, premonitions of things our everyday mind does not know.  These more independent souls can sometimes exit from the living body and act independently, or can be extracted from the living body by malicious magic, as is told in folklore of Germanic (and most other) lands, and as I explore in my articles.  Some of the souls have active, independent afterlives and before-lives, as well. I, and most other modern Heathens, are often critical of depending too heavily on ‘functional’ definitions of our Deities, and of other pantheons as well: the ‘department store’ idea of having ‘a God of this’ and ‘a Goddess of that’, where the main trick of religious practice is to figure out the ‘right’ Deity for one’s petitions.  We consider our Deities to be complex, multifaceted beings, highly developed individuals, not neatly-packaged ‘functions’, and pursue our relations with them based on this understanding.  I take the same attitude towards our full-souls, versus soul-parts.  The idea that we have ‘a (single) soul-part for thinking’, ‘a part for emoting’, ‘a part for remembering’, and so forth, doesn’t sit with my understanding of our souls.  Like the Deities, I think our souls are individual beings who have their own capacities or ‘parts’, with a lot of overlap and interconnection with each other.  For both Deities and souls (and people, too), the important thing is to work on our understanding of, and relationships with, each of them as individuals, rather than focusing on some tightly-structured system of categorization.  Based on many years of reading anthropological and comparative religious studies, I would say that belief systems positing that humans have more than one soul are far more common than belief-systems positing only one soul.  Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Judaism, archaic Greek religion, and many past and present traditional, animistic, and tribal religions (including, in my understanding, historical Heathen beliefs) are examples, ranging from simple binary or ternary soul-concepts to very complex understandings of multiple layered and interwoven souls.  Even in Christianity, there is linguistic usage that differentiates ‘soul’ versus ‘spirit’, although confusingly people are considered to have only a single soul.  This goes back to the founding texts from which the Christian version of the Bible was derived, written in Hebrew and Greek and then translated into Latin, which differentiated between words for souls in those languages (ruach, nefesh, and neshama in Hebrew, pneuma versus psyche in Greek, spiritus versus anima in Latin).  Though the idea that we have more than one soul may seem strange to the modern Westerner (if indeed one believes in any soul at all), to a great many people around the world, past and present, this is the normal understanding.  I argue that this is true about the ancient beliefs of Germanic-speaking Heathen tribes, as well. Defining a Soul Here are the criteria I use to define what a soul is.  1) It confers life by its presence with the body, and its departure is synonymous with physical death.  The souls which fit this definition I call the Life-Souls.  Or, conversely, 2) It is capable of leaving and returning to the living body as an active metaphysical entity, either intentionally or inadvertently (for example during sleep and dreaming, or the result of shock or trauma).  It may also be removed from the body by hostile supernatural or magical acts, which have deleterious but not immediately fatal results for the body.  I call these the Daemon souls or Wander-Souls. In addition: 3) Some souls have an independent afterlife and perhaps a before-life existence, and may reincarnate.  Having an afterlife indicates that this is an existential soul-being, not simply a psychological part of a person.  Some, but not all, of the Heathen souls I’ve identified have this characteristic. There is a partial exception: the Sefa, which has many soul-like characteristics but does not fit into any of these criteria.  I think that Sefa comes into being through the interaction and synergy of all our other souls together, as I discuss in more detail in my article on this website: The Arising of the Self. In order to identify specifically Heathen souls according to these criteria, I require that the word for each soul is present in all of the old Germanic languages that I’ve examined throughout this study, namely Old Saxon, Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old High German, and Gothic.  The selection of these languages is based on the availability of useful textual materials, and fortunately they represent the major branches of the old Germanic languages: Northern (Norse), Western (Saxon branches), Southern (Old High German), and Eastern (Gothic).  The meanings of the soul-words may not be identical among these languages, but they need to be very close in meaning in order to qualify for my selection.  I’ve established this not simply through looking up the words in modern dictionaries, but by reading old texts in all these languages in order to understand the soul-words in their original contexts.  The one exception to this requirement that the soul-words must exist in all the languages is the actual word ‘soul’ itself, or rather, its ancestors: Saiwalo, Saiwala, Seola, Siole, Sele, Sawol, Sawl, etc.  This word is present, with the same meaning of an afterlife being, a ‘shade’, in all the ancient and modern Germanic languages except for Old Norse, which borrowed the word Sal from Anglo-Saxon during the conversion to Christianity.  In my articles about the Saiwalo soul I discuss this matter further. In addition to these ‘full-souls’ there are faculties and capabilities, or ‘soul-parts’, within humans which were certainly recognized and valued by ancient Heathens, and were considered so powerful that they were sometimes poetically personified.  Among these are the Will, Heart, Thought, and many others.  These are the psychological qualities of a person, the subjects that are considered when using the psychological theory of the soul.  Often in the old literature, these qualities are used as poetic synonyms for the souls, to enrich the vocabulary and imagery of the poem.  For example, the Heart and the Hugr soul are very closely connected, as I show in my articles about the Hugr, so that Heart and Breast are often used as poetic variants for the Hugr soul.  The faculty of Thought is often treated as being synonymous with the Hugr, as well, though Hugr has meanings that extend well beyond ‘Thought’ and show Hugr’s true ‘personhood’ rather than Hugr being a single faculty such as ‘Thought.’ In my understanding of soul lore, these faculties, capabilities and qualities all belong to various of the full-souls themselves.  For example, most of the souls have a Will of their own, with the Mod and Hugr souls being particularly powerful in this respect.  Most of the souls are capable of deep Thought and other mental and emotional activities, and have their own residence or foothold within our body or certain body parts or actions, which can be used synonymously for the soul, as I mentioned with Heart and Hugr.  Another example of this is the very close connection between our Breath and the Ahma soul, such that the breath and the soul-word (Ahma, Ond, Aand, Athom, Aethm, Atem, etc.) can be used synonymously.  All of these matters are discussed in more detail in individual articles about each of the souls. A Brief Summary of Each Soul In my choice of which language to use to give a formal name to each soul, I’ve chosen words from different Germanic languages based on these considerations: (1) ease of pronunciation for modern English-speakers; (2) avoiding confusion with other similar but unrelated English words (for example, the Anglo-Saxon soul-word ‘feorh’ is easily confused with English ‘fear’); (3) avoiding words which may be interpreted in different ways by modern Heathens, such as “Ond”; and (4) based on which language encompasses the broadest understanding of each soul.  Please refer to the articles and Study Guides that I’ve written about each of the souls for in-depth discussions as well as all relevant references, sources, and reasoning that I use to reach my conclusions. There is more about each of the souls in “Esoteric Affinities of the Heathen Souls.” I must emphasize that these summaries reflect my own understanding, which is based on ancient sources and modern scholarship, but goes beyond these into my own interpretations.  This is intended to enrich and inspire modern Heathen spiritual practice, rooted in ancient beliefs but living and growing in today’s world.  I  The Life-Souls Ferah (FAIR-ah) (Feorh, Ferhth, Fjor, Fairhw, Ferh, Ferch, Verch.  ‘Ferah’ is the Old Saxon word.)  This is a very ancient word, going back to the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) word *perku, meaning ‘life-soul’ or animating principle.  It is closely connected with PIE words for ‘chest / breast’, for oak, pine, fir, and other trees, for earth and mountains.  It’s directly related to the name of the PIE Thunder-God *Perkwunos and with the verb ‘to strike’.  The Norse deity-names Fjorgyn and Fjorgynn, and a plural Norse word for ‘Gods’, fjarg, are all descendants of these words.  Ferah is a vitalizing Life-soul not only in humans, but in animals, trees, and other living entities as well.  A lovely Anglo-Saxon word is feorh-cynn, ‘the kindred of the living, of those who share the Ferah soul’. As I understand it, Ferah was the soul enclosed within the Trees that were transformed into the mythical first humans, Ask and Embla.  The Tree-Ferahs were first released from the trees by Thor’s mighty Hammer-strike, then given the gifts of breath, spirit, wode, the human body-shape and its abilities, by Odin and his brothers as they shaped the mythical first humans.  Ferah is a vitalizing, life-giving substance that fills us during life, and mysteriously leaves at death.  Ferah has personal characteristics such as wisdom, piety, emotions and thoughts, and connects us with the great Powers of Nature, Earth and Sky.  It is perceptive, aware and responsive to everything in our environment, and is the locus of our bodily sensations and reactions to events around us.  Our individual Ferah comes into being during conception as egg and sperm unite in a lightning-flash of power and set the forces of life into action, followed in due time by the thunder of the heartbeat and the lightning-power of all our body’s bioelectrical functions.  (See “Born of Trees and Thunder: The Ferah Soul”, and the Study Guide for Ferah.) Ahma (Ond, Aand, Aethm, Athom, Ethma, Atum, Atem, Adem.  ‘Ahma’ is the Gothic word.)  All of these words go back to Proto-Indo-European words for both ‘breath’ and ‘spirit,’ and are linguistically related to the Hindu Atman, the highest, most refined soul in Hindu belief.  In the Germanic languages, these words applied to the indwelling human spirit, to spirit-entities such as ghosts and devils, and in Norse they also applied to otherworldly beings such as dwarves and wights.  The Christian Holy Spirit was called by variations of this word in the different languages, such as Ahmeins Weihis in Gothic and Hellig Aand in modern Norwegian.  Ahma is our ‘spirit’ and is the channel for divine gifts of inspiration and the highest mental abilities such as abstract thought and inspired creativity. It is more connected with the divine realms and cosmic powers, and less concerned with earthly, mundane matters than most of our other souls.  (See “Ond, Ahma, Ghost and Breath: Basic Meanings”; “Ghost Rider: Athom, Ghost and Wode in Action”; and the Study Guide for Ahma and Ghost.) Ghost (Gast, Gest, Geist, Keist.  ‘Ghost’ is the modern English form of the old Germanic word.)  Some of the old Germanic languages (Anglo-Saxon, Frisian, Old Saxon, Old High German) split the concept of Ahma into two, with the Ahma-related words applying primarily to ‘breath’ (including the Divine Breath), and another word ‘gast, Geist, etc.’ applying more to spirits, though there was some parallel usage.  In these languages Ghost-words applied to the inner spirit of a person, to spirit-beings such as ghosts, and to physical but otherworldly, supernatural beings such as dragons, wights, and monsters (e.g. Grendel, called an ‘ellor-gast’, an alien spirit, in Anglo-Saxon, even though he was a physical being).  In these languages, the Christian Holy Spirit was called Holy Ghost, Helag Gest, Heilig Geist, etc.  In my understanding, our Ghost and Ahma souls are intimately related in this way: Ahma is the divine breath, the unchanging and formless material of spirit, while Ghost is Ahma’s hama or soul-skin, a pod that shapes and encloses our formless Ahma into a personal being with its own character: our Ghost.  While, as I see it, Ahma is united with the impersonal, undifferentiated divine power out of which everything flows, Ghost interacts with personal Deities and with the mundane world of Midgard on a person-to-person level, while still accessing the powers of our Ahma spirit.  Though the Ghost is a Life-soul, conferring life through the breath, it can also act as a Wander-Soul through temporary flight from the body during trance, dreams, coma, and near-death experiences, while remaining linked to the body through slow, deep breathing.  As we inhale our first breath when we are born, our Ahma enclosed within our Ghost rides in upon our breath and takes root within us.  After death, when we ‘give up the Ghost’, our Ghost may join our closest Deities in their God-Homes.  If it can’t fully let go of earthly life, it may wander as a haunt on the edges of Midgard. If our Ghost during life does not feel attached to any Deities nor drawn to haunt Midgard, then according to my understanding, after … Continue reading Definition and Overview of Heathen Souls