Winifred Hodge Rose
We’ve gone through a long, complicated list of multiple souls in this Heathen Soul Lore series, which leaves us with some fundamental questions. Where, in this sea of souls, does our sense of unitary Selfhood reside? How do our souls functionally coordinate during life in Midgard? What happens to our sense of Self after we die and our souls each move on to their own afterlife fates?
To address these questions, I will examine a new perspective on the Sefa soul. I wrote in Sefa: The Soul of Relationship, about my thought that ‘sefa’ is related to ‘sib’ and that they both stem from the same Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *s(w)e-. The word ‘self’ also comes from this root. *S(w)e- is the third-person pronoun, and also in various forms refers to the social group as an entity: ‘we ourselves’. The suffixed form *s(w)e-bho leads to ‘sib’ (and, I believe, to the Old Saxon soul-word ‘sebo’: the ‘b’ is crossed, and indicates the ‘bh’ sound), while the suffixed extended form *sel-bho leads to ‘self’. (Watkins p. 90.) Proto-Germanic *selbaz leads to the words for ‘self’ in the various Germanic languages: ‘self / seolf / selbo / silba / selb,’ etc. (Online Etymology Dictionary.) Essentially, the only difference between some of the Germanic-language words for ‘self’ and ‘sefa-soul’ is the addition of an ‘l’: Anglo-Saxon self / seolf and sefa / seofa; Old Saxon sebo and selbo. My own thought is that Old Saxon represents the eldest and clearest linguistic connection between self / selbo, Sefa / Sebo, and sib / sibbia.
So, here we have a strong connection between ‘self’, ‘that which belongs to myself’, and ‘that to which I belong’: relatives, social ties and bonds. Both of those are linked by implication to the Sefa soul. This leads me toward a new vision of the Sefa, expanded from the meanings I’ve been able to draw from the old literature. I have not found evidence in the old lore that would make Sefa fit my definition of ‘a soul-being’: it is not a life-soul, nor a daemon-soul, and I’ve seen no indication of an independent afterlife. Yet I don’t see Sefa as a ‘soul-part’ either: it is too extensive and too oriented toward the larger world outside the self, to be limited like that.
Then, we have another issue: our full household of multiple soul-beings, our ‘soular-system’. What links them all together in a functional, daily-life sense? Where does our sense of Selfhood lie, in this vision of multiple souls that I present? I approach these questions using two metaphors drawn from modern science and philosophy: the systems-theory phenomenon of ‘emergent properties’, and ‘holograms’.
The Emergent Self
The question “what is the Self?” is a perennial favorite of philosophers, scientists, and religious thinkers, with many explorations in interesting directions. Within our domain of Heathen soul lore study, an answer to this question gradually unfolds as we pursue this knowledge in depth. This ‘answer’ is not a dogmatic or credal statement, imposed by any authority or belief system. It is an inner knowing, a recognition of what is there, that grows slowly out of personal experience of our souls and our self.
From our Self’s perspective, and that of our everyday, conscious mind, the souls seem like ‘parts’ of itself, or ‘soul-parts’, and the Self has the idea that ‘I have a soul, it belongs to me’. From the perspective of the souls, however, the Self is something they create and maintain together, an outgrowth of their synergy during life in Midgard.
I see the Self as an ‘emergent property’ of the souls. An emergent property arises out of a coordinated system of various entities, for example the cells that comprise the various structures and systems of our brain. None of these cells ‘think’, yet when they work together in a coordinated fashion, ‘thinking’ arises from that activity. An emergent property is not contained in any of the parts of the system, but arises or emerges out of the integrated activity of the system as a whole. There are large fields of study in the sciences and philosophy that examine this fascinating phenomenon of emergent properties as they appear in physical, biological, ecological, and social systems. In Heathen soul lore study, we examine it in a spiritual context, that of our own ‘soular-system.’
Here is what I offer in response to the question “what is the Self?” from the perspective of Heathen soul lore. Our Self is a song, and the singers are our souls. Our Self-Song is sung by all our souls harmonizing their ‘voices’ or vibrations together during our lifetime in Midgard. Each Self-Song is unique, and fluctuates its tones from minute to minute, day to day, as our souls act and react in various ways to their activities and surroundings. This song of the Self, I believe, is how our Sefa-soul arises.
Sometimes our Self-Song is harmonious, sometimes it is dissonant and jarring; sometimes it is muted and blurred, sometimes strong and clear. At different times, different souls have louder or softer voices, depending on the nature of each of our souls and our life circumstances. Tonal balances shift and change. Our song evolves through time, as we grow and move through different stages of life. Yet always, there is a core that holds it all together: the expression of our own unique Self by our souls singing it into being, here in Midgard.
The Midgard Self
Thus Sefa, our soul focused on relationships, is the soul who arises from the relationship among all our souls together. While the life-soul Saiwalo-Dwimor holds our soular-system together in an alchemical / metaphysical sense, Sefa is the bond of relationship which coordinates our soul-household as a functioning system within the domain of Midgard life, with all its demands and complexities. Sefa is not a soul which gives life; it is a soul which is given life, by the interactions of all the other souls. We ourSelf do not ‘have a soul’; rather, our souls create and sustain our Self during life in Midgard.
Sefa focuses on relationships, on knitting-together, on sensing, perceiving, understanding, and working with what matters most to us in life. It focuses equally powerfully on the inner relationships among our soul-household; on our outer relationships with family and kindred, friends, lovers, colleagues, neighbors, others; and on our relationships with the Deities and other spirits. Sefa’s perceptiveness, insight, understanding and caring also enable us to see the relationships among intangibles like ideas, images, situations, creative elements, problems, solutions—all the different ways we strive to understand and address the complexities and the opportunities of our lives as thinking, feeling, responding beings here in Midgard.
Making connections among the multitude of tangibles and intangibles that comprise our Midgard life is Sefa’s strength and purpose. This is also Sefa’s vulnerability: the strong focus on, and need for, relationship and caring can result in exploitation and manipulation of Sefa by unscrupulous or selfishly needy people (and possibly by spirits, too), and in becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume and intensity of all the interrelating and caring going on. Even though Sefa is perceptive and insightful, these abilities can be overridden by its need for relating, whether wise or unwise in any specific situation. Here is where the warding function of our Hugr-soul comes in, as I discussed in Sefa: The Soul of Relationship. Other souls as well, especially Mod, can strengthen Sefa’s resistance to exploitation and to being overwhelmed.
The Sefa is created during Midgard life, and its purpose is to act and have its being in Midgard. The question now arises: what becomes of this Self, after death and separation of the souls?
The Holographic Self
As Sefa weaves together our soul-household with all its experiences and activities in Midgard, it creates a hologram of our life-experience, which is its hama, its soul-skin or soul-shape. Each soul’s essence and experiences are shared and woven into the Sefa-hologram during life; the hologram of our Selfhood contains the meaningfulness of all the souls’ full Midgard lives, woven together. Our sense of being a unitary Self resides in Sefa, but each of our other souls is also our self, our own, our essential being, an individual participating within a holism. This situation is a paradox or a quandary that takes a long time to for us to perceive and settle into; all of the soul lore study that I offer aims to help us in that direction.
A hologram is a three-dimensional image created through the use of laser technology. A unique trait of a hologram is that if you divide it, each piece of the divided hologram contains the image shown in the entire hologram, though small pieces will contain somewhat less detail than the original. I use this as an analogy for our Sefa’s hama, its weaving, except I envision this hologram as existing in metaphysical space, beyond three dimensions.
After death, the soul-household or Hiwship of souls breaks up, but each soul still carries the image of the Self that the whole soul-household created during life in Midgard, though some of the smaller details may be lacking. These holograms enrich each of their bearers with all that the person experienced in Midgard. Here is what the hologram means to each of our souls, after death and separation from the others.
For the Aldr soul, that holographic image is its Werold, the tapestry it has woven of our deeds, ørlög, achievements, that it presents at the Doom-stead of the Holy Ones and lays in the Well of Wyrd. For the Ferah soul, the energies of the hologram are woven back into the webs of life: the patterns and rhythms of the life-force, and the ‘laws’ that interconnect throughout and between Midgard, the Deities, and the other life-worlds. This weaving may be done deliberately by the Ferah as a transformed spirit-being, such as a Landwight or other nature-spirit, or may happen as a natural process of dispersion of Ferah-energies.
Ahma has contributed its beauty and power to the hologram during life, but has no need of the holographic Self after death. Ahma is pure, unchanging Spirit, that lies beyond matters of individual selfhood. Ghost, however, carries the full hologram of selfhood with it, into the God-Homes or divine realms, where it may choose to continue as an individual, personal being, interacting with the Deities in personal form. The Ghost embodies the hologram very strongly, including bearing the shape and many of the abilities of its original physical body, thus creating a Ghost-hama for itself.
Earthly Hama-soul slowly disperses, along with the decay of the physical body, its Lich. In folklore, sometimes the dead body is reanimated as a Draugr, a zombie-like being, by the reattachment of the Hama with the Lich. As the Lich decays, however, the hologram that shapes the lingering selfhood of the Hama also decays. Draugrs do not last forever, and as they ‘age’, they become less and less like their original, living human, as their self-pattern, their hologram, naturally breaks down and disperses.
Mod, I believe, sends out buds or seeds of itself during life, which bear aspects of the living Selfhood. These floating ‘Mod-seeds’ attach to infants at the beginning of their life and bring their Mod-qualities with them. In my understanding, Mod itself partners with Ghost after life is over, and brings with it its strong hologram of life, its willpower, strength and experience.
Hugr strongly holds to the holographic-self after death, and keeps up with its Midgard connections and involvement as an ancestral or guiding spirit, or as an afflicting wight. The natural connection between Hugr and Sefa continues after death through the hologram, their life-long experiences of relationships and all they have learned therefrom. Hugr is likely to reincarnate at some point; the degree to which it retains traces of its previous selfhood-hologram varies a great deal from person to person. Hugr, Mod and Ghost are the ones who inherit or incorporate Sefa most strongly after death.
Saiwalo-Dwimor’s holographic inheritance consists of its treasure-hoard of images, which it collects during Midgard life, and bears back with it to Hel.
Summary
Our whole soul-household sings our Sefa-soul into being, which holds our sense of Self, and creates a hologram of the shared life of all our souls as we live our life in Midgard. Sefa is focused on relationships both within our soul-household, and in the greater world outside ourselves. It connects tangible and intangible beings and things together, and has powers of perceptiveness, insight and understanding that give it the skills necessary for these tasks. After death, our Sefa’s holographic being is shared among all of our souls.
Posted April 2021.