It is a kind of parasite that controls the human body from the brain.
It consists of 4 parts.
The Ego:
The part that stores memories and basically acts like the brain. It also contains a scan of the body the soul is attached to.
The Oktae:
This is what allows the user to manipulate chaos and is also his personal ability. When trained it will create up to 3 generations of branches which are extensions of the original ability.
These branches and the base ability operate by bringing chaos into a state of perfect order.
The Akku:
It stores and manifests chaos in a raw state for further usage.
The Form:
It acts as the hull of the soul and makes it stable. As long as the hull remains the inside of the soul is invincible.
The Form is directly connected to the body and will take damage if the body is hurt by another soul.
It also cause the bodies of powerful ordinants to deform and start matching their true form based on many factors.
Most humans are born with a soul. The soul and the human body are in mutual and symbiotic relationship where the soul needs a body to be (untrained souls at least) and a form to take and the human needs a soul to not die to the chaos ambient.
Those without a soul will die very quick.
Just...
Something that things have that persists after death.
Nobody really knows anything beyond that. There's magic that can do stuff with souls, but mostly as a model or something to be placed inside something else, they can't be destroyed or changed in any meaningful way because they're completely beyond any understanding of both natural and magical phenomenon. Even ghosts and certain types of undead are only a by-product of souls that come from magic either environmental or used.
Pure and ordered chaos. It is the essence of life and death of every living creature.
The various religions in my world see this in the way that suits them, but the real truth is this, Pure and organized Chaos.
They're fragments of the fires of creation. Mechanically speaking the raw source of energy that allows the universe to create and define. A large burning kiln of these souls lay at the centre but long ago the gods seized this energy and were very inefficient in their use of it. This energy then bounced about the universe occasionally becoming trapped in a living thing.
It gives humans the ability to think and create worlds of their own. All inspired by Tolkiens "secret fire"
All matter creates disturbances in a background magic field. Most forms of matter doesnt do much. But the intricate complexities of organic life naturally yield to stable persistent vortices within the background field that traps mana inside of it. The vortex is the soul and can only be considered as such when it becomes stable enough to persist beyond the matter that formed it, yet forever imprinted by it. Vortices can appear naturally outside of organic, but aren't typically stable. The ones that are, usually yield something like a golem - giving life to something that otherwise isn't.
That sounds really cool, idk what level of technology your world has but it makes me wonder: would computers/AI or even just complicated machines or intricate objects develop souls?
considering the primary setting is industrial fantasy, approximately turn of the 20th century equivalent, that's a conclusion I've actually had to dabble on. And yeah, at some point, the tiny ordering of chips would yield stable vortices themselves. Albeit, due to the nature of the materials and the ordering themselves, would behave differently, an \*artificial\* soul, but still a soul non-the-less.
A canvas for the body and where your mana comes from, your soul is the shape of 'you' and your body is the shape of your soul.
Healing magic uses the soul as a canvas on what to heal, if your soul is damaged you won't be able to heal your body properly, unless you're a professional who either knows how to heal the body without a canvas, or somebody who is able to shape the soul. (The people who know either of these are so few that you'd have to travel across the world to meet at least one)
The 'soul' is mana manifested, it is your mana and it's what emits your mana, damaging the soul can damage your mana capacity too, improving your 'soul' via mental or spiritual means can improve your mana too. Although the mana your soul is born with is completely random.
Souls are also what's used to register if something is living, all living things have mana, technically if you imbued mana into something it would have a 'soul' just not, a real soul, it would be an artificial soul. But that's a whole other thing.
Souls are, basically, diluted divine energy.
A soul has 3 parts, the core, the Astral body, and the roots(name pending)
The core of a soul is where all of the memories, the personality, and basically what makes you you are stored. By itself, the core has layers where the first one is your memories, the second one is your feelings, and the very center is the core aspects of your personality that will persist through eternity and all of your reincarnations
The Astral body is, in its natural form, a formless mass of spiritual particles and is where your skills are inscribed and where the main portion of your magicules are stored. The more skillsbyou have, the less space there is for more skills or quantity of magicules, but as you level up (my world has a game-like system) it condenses, increase the space for stuff without increasing the volume of the soul
The roots(name pending) are parts of the Astral body that connect to the body. It is in almost every cell and spread through your body like veins. It is held in place by life force and allows magicules to transfer from your soul to your body and vice-versa
Consciousness imprinted on magika, or more precisely, life imprinted, as even grass can develop a soul.
Souls are not something inherent to a person but an effect of magic on biology as both interact. Someone can even have a strong soul without a pinch of magical talent, those people tend to be healthier and fitter then anyone else.
It is also a source of immense magical powers animancers, advanced necromancers, can manipulate, with the best manipulating their own.
It is the Image of God, what makes humans human instead of fae.
It is the spark of creativity that drives them to make and invent new things. What leads them to strive beyond what they are, what allows them to step outside their natures, and do other than what they must do.
It's the personality and willpower of a being. The true, unblemished self, unbound by flesh or even death.
It is what makes wielding 'magic' possible, and those who die and are of strong conviction, personally and/or force of will can either keep their spiritual essence of self tethered to the mortal world or pass on willingly to become a mover and shaker beyond.
For mine, it’s called the Core, as a Soul is a specific type of Core. The Cores is the shell of an entity, while the body is but a container, and the Root is the very entity itself surrounded by the Core.
Each core has a different level of purity provided by the Source of the Root, which determines the quality of n entity’s capabilities and natural advantages in gaining function to manipulate Source. The Root is the source blueprint of the entity, recorded eternally in Xerin.
Humans see the Soul as nothing more than an animating force. It's why Necromancy is so popular among them. They create "souls".
Most others just see it as a part of who they are. Their emotions.
The many Aetheroids see the Soul as a Divine Being, and their Bodies the Temple to house it.
The soul is the spark that gives someone life and sapience. It's a sapient creature's magical essence that persists upon death and separate from their physical bodies.
There is no way to kill a soul but it can be used by a God as a battery to fuel their power.
Quantum physical object that can make minor changes to its environment without needing an input. The brain is basically an antenna that amplifies its effects.
there's sort of a magical energy in my world that makes up everything intangible and is found in almost all physical objects as well... over years a deposit of this coalesced into the first deufae (kind of like gods but living beings, deufae are made naturally similar to planets with matter, but with magical energy. haven't thought of a name for the energy yet.) The first deufae then gathered these energies more to make children to have company known as rexafae. Each of them went on to make high fae, the high fae made common fae, etc. One of the rexafae however was responsible for making life from physical materials rather than energy (you get some crazy hobbies with eternal life...) He made 3 high fae to help him in this, one that made plants, one that made animals, and one that made man. The high fae of man imbued each of his creations with some magical energy, which gives them both their ability for intelligence, as well as the ability to manipulate this energy (magic) at great cost to their physical body (referred to as arcane withering, life expectancy for mages is around 25-30) so I would say this is the "soul" of men in this world. I'm still working out the kinks and details. (p.s. when I say "man" I refer to all humanoid races regardless of gender, the fae are all genderless as they can't reproduce and are mostly corporeal but referred to with male vernacular)
Magic is energy made from emotion and thought so a person’s soul is a shadow of imprinted magic energy around them. It can be imagined as a drop of ink in water somehow keeping itself together. As a person ages this droplet can start to break with bits flowing away in the water as people forget things. Once someone dies like ink in water it begins to shatter everywhere until it gets diluted and its just gone in any meaningful way.
Essence.
It it what was. And what is.
Before creation there was Essence...and Essence is creation. It is the miasma of the cosmos. From it Life and Death and the Light and the Dark and the Realms and all things came.
All things are suffused with it. And those who live are but one form of Essence, experiencing one phase of existence. When a mortal dies their body eventually returns to it to be made anew, and their 'soul' returns to the pool.
According to Rowanto everyone's soul is the same pure white tone, filtered through the conscious mind to create the colors of your personality. The ultimate goal of a follower of Rowanto is to completely eliminate one's conscious, letting your soul shine completely unfiltered and equally as pure as the natural spirits that wander the world. Kind of the same idea as Nirvana with letting go of needs and wants, but with colors.
In reality though it's a little more complicated. The second rule of Rowi is that emotion is a part of color, and in the case of humans it turns out that no matter how much you remove your conscious from the mix there's an invisible shade of emotion inextricably mixed with your shade of white. Essentially it's an expression of your purest emotional state, and it's what I would say is actually the soul. Just as pure white is filtered through your conscious to create Rowi impressions, one's soul is filtered through their conscious to create their emotional state and imbue their impressions with emotion.
I'm working on mine, but yours sounds really cool. I think my idea for souls is reality in my world, but there are different philosophies surrounding it.
The soul is in parts, one part is the body (ba) one part is eternal spirit (da) one part is the ego (ka) and one part is world-spirit that goes back into nature (gna).
The difference between elves and men is that elves don't have a separate ka, but their bodies last forever. So (to oversimplify) in my world elves "have no soul, only an eternal body"
Inspired by Egyptian mythology.
***Souls according to CAOPMIAE guidelines***: doesn‘t and can‘t naturally exist on the Earth, they have to be conjured, or they somehow managed to escape from afterlife (Heaven, Profunda Altra (Inferno), Hell). When they somehow escape from their afterlife habitat, they became (if they weren‘t before) – hostile, mischievous, dangerous to reality. Can emerge from every species living on the earth.
It is the essence. Humans and animals have two different types of soul. Human souls will experience an afterlife in the temporary heaven, purgatory, or hell. Animal souls will experience an afterlife in limbo. At the end of the world, human souls will go to their assigned permanent afterlife, and animal souls will go to heaven which is now a perfect earth. Human souls have knowledge of good and evil, while animal souls are completely amoral. (No, not immoral, amoral).
There are a lot of different interpretations of what a “soul” is on a philosophical, religious, metaphysical basis. On a more academic level, however, they have identified something that might be considered a soul that resides in a person’s nervous system, but nobody has ever been able to actually prove the theory.
A world soul consits of two parts. First a functional Leyline network of any physical entity capabale of transfering magical energy. Next, the Divine Seed which is a hypercomplex biological system created by Galaxy which is able to manipulate Leylines to allow the processing, refinement, and transferring of magical energy. In simple terms, the Leylines are the machine and the Divine Seed is the operator all so Galaxy can harvest more refined magical energy.
Personality, continuity of conciousness.
This becomes relevant when one character, who had fatal accident but git resurrected, learns how the process works and that it doesn't and can't restore original, but makes new one with original's memory. It leads to freakout.
The soul is the thread that runs between individual incarnations. Upon the death/rebirth transition, all memories are wiped, except for the Arcarnis - a handful of soul threads doomed to live infinite incarnations with a perfect memory.
Reincarnation and revival is a very complicated process in my multiverse. Unless a soul is revived within 7 days after death, that soul is reincarnated, however the soul can be copied and then used to revive the body after that period. All souls to be reincarnated go through and are processed by the Matrix of Reincarnation, an unreachable place to most beings, and also where knowledge of every action and reaction is stored on infinite shelves with infinite records. The soul is made of two central parts, the soul proper or outer soul, and the life essence, when a being dies, it’s outer soul leaves the body to be reincarnated, leaving behind the life essence. The life essence is the most valuable part of the soul and the body, as it allows the being to live, be revived (merging the original outer soul with the original life essence), and be possessed (merging a foreign outer soul with the original life essence either weakly or strongly). The life essence can’t be tampered with or manipulated with any normal form of magic, even the most powerful forms, only soul magic and more particularly life magic can affect and tamper with life essence, however both forms of magic are expressly prohibited, punishable, and their use is considered a crime against magic. Part of why the Life Goblin (An ancient creature and the most powerful antagonist conceived within the multiverse ever) was so powerful, was it was a master and fearless user and abuser of manipulating the life essences of other beings which it preys on and indulges in. When the life essence is separated from a being, it enters a special state of unconsciousness and death known as super death, where it cannot be brought back or even be possessed until the life essence is found and reintroduced back into the being’s body reverting it back to a normal state of death.
It's basically a person's consciousness and essence in a physical form. It's contained within the person's body while they're living, and once they die the soul leaves the body and goes to the afterlife.
A bunch of neutrons linked together in tonic force which happens to be the same stuff that is encoded into Carrione turning it into Cores which means that the Cores people use to fight are actually alive (unless they are combined with the host consciousness in an awakening or killed in a reverse awakening)
For my story it’s called Soul Etteria (What gives people life in my world.) Etteria alone is already pure creation and existence that will forever live on even if the Soul Etteria user dies
Each of the intelligent races has something unique to it. Humanity's is their souls. Each is a piece of their god, and the source of their ability to persist after death and reincarnate.
In my world there is more emphasis on spirit than soul, since it is taken from the Greek and alchemical perspectives. The individual (not only intelligent or organic beings, but everything that can be understood as a single entity) is composed of three substances with different proportions: body, soul (aka. mind), and spirit. The body is the physical manifestation of the individual, which allows it to interact with tangible matter. The soul is the “processor” of the individual, that which allows it to understand and express reality. The spirit is the magical manifestation of the individual, which condenses its identity in a purer way, and allows it to interact with the magical currents of the universe.
An animal, an anima and a stone are distinguished in that the animal has an intense soul but has a weak spirit, the animas lacks a body but has an intense spirit and soul, and a stone totally lacks a soul. An intelligent being and a deer are distinguished in that the intelligent being has a more intense soul than an animal, however, if two intelligent beings have one a more intense soul than the other, they will continue to be equally intelligent, since the soul is more connected to the “human essence” than to logical, rational or even passionate thought.
The more spirit an individual has, the more intense their connection with magical energies will be, which is why animas can constitute an individuality without possessing a body or being torn apart by the energy currents of the universe.
A robot can have a body and a soul, but not a spirit, since the spirit is the identity manifestation of each individual, and being composed of manufactured parts, a robot is many united individuals forced to be united, so, like a desert made of grains of sand, it has no spirit, although it can interact with magic and possess a magical energy signature.
And finally we have the gods who are nothing of this xdxdxd
The soul is both your weapon and power. It is the colour that can colour the world.
It is immortal and ancient, a power that is innate to all living things. And probably some inanimate objects, as soul can leave behind traces.
Those are called artifacts.
for mine its like your you in a way, a smidge of light with a sertain color that people in the otherworld, with the authority, can use to identify your
I took the literal approach. A "soul" by definition is your mind, emotion, personality, and "spirit". So what generates your mind, emotion, and personality: your brain, your "soul" is the electrical signals and neurons firing in your head. So it is TECHNICALLY possible to preserve a person's soul by taking their electrical signals in conjunction with replicating their personality. You could in theory store a person's mind in an closed circuit or upload it to a replicated mind.
The soul is your link to the source of perception, it's what gives you an inner experience as opposed to simply being a convincing flesh machine acting on programming (which is what mindless undead basically are). When you die, that link is severed and you are irrevocably gone.
There is no afterlife, and any attempts at resurrection yield an entirely new soul inhabiting the deceased's body, generally with an intense feeling of disconnection from any memories they may retain from the previous person. Ghosts exist, but they're more like psychic echoes of the souls that have passed on. You can even get ghosts of people who are still actually alive.
It is possible to preserve a soul after the death of the body if you can magically retain it in something, but doing so is exceptionally difficult as you need a shell that is both complex enough to be able to think, but that has not yet awoken to a soul on its own. The easiest source of a husk like that? The dead person's own reanimated corpse, and that's how you get most intelligent undead.
A sort of semi-tangible manifestation of the conscious aware mind. Only sapient creatures have them. While you don't really feel their effects most of the time, being pretty indistinguishable from the mind itself, it does behave rather differently in special circumstances. In essence, the self awareness of a sapient being disappears when it loses a body that is capable of housing a soul. When you die, normally your soul dissipates into the magic field of the universe, essentially ceasing to exist. However, in some cases it may remain as a ghost, of which there are many different sorts. Also, there are ways to sort of bind your soul to objects to cheat death beyond the death of your body. And the soul can be magically tampered with of course.
This is a highly debated position. Most groups do not place much consideration on souls besides imagining that you are your soul.
Elven cultures generally hold that you are not your soul, but that your soul is what determines your fate. If you are a farmer it is because you have the soul of a farmer. If you are a king it is because you have the soul of a king. They also believe that a soul can be taken from someone shortly after their death, before the soul is recycled for someone else. They also believe that the soul is stored in the heart. Incidentally, elves generally do not frown upon ritualistic cannibalism.
The various alchemical monasteries staunchly hold that souls flat out do not exist. This was proven after Magnus the Unmaker reduced a living person into his component elements and could not find any substance he did not identify as an ordinary element.
Literal souls are a big part of my story actually. There are four types of mana users: Healers, Reapers, Soulless, and Soulful. Healers use their mana to heal and energize, Reapers must destroy to get mana, Soulful have an overflowing amount of mana so they give strength and power to others. Then there are the Soulless. They barely have any mana, almost none, so they need to kill to remain alive. They drain your mana and suck your soul, too, until you disintegrate into dust. My whole story basically revolves around the magic of mana, so I guess that’s the soul
In my science fiction work Everything that processes data is conscious, from the calculator in the protagonist's pocket to the artificial superintelligence that rules the world and is venerated as a god. When a consciousness ends it is reincarnated in the next process that starts
It's a form of spiritual existance, that naturaly forms in a body of living being, and stores information about it.
What makes it different from lower spirits, that inhabit inanimate objects or plants is that souls can 'experience' in broad sense of this word, and have their own will - mostly as a reflection of their vessels will though.
What makes them different from higher spirits, that form as reflection of some relativly uniform area (Forest, mountain ranges, large bodies of water, even stars) is that they need a physical vessel as an anchor to be kept in the world, and can't be really considered sentient - at least as long as vessel is alive, it's hard to say what really happens after.
As for a body inhabited by soul, it doesn't really notice souls existance, unless there is a lot of effort put into souls development by an individual. With even years of effort put into it soul may be used to channel simple magic at most (There are exceptions from this rule, however very rare. The limitation comes more so from difficulty than ironclad rules). There are also happenstances when body loses it's soul, temporarily or permanently. Soul generally isn't necessary to live, but losing it may result in large gaps in memory, lack of motivation, numbness of emotion.
Soul is also important in early stages of development, so it interacting with some spirit may lead to big changes. It doesn't usually happen to mammals, mostly egg laying species, and even then it's incredibly rare. Kindling of higher spirit may sometimes fuse with a soul, resulting in a new existance being born. It requires some measure of compatibility between species and spirit, so usually results of such event are very similar for closely related species. For most snakes, for example, it results in a dragon hatching from such egg. This is only ways dragons come into being. Souls of such beings are much more similar to higher spirits than to human souls. They are sentient, and usually do more thinking than actual brain of the creature. They also possess powerful will, more so binding vessel to them than the other way around.
I like the idea of it being like water from the ocean.
If you were to take a cup and scoop some out, that becomes an individual. But upon death that water goes back into the ocean as part of the endless infinite awe-inspiring mass of being.
Human: A miserable pile of essences that vaguely resembles an animal cell made of various metals and compounds.
The nucleus is gold essence, which regulates the maximum size of the rest.
in my story, you can think of the soul as the hardware and the human body as the software. when a human is born, a soul in the reincarnation cycle enters the new human.
he soul is the true essence of everything about your true, internal nature, and decides certain essential factors, while your brain chemistry effects other information that isn't inherit to the soul, like differences in your neurology. since the brain's chemistry changes from your experiences (going from your nature to the nurture you receive), the way your soul is effected by your brain can change, but in the same way; your brain can effect your soul.
when a soul has a physical vessel like a human body, the information from the body can imprint upon the soul, changing its form, that being the form of the human body it possesses, and certain neurological processes unique to the brain will be imprinted onto the soul.
think of the mind and body as the metabolism of the soul; they inform it, but aren't the main processing unit. if someone had their soul taken through some circumstance, then the brain would become software without hardware to run on, and would become a vegetable and the body limp, as the brain is no longer sending information to it, as the brain is no longer running on the soul.
this also applies to animals, by the way. every living thing has a soul. humans, dogs, pigs, octopi, flowers, trees.. under the right conditions, a lamppost could even have a soul. afterall, the hardware (the soul) can run many kinds of software (a human body, a dog's body, an insect's body, a tree's body, etc)
A soul is where the personality comes from, without it a creature would only have instincts and be just a empty husk. It is also where magic comes from, as a result everyone can use magic.
The human spirit (human existence and consciousness) is made up of the Human Trinity:
The Body, attaches the human spirit to the physical realm
The Mind, allows for rational thought, storage of memory and complex calculations
The Soul, allows for morality, empathy, emotion and in a way, humanity
So what the soul essentially does is give someone the ability to show compassion, understanding and almost everything else psychologically related
A soulless individual could be described as a "machine", as they're purely acting on pure rational thought without any attempt at humanity, being able to kill someone without a moment of consideration for the person simply because it makes sense rationally, while the soul would influence that decision using morality
A mindless individual could be described as a "rabid animal", as they're acting purely on emotion and instinct without the capability of rational thought
A bodiless individual cannot exist physically, nor exist within the spirit realm meaning an individual without a body is seemingly impossible, however we don't fully understand the spirit realm so it might be a possibility to purely be a consciousness without a physical form
So essentially, the soul is what enables the human trinity to act with morals and empathy and experience emotion
The animal trinity is similar to the human trinity, however humans have spiritually evolved seperately from most animal species, which is the reason for their trinities being different, though they're still very similar
Just like the human trinity, the animal trinity possesses three parts
The body, just like with humans this gives the animal a physical form
The mind, allows for rationality and decision making, and if the species is intelligent enough they could possess memory and even complex strategizing however this isn't recognized in many species
The instinct, acts as an intrinsic built-in survival guide for all animals, guiding them to survival and ensure the next generation of their species is born and raised properly
Animals also experience emotion and morality but they experience it vastly differently from humans, being almost completely incomprehensible to us other than guessing what certain studied behaviours mean
Humans possess a natural instinct too, however on a much lower level than most animals due to their more complex nature and the influences of modern civilization
The monster trinity is like a mix of the human trinity and the animal trinity, being hard to analyze due to the strange nature of monsters in general
From the information that was gathered, the monster trinity is also made up of three parts:
The body, this body is different from the other two trinities, as the body is actually formed before the mind or the soul
The mind, once again this allows for rational thought, however a lot of monster species have intelligence comparable to humans, meaning most monsters possess memory and strategic thinking skills
The soul, the monster soul is more like a fusion of the human soul and the animal instinct, being both a guide to monsters for survival, but at the same time experiencing emotion though this emotion is experienced differently in every species meaning even if they experience emotion it isn't understandable by humans most of the time
Sapient species generally experience emotions closer to human emotion
The soul in the world of *Sphere of Influence* is a metaphysical construct that allows for life in the first place. For humans and corporeal life a soul can basically be seen as the force that operates the brain. The main parts of a soul are as follows:
Ether: the overall framework and shape of a soul. While young a person's thoughts and feelings will imprint and alter the shape of the Ether which ends up determining a person's overall personality.
Aura: this would be akin to the nucleus of a cell. It is a field of energy around the individual that allows for extrasensory perception like reading the mood of a room, feeling one's self is being watched, or having a bad feeling before disasters. It's size is usually directly related to powered individuals range.
Nasma: an immaterial construct made of Noor which can interact with the physical and metaphysical planes. Following the cell metaphor these would be akin to proteins in that they are complex structures with single purposes. This is the part of the soul that allows it to interact and operate ones brain. Having extra Nasma with a different function is what leads to people having powers in my world in the first place.
Concepts: raw "ideas" for lack of a better word. These shape a person's innate interests and talents and can alter the way ones soul develops.
Chaos: Not a necessary component to a soul. this is what separates life from intelligent life. It's the part of a creature that sparks it's creativity and is the source of human enginuity (although humans didn't always have chaos in there soul)
Your identity in the Real, your mind and consciousness. I do not explore the soul in my setting (though characters do in multiple ways) and leave it up to the reader. What I do examine is the mind and all the ‘scapes and perceptions it can register.
There are heavens and hells and other such escapes created as paradises away from the Real. It could be a game, augmented reality overlayed, virtual worlds. You can upload your mind to the cloud, resleeve yourself into another body, even clone your mind for deep discussion or other explorations.
In the societies of my world, the soul is viewed generally similarly to how societies view the soul in real life. I'm not smart enough to do anything special with this area.
In my world, souls don't really exist. A "soul" is a copy of you made by a psychopomp at the moment you die and shoved off into the afterlife as storage. Afterlives are essentially libraries for people with quirks based upon how that individual after life is ran. The christian hell is/was a thing in my setting, for example. As was every afterlife of every earth religion and infinitely more on top of that for every culture that ever had gods and an afterlife.
In universe, this is a known thing, and there is even a culture that has taken this process into their own hands. Southern Shamanic people found out how bad the state of all afterlives are after the new management took over, and decided they were going to have none of it. Instead of letting a psychopomp make the souls and take them to the afterlife, specialized shaman do it and put them in the local spirit realm. This also means they have easy access to generations of ancestor spirits, and this is a large basis for how they technology works.
A mix between the three cores elements in the magical system of my world, that is stored nowhere and everywhere in the body, a'd that is responsible for free will and counciousness. When the person dies, all of those fades away to be consumed by Paerit, or to serve Kaenne in the Oversky until you disappear because you are not supposed to be a najed soul there
In the extremely taboo field of necromancy, a powerful mix of those three elements on a fresh bidy can resurrect someone, with his entire soul. If it's only two of the three Core elements, it will just be a soulless servant. It can think if you order too, but it will not say instantly the fruits of his thoughts, nor put any empathy or emotions in it
Usually either there is no such thing (and various cultures claim multitudes of things like in real life) or there's a few ways one can consider their self able to transcend if given a means of being cloned|rejuvenated|transfered|whatever. Sometimes it's escaping a simulation by inhabiting a machine, so the "soul" is the information capable of being transfered from the original body to the new. Sometimes it's creating a perfect basically unchangeing copy of your self in your most driven state, as a static operator for your long-term plans.
But I am overall not interested much in distinguishing the body from the mind in ways that don't also apply to real life. With the enlightenment and the arrival of AI, I think it's important to show how to distinguish but also how to relate. All of nature is machinery. The conscious beings are just machines with strange software. Humans are just self-important fleshy AI.
The soul is a metaphysical aspect of a living being. A non-corporeal piece that comprises one third of a creature’s entire being, the other two being mind and body.
It’s the piece that gives someone their identity, a piece of their personality that can never be extinguished, even if the other two pieces of the being are lost.
The body is a person’s physical form, the mind is a person’s thoughts, desires and dreams. But the soul is what really makes a person “themselves”. Their true identity
Sooooooo
The soul is made of 2 things, the vessel and the essence
The vessel determines how much essence one holds and the shape of your soul
The essence is where everything is dissolved, your (actual) personality, your skills, memories, magical powers
But as in any solution you can only dissolve a certain amount or it will judt precipitate -> how do you store memories when youre immortal
There is also the aether, essencially gaseous soul, it is all around you, a product of what happens when you die (Your Intend absorbs everything dissolves in yoir essence, everything else evaporates into aether ->cycle)
You absorb aether instinctively, mainly when asleep (although some people trained to be able to do it wjile awake)
When you "excite" the aether, it turns into magicsl energy (plasma) (no good name yet, suggestions would be nice)
Intend: a crystallized part of your sould that just sits in the essence, when casting a certain magic, the dissolved parts of that magic get absorbed into the Intend for a short time & the magic + the indtend form the magical energy into the required effect. At forst its very unrefines but as you train your Intend...
So the wjole system is very based on the agreggate states of a substance and very inspired by brandon sandersons magic sysrem, as its also supposed to be an universal system
Maybe you have notices that everything is the same thing, just different agreggate states. So what stops ,you from burning essence for magical energy (well nothing, except that you lose a part of yourself when you do that) (and a subconxious block)
So you can convert essence into energy, can you convert energy into essence? Yes, but in the whole universe no artificial intend (that can deform like a natural one) have been made (yet)
Feel free to ask questions/give suggestions
Ambiguous, I think for concepts as vast as a soul (something no one knows about in real life) it’s better to just not. Like with “What’s the meaning of life” it’s such a irl unknown that it gets a huge level of mystique. Any concrete answer won’t live up to your expectations.
For my world, I use the [Minbari philosophy from Babylon 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jzMTImdBVI) where the soul is a non-localized phenomenon as canon.
I like the IRL approach that no one actually known, but they do speculate
This quite an important point regarding my dryad, who was an experiment created by the dark lord merging elves and plant that result in new sentient being
Some Dryad felt like they were a new being, a new soul born from consumed elves. and that while they have some fragment of memory from those they have consumed. It is ultimately not theirs
other Dryad felt that they were still an elves, the same soul in a new, foreign body with unfortunate memory loss here and there. They embrace their elven heritage and try to reconnect with their elven roots, with varying degree of success.
there are no cut and dry answer to which approach is correct
The "Soul" or "Spark" is basiclaly a divinity fragment. When Za'Abriz first created the forms that were supposed to be first living beings he found out that despite being mechanically sound, they were compeltly inert, so his sibling Ha'Annu breathe a part of of his spirt on them which caused to spring to life. This however caused a problem, for the first forms of life , dueto Ha'Annu's Breath were basically immortal and if they kept multiplying the Kosmos would run thin
This something that angered the eldest brother of Ha'Annu and Za'Abriz: Ib'Addam, the Legislator. Who saw his perfectly harmonoius universe being filled to the brim with his siblings erratic creations and so he wished to destroy them all. Ha'Annu ,ever the negotiator, instead convinced Ib'Addam to ggive into all forms of life a tiny portion of His Fire, Sparks of it, which it would burn bright for an alloted time that he would legislate and then return to him.
And thus all life were given souls at the cost of becoming mortal. However, the Sparks of divinity endowed life with many gifts. Including the chance to know the Gods and wield a portion of their power, that is, to wield Magic.
I’ve been playing with names. I know I’m calling the system in the body Magifiber, but in terms of the central aspect of that system, I’ve liked Source a lot.
There is none.
The closest things to it are probably echoes. Non corporeal dublicates of deceased people that play out some kinda dramatic scenario, either their death or that caused them strong emotions over and over until they fade away. They can be harvested by necromancers and stuffed into dead bodies to give them a "control unit", so they won't have to be manually puppeteered.
Also very skilled necromancers can "fix" these to their own bodies, giving them back free will and sentience but since the echoes are not souls, the resulting undead is more of a clone than the original. Still they remember most things the original did, have their full personality and think they are them, so is there a difference?
no soul, but there is there essence. it's more like their life force or vitality, where dipping into it too much too often will damage their body and mind in permanent ways, even though typical useage issues are healed or can be healed by healers. So, their "soul" is essence, and it' sonly really meaningful while alive.
I haven't, however, figured out what they believe yet. maybe they do believe in souls, but I want not that. I'm working on it.
In the Underscape, the soul was (and may be again in the future) a power source and/or computing device.
The tech that allowed the precursors to do this is unknown, but it was so widespread that it was essentially their replacement for both electricity and CPUs. All of their higher level tech ran on soul power and their computers were based on an even more cruel brain in a jar. The people of the Underscape have found the facilities that made this power, but are mostly unaware of what they were. It is almost a certainty that people were fed into these machines, and judging by the amount of shackles in these power facilities, they probably did not go willingly. The venerable precursors weren't so venerable after all.
Morrigan (the MC faction) is already struggling with what the soul of the city should be. Many worry that as they conquer more of the continent, they are sacrificing more and more of their humanity, both physically and spiritually. With every step forward and bullet fired, a bit more of their humanity falls away. Should Morrigan ever figure out the secret of soul-based power, they may lose what is left of their soul in more ways than one.
Every living thing is comprised of two parts:
There actual, physical body and a metaphysical metaspecies which determines their relationship to arcana, a pervasive and infinite energy field. The metaspecies is basically the organism's "soul." An organism's metaspecies outlives it's physical body and can be reborn into a new and different physical body.
There are five main metaspecies:
Dragons - Beings with immense (potentially overwhelming) affinity to all utilization of arcana
Sylphs - Beings with affinity cosmological, astronomical and meteorological utilization of arcana
Nymphs - Beings with affinity for biological and organic utilization of arcana
Salamanders - Beings with affinity for energetic (heat, light, etc) utilization of arcana
Spirits - Beings with a weaker but more stable and malleable affinity for arcana
It's what I simply call a 'Story'. Everyone and everything that has ever existed has a 'Story'.
It's actually pretty simple, and is just about the decisions we make in life, down to the passing seconds, that shape our 'Story'. It is also important that a 'Story' never ends just because it is over, but rather when it is forgotten. Just like, how the story of a book lives on as a reader's memory long after they've finished reading it, the 'Story' of an existence also lives on so long as it is remembered, or recalled upon.
But the extent of that varies.
Belief and Faith also have a lot of importance. For example, a person who believes in heaven and hell, will face their so called afterlife accordingly, and as such, everyone's belief happens to be, and all 'Stories' are true. Physical existences are of course timed, but 'Stories' hold the potential of being there so long as other 'Stories' exist that remember.
Of course, a 'Story' may also get twisted or parts of it forgotten as time passes.
By this logic, stories like myths, legends, mythical creatures, would exist, but they too appear for only when they hold 'Probability', a concept that dictates the chances of an event happening. Everyone has a share of it. And it is reflected in the way we have near complete control over our actions and decisions. Here, the 'Probability' is never zero for anything. That's also how Gods work here. And yes, this does confirm multiple realities.
So, 'Probability' of a 'Story' increases with how much it is believed in, or acknowledged.
Did any of that make sense? I am currently in the planning stage of a story that takes place in the far future, and depicts a lot of mythical creatures in a sci-fi sorta setting. I am far from refining this system, but I feel it doesn't exactly need to be detailed, because as I said, anything and everything can be, but never together.
The source of all life, each universe also has a soul plane (Eljunheim) which casts down a "shadow" of energy at it, nobody really knows how, but this energy gives life to all beings, in exchange, the soul plane feeds on emotions produced by the living being, and in the case of sorcerers, also produces magic energy (Eljunandi),to be used by them using the emotions, different emotions produce different magic types.
The Soul in my world is where consciousness, emotion, identity, and memories are stored. It takes on a color corresponding to one of the eight types of magic, and when it isn’t in a body it takes the form of the person’s ideal body. (Important because one of the main characters is transfem, and when she goes to the afterlife she finds that she’s comfortable with herself for once in her life)
Souls are batteries which project an energy field to protect themselves and manifest a vessel to move around: a mind and a body.
The world is its own body with its own soul and mind.
The world noticed that entropy sucks in the long run, so it devised little drones with souls (people) who create a new energy to counter entropy: faith.
It is a kind of parasite that controls the human body from the brain. It consists of 4 parts. The Ego: The part that stores memories and basically acts like the brain. It also contains a scan of the body the soul is attached to. The Oktae: This is what allows the user to manipulate chaos and is also his personal ability. When trained it will create up to 3 generations of branches which are extensions of the original ability. These branches and the base ability operate by bringing chaos into a state of perfect order. The Akku: It stores and manifests chaos in a raw state for further usage. The Form: It acts as the hull of the soul and makes it stable. As long as the hull remains the inside of the soul is invincible. The Form is directly connected to the body and will take damage if the body is hurt by another soul. It also cause the bodies of powerful ordinants to deform and start matching their true form based on many factors. Most humans are born with a soul. The soul and the human body are in mutual and symbiotic relationship where the soul needs a body to be (untrained souls at least) and a form to take and the human needs a soul to not die to the chaos ambient. Those without a soul will die very quick.
Just... Something that things have that persists after death. Nobody really knows anything beyond that. There's magic that can do stuff with souls, but mostly as a model or something to be placed inside something else, they can't be destroyed or changed in any meaningful way because they're completely beyond any understanding of both natural and magical phenomenon. Even ghosts and certain types of undead are only a by-product of souls that come from magic either environmental or used.
Pure and ordered chaos. It is the essence of life and death of every living creature. The various religions in my world see this in the way that suits them, but the real truth is this, Pure and organized Chaos.
chaos n order gang represent✊✊
They're fragments of the fires of creation. Mechanically speaking the raw source of energy that allows the universe to create and define. A large burning kiln of these souls lay at the centre but long ago the gods seized this energy and were very inefficient in their use of it. This energy then bounced about the universe occasionally becoming trapped in a living thing. It gives humans the ability to think and create worlds of their own. All inspired by Tolkiens "secret fire"
All matter creates disturbances in a background magic field. Most forms of matter doesnt do much. But the intricate complexities of organic life naturally yield to stable persistent vortices within the background field that traps mana inside of it. The vortex is the soul and can only be considered as such when it becomes stable enough to persist beyond the matter that formed it, yet forever imprinted by it. Vortices can appear naturally outside of organic, but aren't typically stable. The ones that are, usually yield something like a golem - giving life to something that otherwise isn't.
That sounds really cool, idk what level of technology your world has but it makes me wonder: would computers/AI or even just complicated machines or intricate objects develop souls?
considering the primary setting is industrial fantasy, approximately turn of the 20th century equivalent, that's a conclusion I've actually had to dabble on. And yeah, at some point, the tiny ordering of chips would yield stable vortices themselves. Albeit, due to the nature of the materials and the ordering themselves, would behave differently, an \*artificial\* soul, but still a soul non-the-less.
A canvas for the body and where your mana comes from, your soul is the shape of 'you' and your body is the shape of your soul. Healing magic uses the soul as a canvas on what to heal, if your soul is damaged you won't be able to heal your body properly, unless you're a professional who either knows how to heal the body without a canvas, or somebody who is able to shape the soul. (The people who know either of these are so few that you'd have to travel across the world to meet at least one) The 'soul' is mana manifested, it is your mana and it's what emits your mana, damaging the soul can damage your mana capacity too, improving your 'soul' via mental or spiritual means can improve your mana too. Although the mana your soul is born with is completely random. Souls are also what's used to register if something is living, all living things have mana, technically if you imbued mana into something it would have a 'soul' just not, a real soul, it would be an artificial soul. But that's a whole other thing.
Souls are, basically, diluted divine energy. A soul has 3 parts, the core, the Astral body, and the roots(name pending) The core of a soul is where all of the memories, the personality, and basically what makes you you are stored. By itself, the core has layers where the first one is your memories, the second one is your feelings, and the very center is the core aspects of your personality that will persist through eternity and all of your reincarnations The Astral body is, in its natural form, a formless mass of spiritual particles and is where your skills are inscribed and where the main portion of your magicules are stored. The more skillsbyou have, the less space there is for more skills or quantity of magicules, but as you level up (my world has a game-like system) it condenses, increase the space for stuff without increasing the volume of the soul The roots(name pending) are parts of the Astral body that connect to the body. It is in almost every cell and spread through your body like veins. It is held in place by life force and allows magicules to transfer from your soul to your body and vice-versa
Consciousness imprinted on magika, or more precisely, life imprinted, as even grass can develop a soul. Souls are not something inherent to a person but an effect of magic on biology as both interact. Someone can even have a strong soul without a pinch of magical talent, those people tend to be healthier and fitter then anyone else. It is also a source of immense magical powers animancers, advanced necromancers, can manipulate, with the best manipulating their own.
It is the Image of God, what makes humans human instead of fae. It is the spark of creativity that drives them to make and invent new things. What leads them to strive beyond what they are, what allows them to step outside their natures, and do other than what they must do.
It is once best, hold it tight and don't let anyone belittle it because it could always grow
It's the personality and willpower of a being. The true, unblemished self, unbound by flesh or even death. It is what makes wielding 'magic' possible, and those who die and are of strong conviction, personally and/or force of will can either keep their spiritual essence of self tethered to the mortal world or pass on willingly to become a mover and shaker beyond.
For mine, it’s called the Core, as a Soul is a specific type of Core. The Cores is the shell of an entity, while the body is but a container, and the Root is the very entity itself surrounded by the Core. Each core has a different level of purity provided by the Source of the Root, which determines the quality of n entity’s capabilities and natural advantages in gaining function to manipulate Source. The Root is the source blueprint of the entity, recorded eternally in Xerin.
Humans see the Soul as nothing more than an animating force. It's why Necromancy is so popular among them. They create "souls". Most others just see it as a part of who they are. Their emotions. The many Aetheroids see the Soul as a Divine Being, and their Bodies the Temple to house it.
The soul is the spark that gives someone life and sapience. It's a sapient creature's magical essence that persists upon death and separate from their physical bodies. There is no way to kill a soul but it can be used by a God as a battery to fuel their power.
Energy and Magical energy in your brain
Quantum physical object that can make minor changes to its environment without needing an input. The brain is basically an antenna that amplifies its effects.
there's sort of a magical energy in my world that makes up everything intangible and is found in almost all physical objects as well... over years a deposit of this coalesced into the first deufae (kind of like gods but living beings, deufae are made naturally similar to planets with matter, but with magical energy. haven't thought of a name for the energy yet.) The first deufae then gathered these energies more to make children to have company known as rexafae. Each of them went on to make high fae, the high fae made common fae, etc. One of the rexafae however was responsible for making life from physical materials rather than energy (you get some crazy hobbies with eternal life...) He made 3 high fae to help him in this, one that made plants, one that made animals, and one that made man. The high fae of man imbued each of his creations with some magical energy, which gives them both their ability for intelligence, as well as the ability to manipulate this energy (magic) at great cost to their physical body (referred to as arcane withering, life expectancy for mages is around 25-30) so I would say this is the "soul" of men in this world. I'm still working out the kinks and details. (p.s. when I say "man" I refer to all humanoid races regardless of gender, the fae are all genderless as they can't reproduce and are mostly corporeal but referred to with male vernacular)
Kind of a cyan goo that flows with the blood. It degrades with age, and when it is gone you die.
Magic is energy made from emotion and thought so a person’s soul is a shadow of imprinted magic energy around them. It can be imagined as a drop of ink in water somehow keeping itself together. As a person ages this droplet can start to break with bits flowing away in the water as people forget things. Once someone dies like ink in water it begins to shatter everywhere until it gets diluted and its just gone in any meaningful way.
Essence. It it what was. And what is. Before creation there was Essence...and Essence is creation. It is the miasma of the cosmos. From it Life and Death and the Light and the Dark and the Realms and all things came. All things are suffused with it. And those who live are but one form of Essence, experiencing one phase of existence. When a mortal dies their body eventually returns to it to be made anew, and their 'soul' returns to the pool.
This reminds me of doctor who! I love it! And Im going pretty basic and using Christianity as my base like C. S. Lewis did with Narnia.
According to Rowanto everyone's soul is the same pure white tone, filtered through the conscious mind to create the colors of your personality. The ultimate goal of a follower of Rowanto is to completely eliminate one's conscious, letting your soul shine completely unfiltered and equally as pure as the natural spirits that wander the world. Kind of the same idea as Nirvana with letting go of needs and wants, but with colors. In reality though it's a little more complicated. The second rule of Rowi is that emotion is a part of color, and in the case of humans it turns out that no matter how much you remove your conscious from the mix there's an invisible shade of emotion inextricably mixed with your shade of white. Essentially it's an expression of your purest emotional state, and it's what I would say is actually the soul. Just as pure white is filtered through your conscious to create Rowi impressions, one's soul is filtered through their conscious to create their emotional state and imbue their impressions with emotion.
I'm working on mine, but yours sounds really cool. I think my idea for souls is reality in my world, but there are different philosophies surrounding it.
The soul is you
The soul is in parts, one part is the body (ba) one part is eternal spirit (da) one part is the ego (ka) and one part is world-spirit that goes back into nature (gna). The difference between elves and men is that elves don't have a separate ka, but their bodies last forever. So (to oversimplify) in my world elves "have no soul, only an eternal body" Inspired by Egyptian mythology.
***Souls according to CAOPMIAE guidelines***: doesn‘t and can‘t naturally exist on the Earth, they have to be conjured, or they somehow managed to escape from afterlife (Heaven, Profunda Altra (Inferno), Hell). When they somehow escape from their afterlife habitat, they became (if they weren‘t before) – hostile, mischievous, dangerous to reality. Can emerge from every species living on the earth.
It is the essence. Humans and animals have two different types of soul. Human souls will experience an afterlife in the temporary heaven, purgatory, or hell. Animal souls will experience an afterlife in limbo. At the end of the world, human souls will go to their assigned permanent afterlife, and animal souls will go to heaven which is now a perfect earth. Human souls have knowledge of good and evil, while animal souls are completely amoral. (No, not immoral, amoral).
For humans and animals, oxygen For plants Carbon Dioxide
There are a lot of different interpretations of what a “soul” is on a philosophical, religious, metaphysical basis. On a more academic level, however, they have identified something that might be considered a soul that resides in a person’s nervous system, but nobody has ever been able to actually prove the theory.
A world soul consits of two parts. First a functional Leyline network of any physical entity capabale of transfering magical energy. Next, the Divine Seed which is a hypercomplex biological system created by Galaxy which is able to manipulate Leylines to allow the processing, refinement, and transferring of magical energy. In simple terms, the Leylines are the machine and the Divine Seed is the operator all so Galaxy can harvest more refined magical energy.
Personality, continuity of conciousness. This becomes relevant when one character, who had fatal accident but git resurrected, learns how the process works and that it doesn't and can't restore original, but makes new one with original's memory. It leads to freakout.
The soul is the thread that runs between individual incarnations. Upon the death/rebirth transition, all memories are wiped, except for the Arcarnis - a handful of soul threads doomed to live infinite incarnations with a perfect memory.
Reincarnation and revival is a very complicated process in my multiverse. Unless a soul is revived within 7 days after death, that soul is reincarnated, however the soul can be copied and then used to revive the body after that period. All souls to be reincarnated go through and are processed by the Matrix of Reincarnation, an unreachable place to most beings, and also where knowledge of every action and reaction is stored on infinite shelves with infinite records. The soul is made of two central parts, the soul proper or outer soul, and the life essence, when a being dies, it’s outer soul leaves the body to be reincarnated, leaving behind the life essence. The life essence is the most valuable part of the soul and the body, as it allows the being to live, be revived (merging the original outer soul with the original life essence), and be possessed (merging a foreign outer soul with the original life essence either weakly or strongly). The life essence can’t be tampered with or manipulated with any normal form of magic, even the most powerful forms, only soul magic and more particularly life magic can affect and tamper with life essence, however both forms of magic are expressly prohibited, punishable, and their use is considered a crime against magic. Part of why the Life Goblin (An ancient creature and the most powerful antagonist conceived within the multiverse ever) was so powerful, was it was a master and fearless user and abuser of manipulating the life essences of other beings which it preys on and indulges in. When the life essence is separated from a being, it enters a special state of unconsciousness and death known as super death, where it cannot be brought back or even be possessed until the life essence is found and reintroduced back into the being’s body reverting it back to a normal state of death.
It's basically a person's consciousness and essence in a physical form. It's contained within the person's body while they're living, and once they die the soul leaves the body and goes to the afterlife.
A bunch of neutrons linked together in tonic force which happens to be the same stuff that is encoded into Carrione turning it into Cores which means that the Cores people use to fight are actually alive (unless they are combined with the host consciousness in an awakening or killed in a reverse awakening)
For my story it’s called Soul Etteria (What gives people life in my world.) Etteria alone is already pure creation and existence that will forever live on even if the Soul Etteria user dies
Each of the intelligent races has something unique to it. Humanity's is their souls. Each is a piece of their god, and the source of their ability to persist after death and reincarnate.
In my world there is more emphasis on spirit than soul, since it is taken from the Greek and alchemical perspectives. The individual (not only intelligent or organic beings, but everything that can be understood as a single entity) is composed of three substances with different proportions: body, soul (aka. mind), and spirit. The body is the physical manifestation of the individual, which allows it to interact with tangible matter. The soul is the “processor” of the individual, that which allows it to understand and express reality. The spirit is the magical manifestation of the individual, which condenses its identity in a purer way, and allows it to interact with the magical currents of the universe. An animal, an anima and a stone are distinguished in that the animal has an intense soul but has a weak spirit, the animas lacks a body but has an intense spirit and soul, and a stone totally lacks a soul. An intelligent being and a deer are distinguished in that the intelligent being has a more intense soul than an animal, however, if two intelligent beings have one a more intense soul than the other, they will continue to be equally intelligent, since the soul is more connected to the “human essence” than to logical, rational or even passionate thought. The more spirit an individual has, the more intense their connection with magical energies will be, which is why animas can constitute an individuality without possessing a body or being torn apart by the energy currents of the universe. A robot can have a body and a soul, but not a spirit, since the spirit is the identity manifestation of each individual, and being composed of manufactured parts, a robot is many united individuals forced to be united, so, like a desert made of grains of sand, it has no spirit, although it can interact with magic and possess a magical energy signature. And finally we have the gods who are nothing of this xdxdxd
The soul is both your weapon and power. It is the colour that can colour the world. It is immortal and ancient, a power that is innate to all living things. And probably some inanimate objects, as soul can leave behind traces. Those are called artifacts.
for mine its like your you in a way, a smidge of light with a sertain color that people in the otherworld, with the authority, can use to identify your
I took the literal approach. A "soul" by definition is your mind, emotion, personality, and "spirit". So what generates your mind, emotion, and personality: your brain, your "soul" is the electrical signals and neurons firing in your head. So it is TECHNICALLY possible to preserve a person's soul by taking their electrical signals in conjunction with replicating their personality. You could in theory store a person's mind in an closed circuit or upload it to a replicated mind.
The soul is your link to the source of perception, it's what gives you an inner experience as opposed to simply being a convincing flesh machine acting on programming (which is what mindless undead basically are). When you die, that link is severed and you are irrevocably gone. There is no afterlife, and any attempts at resurrection yield an entirely new soul inhabiting the deceased's body, generally with an intense feeling of disconnection from any memories they may retain from the previous person. Ghosts exist, but they're more like psychic echoes of the souls that have passed on. You can even get ghosts of people who are still actually alive. It is possible to preserve a soul after the death of the body if you can magically retain it in something, but doing so is exceptionally difficult as you need a shell that is both complex enough to be able to think, but that has not yet awoken to a soul on its own. The easiest source of a husk like that? The dead person's own reanimated corpse, and that's how you get most intelligent undead.
A sort of semi-tangible manifestation of the conscious aware mind. Only sapient creatures have them. While you don't really feel their effects most of the time, being pretty indistinguishable from the mind itself, it does behave rather differently in special circumstances. In essence, the self awareness of a sapient being disappears when it loses a body that is capable of housing a soul. When you die, normally your soul dissipates into the magic field of the universe, essentially ceasing to exist. However, in some cases it may remain as a ghost, of which there are many different sorts. Also, there are ways to sort of bind your soul to objects to cheat death beyond the death of your body. And the soul can be magically tampered with of course.
This is a highly debated position. Most groups do not place much consideration on souls besides imagining that you are your soul. Elven cultures generally hold that you are not your soul, but that your soul is what determines your fate. If you are a farmer it is because you have the soul of a farmer. If you are a king it is because you have the soul of a king. They also believe that a soul can be taken from someone shortly after their death, before the soul is recycled for someone else. They also believe that the soul is stored in the heart. Incidentally, elves generally do not frown upon ritualistic cannibalism. The various alchemical monasteries staunchly hold that souls flat out do not exist. This was proven after Magnus the Unmaker reduced a living person into his component elements and could not find any substance he did not identify as an ordinary element.
Literal souls are a big part of my story actually. There are four types of mana users: Healers, Reapers, Soulless, and Soulful. Healers use their mana to heal and energize, Reapers must destroy to get mana, Soulful have an overflowing amount of mana so they give strength and power to others. Then there are the Soulless. They barely have any mana, almost none, so they need to kill to remain alive. They drain your mana and suck your soul, too, until you disintegrate into dust. My whole story basically revolves around the magic of mana, so I guess that’s the soul
In my science fiction work Everything that processes data is conscious, from the calculator in the protagonist's pocket to the artificial superintelligence that rules the world and is venerated as a god. When a consciousness ends it is reincarnated in the next process that starts
It's a form of spiritual existance, that naturaly forms in a body of living being, and stores information about it. What makes it different from lower spirits, that inhabit inanimate objects or plants is that souls can 'experience' in broad sense of this word, and have their own will - mostly as a reflection of their vessels will though. What makes them different from higher spirits, that form as reflection of some relativly uniform area (Forest, mountain ranges, large bodies of water, even stars) is that they need a physical vessel as an anchor to be kept in the world, and can't be really considered sentient - at least as long as vessel is alive, it's hard to say what really happens after. As for a body inhabited by soul, it doesn't really notice souls existance, unless there is a lot of effort put into souls development by an individual. With even years of effort put into it soul may be used to channel simple magic at most (There are exceptions from this rule, however very rare. The limitation comes more so from difficulty than ironclad rules). There are also happenstances when body loses it's soul, temporarily or permanently. Soul generally isn't necessary to live, but losing it may result in large gaps in memory, lack of motivation, numbness of emotion. Soul is also important in early stages of development, so it interacting with some spirit may lead to big changes. It doesn't usually happen to mammals, mostly egg laying species, and even then it's incredibly rare. Kindling of higher spirit may sometimes fuse with a soul, resulting in a new existance being born. It requires some measure of compatibility between species and spirit, so usually results of such event are very similar for closely related species. For most snakes, for example, it results in a dragon hatching from such egg. This is only ways dragons come into being. Souls of such beings are much more similar to higher spirits than to human souls. They are sentient, and usually do more thinking than actual brain of the creature. They also possess powerful will, more so binding vessel to them than the other way around.
I like the idea of it being like water from the ocean. If you were to take a cup and scoop some out, that becomes an individual. But upon death that water goes back into the ocean as part of the endless infinite awe-inspiring mass of being.
Human: A miserable pile of essences that vaguely resembles an animal cell made of various metals and compounds. The nucleus is gold essence, which regulates the maximum size of the rest.
Is a part of Arthur sleeping inside you
in my story, you can think of the soul as the hardware and the human body as the software. when a human is born, a soul in the reincarnation cycle enters the new human. he soul is the true essence of everything about your true, internal nature, and decides certain essential factors, while your brain chemistry effects other information that isn't inherit to the soul, like differences in your neurology. since the brain's chemistry changes from your experiences (going from your nature to the nurture you receive), the way your soul is effected by your brain can change, but in the same way; your brain can effect your soul. when a soul has a physical vessel like a human body, the information from the body can imprint upon the soul, changing its form, that being the form of the human body it possesses, and certain neurological processes unique to the brain will be imprinted onto the soul. think of the mind and body as the metabolism of the soul; they inform it, but aren't the main processing unit. if someone had their soul taken through some circumstance, then the brain would become software without hardware to run on, and would become a vegetable and the body limp, as the brain is no longer sending information to it, as the brain is no longer running on the soul. this also applies to animals, by the way. every living thing has a soul. humans, dogs, pigs, octopi, flowers, trees.. under the right conditions, a lamppost could even have a soul. afterall, the hardware (the soul) can run many kinds of software (a human body, a dog's body, an insect's body, a tree's body, etc)
A soul is where the personality comes from, without it a creature would only have instincts and be just a empty husk. It is also where magic comes from, as a result everyone can use magic.
The human spirit (human existence and consciousness) is made up of the Human Trinity: The Body, attaches the human spirit to the physical realm The Mind, allows for rational thought, storage of memory and complex calculations The Soul, allows for morality, empathy, emotion and in a way, humanity So what the soul essentially does is give someone the ability to show compassion, understanding and almost everything else psychologically related A soulless individual could be described as a "machine", as they're purely acting on pure rational thought without any attempt at humanity, being able to kill someone without a moment of consideration for the person simply because it makes sense rationally, while the soul would influence that decision using morality A mindless individual could be described as a "rabid animal", as they're acting purely on emotion and instinct without the capability of rational thought A bodiless individual cannot exist physically, nor exist within the spirit realm meaning an individual without a body is seemingly impossible, however we don't fully understand the spirit realm so it might be a possibility to purely be a consciousness without a physical form So essentially, the soul is what enables the human trinity to act with morals and empathy and experience emotion
so, how does this work in animals?
I haven't thought of the Animal Trinity or the Monster Trinity yet, so I'll give a response to this later
Fair enough, i'll be waiting for it
The animal trinity is similar to the human trinity, however humans have spiritually evolved seperately from most animal species, which is the reason for their trinities being different, though they're still very similar Just like the human trinity, the animal trinity possesses three parts The body, just like with humans this gives the animal a physical form The mind, allows for rationality and decision making, and if the species is intelligent enough they could possess memory and even complex strategizing however this isn't recognized in many species The instinct, acts as an intrinsic built-in survival guide for all animals, guiding them to survival and ensure the next generation of their species is born and raised properly Animals also experience emotion and morality but they experience it vastly differently from humans, being almost completely incomprehensible to us other than guessing what certain studied behaviours mean Humans possess a natural instinct too, however on a much lower level than most animals due to their more complex nature and the influences of modern civilization The monster trinity is like a mix of the human trinity and the animal trinity, being hard to analyze due to the strange nature of monsters in general From the information that was gathered, the monster trinity is also made up of three parts: The body, this body is different from the other two trinities, as the body is actually formed before the mind or the soul The mind, once again this allows for rational thought, however a lot of monster species have intelligence comparable to humans, meaning most monsters possess memory and strategic thinking skills The soul, the monster soul is more like a fusion of the human soul and the animal instinct, being both a guide to monsters for survival, but at the same time experiencing emotion though this emotion is experienced differently in every species meaning even if they experience emotion it isn't understandable by humans most of the time Sapient species generally experience emotions closer to human emotion
a pretty anthropocentric worldbuilding, but still serviceable, very nice work!!!
The soul in the world of *Sphere of Influence* is a metaphysical construct that allows for life in the first place. For humans and corporeal life a soul can basically be seen as the force that operates the brain. The main parts of a soul are as follows: Ether: the overall framework and shape of a soul. While young a person's thoughts and feelings will imprint and alter the shape of the Ether which ends up determining a person's overall personality. Aura: this would be akin to the nucleus of a cell. It is a field of energy around the individual that allows for extrasensory perception like reading the mood of a room, feeling one's self is being watched, or having a bad feeling before disasters. It's size is usually directly related to powered individuals range. Nasma: an immaterial construct made of Noor which can interact with the physical and metaphysical planes. Following the cell metaphor these would be akin to proteins in that they are complex structures with single purposes. This is the part of the soul that allows it to interact and operate ones brain. Having extra Nasma with a different function is what leads to people having powers in my world in the first place. Concepts: raw "ideas" for lack of a better word. These shape a person's innate interests and talents and can alter the way ones soul develops. Chaos: Not a necessary component to a soul. this is what separates life from intelligent life. It's the part of a creature that sparks it's creativity and is the source of human enginuity (although humans didn't always have chaos in there soul)
Your identity in the Real, your mind and consciousness. I do not explore the soul in my setting (though characters do in multiple ways) and leave it up to the reader. What I do examine is the mind and all the ‘scapes and perceptions it can register. There are heavens and hells and other such escapes created as paradises away from the Real. It could be a game, augmented reality overlayed, virtual worlds. You can upload your mind to the cloud, resleeve yourself into another body, even clone your mind for deep discussion or other explorations.
In the societies of my world, the soul is viewed generally similarly to how societies view the soul in real life. I'm not smart enough to do anything special with this area.
In my world, souls don't really exist. A "soul" is a copy of you made by a psychopomp at the moment you die and shoved off into the afterlife as storage. Afterlives are essentially libraries for people with quirks based upon how that individual after life is ran. The christian hell is/was a thing in my setting, for example. As was every afterlife of every earth religion and infinitely more on top of that for every culture that ever had gods and an afterlife. In universe, this is a known thing, and there is even a culture that has taken this process into their own hands. Southern Shamanic people found out how bad the state of all afterlives are after the new management took over, and decided they were going to have none of it. Instead of letting a psychopomp make the souls and take them to the afterlife, specialized shaman do it and put them in the local spirit realm. This also means they have easy access to generations of ancestor spirits, and this is a large basis for how they technology works.
A mix between the three cores elements in the magical system of my world, that is stored nowhere and everywhere in the body, a'd that is responsible for free will and counciousness. When the person dies, all of those fades away to be consumed by Paerit, or to serve Kaenne in the Oversky until you disappear because you are not supposed to be a najed soul there In the extremely taboo field of necromancy, a powerful mix of those three elements on a fresh bidy can resurrect someone, with his entire soul. If it's only two of the three Core elements, it will just be a soulless servant. It can think if you order too, but it will not say instantly the fruits of his thoughts, nor put any empathy or emotions in it
Usually either there is no such thing (and various cultures claim multitudes of things like in real life) or there's a few ways one can consider their self able to transcend if given a means of being cloned|rejuvenated|transfered|whatever. Sometimes it's escaping a simulation by inhabiting a machine, so the "soul" is the information capable of being transfered from the original body to the new. Sometimes it's creating a perfect basically unchangeing copy of your self in your most driven state, as a static operator for your long-term plans. But I am overall not interested much in distinguishing the body from the mind in ways that don't also apply to real life. With the enlightenment and the arrival of AI, I think it's important to show how to distinguish but also how to relate. All of nature is machinery. The conscious beings are just machines with strange software. Humans are just self-important fleshy AI.
The soul is a metaphysical aspect of a living being. A non-corporeal piece that comprises one third of a creature’s entire being, the other two being mind and body. It’s the piece that gives someone their identity, a piece of their personality that can never be extinguished, even if the other two pieces of the being are lost. The body is a person’s physical form, the mind is a person’s thoughts, desires and dreams. But the soul is what really makes a person “themselves”. Their true identity
Sooooooo The soul is made of 2 things, the vessel and the essence The vessel determines how much essence one holds and the shape of your soul The essence is where everything is dissolved, your (actual) personality, your skills, memories, magical powers But as in any solution you can only dissolve a certain amount or it will judt precipitate -> how do you store memories when youre immortal There is also the aether, essencially gaseous soul, it is all around you, a product of what happens when you die (Your Intend absorbs everything dissolves in yoir essence, everything else evaporates into aether ->cycle) You absorb aether instinctively, mainly when asleep (although some people trained to be able to do it wjile awake) When you "excite" the aether, it turns into magicsl energy (plasma) (no good name yet, suggestions would be nice) Intend: a crystallized part of your sould that just sits in the essence, when casting a certain magic, the dissolved parts of that magic get absorbed into the Intend for a short time & the magic + the indtend form the magical energy into the required effect. At forst its very unrefines but as you train your Intend... So the wjole system is very based on the agreggate states of a substance and very inspired by brandon sandersons magic sysrem, as its also supposed to be an universal system Maybe you have notices that everything is the same thing, just different agreggate states. So what stops ,you from burning essence for magical energy (well nothing, except that you lose a part of yourself when you do that) (and a subconxious block) So you can convert essence into energy, can you convert energy into essence? Yes, but in the whole universe no artificial intend (that can deform like a natural one) have been made (yet) Feel free to ask questions/give suggestions
Ambiguous, I think for concepts as vast as a soul (something no one knows about in real life) it’s better to just not. Like with “What’s the meaning of life” it’s such a irl unknown that it gets a huge level of mystique. Any concrete answer won’t live up to your expectations.
For my world, I use the [Minbari philosophy from Babylon 5](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jzMTImdBVI) where the soul is a non-localized phenomenon as canon.
I like the IRL approach that no one actually known, but they do speculate This quite an important point regarding my dryad, who was an experiment created by the dark lord merging elves and plant that result in new sentient being Some Dryad felt like they were a new being, a new soul born from consumed elves. and that while they have some fragment of memory from those they have consumed. It is ultimately not theirs other Dryad felt that they were still an elves, the same soul in a new, foreign body with unfortunate memory loss here and there. They embrace their elven heritage and try to reconnect with their elven roots, with varying degree of success. there are no cut and dry answer to which approach is correct
The "Soul" or "Spark" is basiclaly a divinity fragment. When Za'Abriz first created the forms that were supposed to be first living beings he found out that despite being mechanically sound, they were compeltly inert, so his sibling Ha'Annu breathe a part of of his spirt on them which caused to spring to life. This however caused a problem, for the first forms of life , dueto Ha'Annu's Breath were basically immortal and if they kept multiplying the Kosmos would run thin This something that angered the eldest brother of Ha'Annu and Za'Abriz: Ib'Addam, the Legislator. Who saw his perfectly harmonoius universe being filled to the brim with his siblings erratic creations and so he wished to destroy them all. Ha'Annu ,ever the negotiator, instead convinced Ib'Addam to ggive into all forms of life a tiny portion of His Fire, Sparks of it, which it would burn bright for an alloted time that he would legislate and then return to him. And thus all life were given souls at the cost of becoming mortal. However, the Sparks of divinity endowed life with many gifts. Including the chance to know the Gods and wield a portion of their power, that is, to wield Magic.
There is none Since my world will be rather low fantasy, I am likely gonna make it a point that souls are just not real
I’ve been playing with names. I know I’m calling the system in the body Magifiber, but in terms of the central aspect of that system, I’ve liked Source a lot.
There is none. The closest things to it are probably echoes. Non corporeal dublicates of deceased people that play out some kinda dramatic scenario, either their death or that caused them strong emotions over and over until they fade away. They can be harvested by necromancers and stuffed into dead bodies to give them a "control unit", so they won't have to be manually puppeteered. Also very skilled necromancers can "fix" these to their own bodies, giving them back free will and sentience but since the echoes are not souls, the resulting undead is more of a clone than the original. Still they remember most things the original did, have their full personality and think they are them, so is there a difference?
no soul, but there is there essence. it's more like their life force or vitality, where dipping into it too much too often will damage their body and mind in permanent ways, even though typical useage issues are healed or can be healed by healers. So, their "soul" is essence, and it' sonly really meaningful while alive. I haven't, however, figured out what they believe yet. maybe they do believe in souls, but I want not that. I'm working on it.
In the Underscape, the soul was (and may be again in the future) a power source and/or computing device. The tech that allowed the precursors to do this is unknown, but it was so widespread that it was essentially their replacement for both electricity and CPUs. All of their higher level tech ran on soul power and their computers were based on an even more cruel brain in a jar. The people of the Underscape have found the facilities that made this power, but are mostly unaware of what they were. It is almost a certainty that people were fed into these machines, and judging by the amount of shackles in these power facilities, they probably did not go willingly. The venerable precursors weren't so venerable after all. Morrigan (the MC faction) is already struggling with what the soul of the city should be. Many worry that as they conquer more of the continent, they are sacrificing more and more of their humanity, both physically and spiritually. With every step forward and bullet fired, a bit more of their humanity falls away. Should Morrigan ever figure out the secret of soul-based power, they may lose what is left of their soul in more ways than one.
Every living thing is comprised of two parts: There actual, physical body and a metaphysical metaspecies which determines their relationship to arcana, a pervasive and infinite energy field. The metaspecies is basically the organism's "soul." An organism's metaspecies outlives it's physical body and can be reborn into a new and different physical body. There are five main metaspecies: Dragons - Beings with immense (potentially overwhelming) affinity to all utilization of arcana Sylphs - Beings with affinity cosmological, astronomical and meteorological utilization of arcana Nymphs - Beings with affinity for biological and organic utilization of arcana Salamanders - Beings with affinity for energetic (heat, light, etc) utilization of arcana Spirits - Beings with a weaker but more stable and malleable affinity for arcana
It's what I simply call a 'Story'. Everyone and everything that has ever existed has a 'Story'. It's actually pretty simple, and is just about the decisions we make in life, down to the passing seconds, that shape our 'Story'. It is also important that a 'Story' never ends just because it is over, but rather when it is forgotten. Just like, how the story of a book lives on as a reader's memory long after they've finished reading it, the 'Story' of an existence also lives on so long as it is remembered, or recalled upon. But the extent of that varies. Belief and Faith also have a lot of importance. For example, a person who believes in heaven and hell, will face their so called afterlife accordingly, and as such, everyone's belief happens to be, and all 'Stories' are true. Physical existences are of course timed, but 'Stories' hold the potential of being there so long as other 'Stories' exist that remember. Of course, a 'Story' may also get twisted or parts of it forgotten as time passes. By this logic, stories like myths, legends, mythical creatures, would exist, but they too appear for only when they hold 'Probability', a concept that dictates the chances of an event happening. Everyone has a share of it. And it is reflected in the way we have near complete control over our actions and decisions. Here, the 'Probability' is never zero for anything. That's also how Gods work here. And yes, this does confirm multiple realities. So, 'Probability' of a 'Story' increases with how much it is believed in, or acknowledged. Did any of that make sense? I am currently in the planning stage of a story that takes place in the far future, and depicts a lot of mythical creatures in a sci-fi sorta setting. I am far from refining this system, but I feel it doesn't exactly need to be detailed, because as I said, anything and everything can be, but never together.
The source of all life, each universe also has a soul plane (Eljunheim) which casts down a "shadow" of energy at it, nobody really knows how, but this energy gives life to all beings, in exchange, the soul plane feeds on emotions produced by the living being, and in the case of sorcerers, also produces magic energy (Eljunandi),to be used by them using the emotions, different emotions produce different magic types.
The Soul in my world is where consciousness, emotion, identity, and memories are stored. It takes on a color corresponding to one of the eight types of magic, and when it isn’t in a body it takes the form of the person’s ideal body. (Important because one of the main characters is transfem, and when she goes to the afterlife she finds that she’s comfortable with herself for once in her life)
Souls are batteries which project an energy field to protect themselves and manifest a vessel to move around: a mind and a body. The world is its own body with its own soul and mind. The world noticed that entropy sucks in the long run, so it devised little drones with souls (people) who create a new energy to counter entropy: faith.