Ghosts and Souls and Spirits

It’s the bitter end of October, and all of Nature seems to be intent on dying. Leaves have lost their vital greenness and are falling from their trees. The last green tomatoes hang hopelessly on their withering vines. The flowers have faded, leaving behind brown seedpods, their visible prayer for continued life. Even the weeds have showed down to a near halt. The life-giving light is fading and the nights are longer. And those who are sensitive to such things say that the darkness is alive with ghosts and spirits. The souls of the dead.

Over the past few years I have been thinking a lot about ghosts and spirits and souls because I’ve been writing Hell’s Gate*, my next book, which will be out soon.

Hell’s Gate is a structure that strips away the magic of anyone who walks through it. But I couldn’t just say it does this, I needed to give the reader some sort of explanation of how it does it.

I have found that reality, what is known or believed, is much more bizarre and interesting than anything I could make up, so I sorted through what I know about existing religions and their ideas about death and how we interact with the divine. As far as I was able to determine, they all include something comparable to a soul.

Christianity is familiar to most English speaking readers and so it seemed like a good source to borrow from. There are a plethora of different kinds of Christians, but they all believe in the concept of the soul. In fact many say that, like their god, the Father-Son-Holy Spirit, we are also a trinity, made up of a body, soul, and spirit. The soul is intimately connected to the physical body and is the seat of our personality and desires—everything that makes us an individual. Our spirit is the part of us that connects us to God.

But Christianity doesn’t mention magic or gods and goddesses. And gods and goddesses and magic are alive and kicking in the Mage Web series.

The Ancient Egyptians were practitioners of magic, from the high priests and priestesses to the most humble housewife. And they had gods and goddesses. They

believed that when the god Atum created the world, he imbued everything in it with magic.

They also believed that a human’s magic is contained in their Ba, which is close to the Christian

concept of soul, and their Ka, pictured as a pair of upraised arms, which is close to the Christian concept of spirit. At least I think they are. During the three thousand plus years of Ancient Egypt’s existence its priests defined at least nine parts of the invisible stuff that gave the physical body its life. All of them probably weren’t in use at once, and since we don’t have an Ancient Egyptian priest or priestess around to question, we really don’t know the exact function of each one. A simple, present-day explanation of a very complex belief system is that when a person dies, their Ba (soul) and Ka (spirit) not only leave their body, but also separate and must be put back together so the deceased, as reunited Ba and Ka, can make the perilous journey through the underworld, stand before Osiris, and have their heart (Ib, the seat of their wisdom, spirit, and personality) weighed. If it is found to be lighter than Maat’s feather the deceased is admitted to the afterlife. If not, their heart is fed to the monster Ammit.

These were exactly the concepts I needed. In the Mage Web Series, the soul embodies the personality and desires—everything that makes a person who they are. Spirit is what connects the person to the divine, or integrates them with the multiverse, which allows them to become something even greater and more powerful. Because without the spirit connection, they can’t practice magic.

Hell’s Gate takes away a person’s magic by trapping their soul and spirit in their physical body and isolating them from the multiverse and the divine.

It rips off their wings.

*See the Hell’s Gate cover blurb on the homepage of my website.