Imagining the Soul: A History

Rating:
Summary: The Eternal and Unchangeable Soul, In Various Guises
Review: Our bodies are beset by frailties, and are full of passions for things that are unhealthy for us. Then they die and that's it. Unless you believe in the soul. The concept of soul has been a comfort, and a goad, throughout time. Souls are our most valuable, even divine, assets, our best qualities, and they live long after the body is gone. Some say the souls get rewards or punishments, and some say they get to inhabit some other body, and some say that the idea of souls helps us get around our inevitable deaths but that souls haven't been shown to exist any more than any of our gods have. Souls are supposed to be eternal and constant, but our portrayals of them have changed drastically over the centuries. In _Imagining the Soul: A History_ (Sutton Publishing), Rosalie Osmond guides us through the ways we have depicted souls, from the ancient Egyptians through western history until now; it is a rewarding tour not only for the history involved but for what the images tell us about ourselves.

The ancient Egyptians pictured a soul as a bird with a human head, combining the person with the capacity of flight. The ancient Greeks kept the visual image of the winged soul, but had the first ideas of souls that would separate from bodies at death and survive independently thereafter. Plato thought that thoughts were the best things that humans produced, and he insisted that souls were in charge of this function. Christian teachers borrowed many of the Greek ideas and modified them. Significantly, the church fathers imagined souls as having some sort of mystic bodies of their own; the Greeks could stand abstractions, but the early church stood by at least half-corporeal souls, like that of the Hell-tormented Dives who begs Lazarus for water. The spiritualists adopted the idea of literally weighing souls (in addition to producing ectoplasm), but there is a long tradition, even in Greek art, of souls being weighed as part of the judgement they must endure. However, a French thinker named La Mettrie wrote in _The Human Machine_ in 1748 that humans were merely complicated machines, different only in degree from timepieces or lizards. As the idea is expressed currently, mind is entirely a product of brain. Certainly, if you mess with a brain by trauma or drugs, you do change its mental product.

The manifestations of the soul and its images though history are extraordinarily rich, and Osmond is a witty guide who is obviously delighted by what her research has turned up. She frequently uses exclamation points to show just how funny or ironic she finds many of the ideas and pictures here. There is organization to the work, with a chapter on souls as depicted in the theater and another on souls at the very time of death. There is concentration on how each society has handled the folklore of souls in comparison to what can truly be known about them, especially in current scientific views. Osmond has obviously wide erudition, and has presented it entertainingly in a well-illustrated volume.

Rating:
Summary: The Eternal and Unchangeable Soul, In Various Guises
Review: Our bodies are beset by frailties, and are full of passions for things that are unhealthy for us. Then they die and that's it. Unless you believe in the soul. The concept of soul has been a comfort, and a goad, throughout time. Souls are our most valuable, even divine, assets, our best qualities, and they live long after the body is gone. Some say the souls get rewards or punishments, and some say they get to inhabit some other body, and some say that the idea of souls helps us get around our inevitable deaths but that souls haven't been shown to exist any more than any of our gods have. Souls are supposed to be eternal and constant, but our portrayals of them have changed drastically over the centuries. In _Imagining the Soul: A History_ (Sutton Publishing), Rosalie Osmond guides us through the ways we have depicted souls, from the ancient Egyptians through western history until now; it is a rewarding tour not only for the history involved but for what the images tell us about ourselves.

The ancient Egyptians pictured a soul as a bird with a human head, combining the person with the capacity of flight. The ancient Greeks kept the visual image of the winged soul, but had the first ideas of souls that would separate from bodies at death and survive independently thereafter. Plato thought that thoughts were the best things that humans produced, and he insisted that souls were in charge of this function. Christian teachers borrowed many of the Greek ideas and modified them. Significantly, the church fathers imagined souls as having some sort of mystic bodies of their own; the Greeks could stand abstractions, but the early church stood by at least half-corporeal souls, like that of the Hell-tormented Dives who begs Lazarus for water. The spiritualists adopted the idea of literally weighing souls (in addition to producing ectoplasm), but there is a long tradition, even in Greek art, of souls being weighed as part of the judgement they must endure. However, a French thinker named La Mettrie wrote in _The Human Machine_ in 1748 that humans were merely complicated machines, different only in degree from timepieces or lizards. As the idea is expressed currently, mind is entirely a product of brain. Certainly, if you mess with a brain by trauma or drugs, you do change its mental product.

The manifestations of the soul and its images though history are extraordinarily rich, and Osmond is a witty guide who is obviously delighted by what her research has turned up. She frequently uses exclamation points to show just how funny or ironic she finds many of the ideas and pictures here. There is organization to the work, with a chapter on souls as depicted in the theater and another on souls at the very time of death. There is concentration on how each society has handled the folklore of souls in comparison to what can truly be known about them, especially in current scientific views. Osmond has obviously wide erudition, and has presented it entertainingly in a well-illustrated volume.