A couple of my recent posts have looked at the possibility of a deep division in every human being between an immortal soul and a mortal ego-mind. Most recently I looked at traditions from around the world stating that such a division, in some form, exists. But as some commenters have pointed out, it is arguable that the alleged divisions simply reflect different levels or aspects of the soul, rather than two or more separate entities.
I think, however, that this interpretation doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Many of the traditions I cited hold that these two aspects of the self separate at death–either at the moment of dying, or sometime afterward. Typically, though not always, these traditions go on to say that true personal immortality can be achieved only if the two distinct elements are reunited.
In what follows, I'm drawing exclusively on a book called The Lost Secret of Death, by Peter Novak, which goes into this subject in some detail. Although it is possible that Novak oversimplifies some of this information, his descriptions seem basically accurate as best I can tell from my own, admittedly cursory investigation.
The purpose of this post is simply to lay out a number of specific examples without much elaboration. All quotes are taken from Novak's book.
Egypt: “But once the person died, the ba and ka, which had until then known only partnership, having functioned as virtually a single unit all during the person's life, now found themselves separated, alienated, ripped apart from each other. This abrupt and disorienting rupture seems to have been associated with the ba experiencing a loss of memory; multiple chapters in the Egyptian Book of the Dead pray for the deceased's memory to be returned to him after he has left the body. How was this memory to be restored? By reconnecting the ba to its ka, which contained the full pattern and record of the person's life, including his memories and his subjective sense of self. Virtually all of Egypt's famous Pyramid Texts, as well as virtually the entire Book of the Dead, had but a single purpose: to cause the ba and ka to reunite again after they split off from each other at death.”
China: “The po, or yin soul, was thought to take shape over the course of an individual's lifetime; being very impressionable and sensitive, it was molded by the person's environment. The po provided one's personal sense of self-identity, and was held to be what makes a person feel fully alive and real and present in the moment.… After departing the dead body, the yang soul would return to heaven unchanged, sometimes returning to reincarnate later, while the yin soul became imprisoned in a dreary underground netherworld in a feebleminded state. Like the ancient Egyptians, these Chinese Taoists also realized that an afterdeath soul-division would spell the disintegration of the known self, and they were just as anxious to ensure its survival.… They designed techniques to construct a ‘spirit’ body by welding these two souls together while the person was alive, so they could no longer disconnect at death.”
Inca: “Like Egypt and China, the Incas subscribe to a dualistic philosophy that included the idea that people possess two souls which divide at death…. At death, one soul was thought to return to its place of origin in heaven, while the other soul remained with the corpse.”
Greece: “In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Greece's oldest literary texts, two distinct types of souls are distinguished–the psuche and the thumos.... Death shattered the unity of psuche and thumos in two stages. First, the two souls detached in unison from the body when its functions ceased, and shortly thereafter, they separated from each other as well, an event called the ‘second death.’ One soul disappeared into the air while the other sole, transformed into a shadowy replica of the living person, descended into Hades.”
India: “Modern Hinduism still teaches there two different entities that coexist in the human body, the atman and the jiva.… During life these two are integrated deeply together, but after death they divide, after which the jiva, or astral-emotional body, is thought to deteriorate."
Hawaii: “Hawaiian thought called their two souls the uhane, which was thought to be masculine, intelligent, and processing free will, and the unihipili, which was thought to be feminine, emotional, and possessing the memory.… The ancient Polynesians believed that their two souls might split apart from each other at death. If this happens, they said, the uhane would lose its memory and sense of self-identity, ending up as a ghost wandering in great confusion. The unihipili, meanwhile, would still recall its memories very well, but would become a different sort of ghost–feebleminded and behaving in an automatic and suggestible fashion.” (This description seems to be drawn mainly from the work of Max Freedom Long, whose claims have been challenged by anthropologists, so it should be taken with a grain of salt.)
Persia: “Zoroastrianism, the indigenous religion of Persia prior to the introduction of Islam, is yet another echo of mankind's early dualistic perspective.… The two parts of the soul were called the urvan and the daena, and … were thought of as twins. Thought to exist before birth, the urvan survived death unharmed. It was conscious, active, and verbal, and was free to make its own independent choices and decisions. Meanwhile, the daena was, like Egypt's ka, also conceived of as the person's own image or self.… After wandering alone for three days after death, the urvan would again encounter its daena… This encounter … was critical; the nature of the after death ‘conversation’ of these two halves of the soul … would determine the entire afterlife experience of the individual. Immortality required a successful reconciliation of the urvan and daena after death.”
Judaism: “At the time the Old Testament was being written, and there seem to have been two primary soul concepts in the Jewish language. Ancient Israel held that people are comprised of two spiritual elements–a ruah and a nefesh.… The ruah was active, strong, conscious, intelligent, and communicated with words. It was immortal, pre-existing the person's birth and surviving his death unharmed, always ‘returning to God who gave it.’ But the nefesh, which embodied one's emotions, memories, and sense of self identity, was vulnerable and could be greatly harmed by death, becoming trapped in a weak and feebleminded state in She'ol, a dark, underground, dreamlike netherworld.”
Christianity: “The Mandaean religion, a small but still-living relative of early Christianity, believes even today that living people possess both soul and spirit, and that these two elements of the self split apart after death…. Mandaean priests still celebrate a ritual called the masiqta three days after burial, the aim of which is to reunite the person's soul and spirit in the afterlife.”
“Manichaeism, a once vigorous but now dead offshoot of early Christianity, also believed there were two distinct components to the human soul.… The nous, according to Manichaeism, was the half of the self that was immortal and invulnerable, while the psuche was the personal part of the self, which was extremely vulnerable and in imminent danger of being destroyed during the death transition. It was thought that a special emotional catharsis during life would unite the psuche with the nous, thereby saving it from destruction at death.”
Islam: “Ancient Islam called these two souls the ruh and the nafs… The ruh is believed to be an immortal soul that never dies, but at least some nafs, the Scriptures declare, will taste death. Thus, it seems, these two elements may be able to divide from each other after death.”
Voodoo: “Voodoo pictures the soul was being comprised of two distinct parts, the gros bon ange, or ‘big good angel,’ and the ti bon ange, or ‘little good angel.’… When a person dies, both the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange continue to exist and function, but they divide from each other.”
Buddhism: “Traditional Buddhism recognizes five constituents, or skandhas, which make up a person… None of those, by itself, is anything we can recognize as the self, which leads Buddhists to declare that there isn't any self at all, only these pieces. But these skandhas match up perfectly with the ancient world's three-part model of a human being; Buddhism's form, feelings, and perceptions are all functions of the unconscious soul, while volition and consciousness are functions of the conscious spirit. When they are all united, these five create the illusion of the existence of a self, but that's all it is, Buddhist thought insists, an illusion.… Buddhism teaches, just as the binary soul doctrine once did, that the multiple components of the self divide from each other at death. The major difference between the two views is that Buddhism insists that these components can never recombine again to reconstitute that self.”
Siberia: “The Khanty and Mansi [tribes] of Siberia also believed in a binary soul system. One soul, the lili, is associated with the breath, the head, and the handling of raw intellectual data, while the is, or shadow soul, is related to a person's emotions and is particularly active during sleep…. The lili soul is thought to be reincarnated in one's own kin after death, while the is soul would either depart for a realm of the dead, or remain behind on earth as a shadowy ghost.”
Australia: “Many Australian aboriginal tribes still believe that people possess two souls which divide at death. The true self, which pre-exists the person's birth, comes from a timeless, primordial, heavenly realm called Alcheringa, or ‘The Dreaming,’ and returns there after death…. The other soul, meanwhile, separates from that self after death, remaining behind on earth to take up residence in another human body. Mirroring this belief in double souls, the practice of double funerals [is] very common in Australia, just as they once were all throughout the ancient Middle East.”
Africa: “Africa's present-day Mossi tribe believes that human beings have one masculine and one feminine soul, and that death divides these two. The Samo Tribe calls their two souls the ri and the mere. The ri soul contains the person's thought and life force, reincarnating after death, while the mere soul, thought of as a perfect double of the person, becomes permanently trapped in a netherworld when it experiences a second death sometime after leaving the body. The Ba-Huana tribe credits human beings with two souls, the bun and doshi. The bun is the soul, or self, and survives death unharmed, while the doshi is a shadowy second self, or double, that tends to linger around on earth after death, haunting its enemies and persecuting its own relations if a proper burial is not made.”
Inuit: “The Inuit (Eskimo) of Canada and Greenland believed in two souls; the inua held the life force and reincarnated into a new body after death, while the tarnneg, or double of the person, became a permanent occupant of the realm of the dead.”
American Indian: “North America's Dakota Tribe called their two souls the nagi and the niya. The nagi soul held the power of movement and independent free will, and after death, it could either join the world of the spirits, or be forced to wander aimlessly. The niya soul, thought to contain one's conscience and memory, helped the person to relate to and interact with others. After death, the niya was thought to testify against the other soul in a great judgment after death, much like Persia's daena and Egypt's ka.”
“Deep in the rain forests of the northwest Amazon, the Maku tribe still subscribes to the binary soul doctrine.… We all possess one hot soul, or baktup, the Maku declare, and one cold soul, or bowugn. When we die, these two divide; the baktup soul becomes something akin to a ghost, hanging around and frightening people, while the bowugn souls shrivels up into a little ball and flies away to heaven.”
All quotes are from Peter Novak's The Lost Secret of Death, Chapter 1.
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