It is perfectly reasonable to ask, “If you believe that
these spirits are all doing their thing in some afterlife, how do you account
for ghosts? How about reincarnation and past life memory? Are the spirits out
there, down here, or inside me?”
One, let me state for the record that I don’t know. And I
don’t think anyone knows the entirety of what happens after we die. I don’t
think anyone fully understands what spirits are and how they operate. But I
have some ideas.
Let’s look at our own meatsacks as an example. Non-human
cells in your body outnumber human cells in your body by 10-1. That’s right,
you have ten times as many microbe cells in your body as cells you have
actually grown yourself. Those microbes are small, so they only make up about
3% of your total mass, but 3% is pretty significant. Also, does size really
matter when it comes to the ability of any given cell?
Chances are, our spirit-selves aren’t just some Jedi-ghost
version of you. Just like we have different organs and trillions of microbes
that make up our bodies, it may be a good bet that our spiritual selves have as
much complexity or more.
Let’s turn to our friends the Ancient Egyptians again, and
see what they had to say on the matter. After all, they probably studied the
afterlife more than any other culture on Earth. Keep in mind that Egypt was an
empire that lasted over 3,000 years and things differed from place to place and
in different time periods. The list I give here is not definitive and has some
of my take on the subject.
Depending on who you asked, the Ancient Egyptians believed the
soul had three to seven different parts. Let’s run with six of them:
Ib – The heart: Every person has one drop of their mother’s
blood in their heart when they are born. So it can be said that the heart links
us to our ancestors. The heart is the seat of emotion, all of them—love, hate,
jealousy, compassion, etc. That’s important because when you get judged in the
afterlife it is your heart that will be weighed to tell if you were a good
person. So you could say that it’s not so much bad decisions that you made or
weaknesses that you possess that fucks you, but your intentions. Did you do it
out of love or did you do it out of fear and hate?
Ren – Name: Your sense of self. What you answer when they
ask, “Who the fuck are you?” This would be the part of your own spirit created
by your accomplishments. When they really wanted to fuck you in Ancient Egypt
they erased your name when you died. This breaks your contact with the living
world. Everything here has a name. If you have no name, you’re nobody.
Ba – Personality: The translations become a little tricky as
we don’t really have words for some of these concepts. Your Ba is the part of
you that is fun at parties. Your unique perspective. It’s also the part which
actually travels between the afterlife and the living world. The Ba probably
comes closest to being that Force-Ghost. If you’re being haunted and that ghost
isn’t an asshole, chances are you’re talking to the person’s Ba.
Ka – Spark: Essentially, your battery. Having this makes the
difference between life and death. The Egyptians believed your Ka needs a place
to keep generating energy, which is part of why they preserved the dead. It
needs food and water, just like you do, but after death it comes in the form of
offerings. Prayers will do in a pinch.
Shuyet – Shadow: The shuyet is the symbol of you. It represents
your form, but may not actually be you, but certainly created by you. Your shuyet
inhabits representations of you such as statues and drawings. Which is why we
have that stuff on our ancestor altars, except you need to understand, that’s
not the actual person. Just the symbol. If a ghost comes back and does
random-ass annoying things it’s probably a shuyet.
Akh – Spirit: The akh is different from all the other parts
because it gets created after you die. After you go through the hall of
judgement, the gods slam back together various parts of your soul and you have
a shiny new akh. The akh does not start out as a god, but can become one. The
akh does all the amazing shit spirits can do and we cannot.
That all seems pretty intricate, but nowhere near as
intricate as say, a human body. So I would say the reality is probably much
more complex than that. And non-human spirits may be even more complicated. Add
to this that time is not linear and things can be so crazy you just chalk it up
to “things we weren’t meant to know.”
But for us magi, that’s what we call a challenge. We do our
best to figure that shit out, and we may never know in this lifetime or the
next how it all works. You can ask the spirits, and that’s helpful to an
extent, but they would have to put it in concepts your ape-self can understand,
which it can’t. That’s why magi study endless symbol systems to try and grasp
some iota of meaning out of all of it.
Your spirit may have as many parts as there are stars in the
sky. Keep grasping for them.