Spirit. Soul. Aether. Azoth. Prana. Quintessence, the fifth element.
Due to the nature of our research, we find ourselves obliged to start our exploration of the elements with this most misunderstood feature of ancient phenomenology.
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| Obligatory "Leeloo multipass" reference. |
Because this topic is the subject of so many jokes, we’ll have to get them all out of the way.
What isn’t Quintessence?
Quintessence is not love. Quintessence is not family. Quintessence is undoubtedly not the friends we made along the way.
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| The talking horse program lied to you. |
What are the Qualities of Quintessence?
Unlike the other four elements, Quintessence is not easy to relate because it does not have a discrete material correlate.
This presents a contradiction because quintessence is both the non-material element and is present in all matter.
What is Quintessence?
Quintessence - the element of animation.
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| There is no standardized image for quintessence, though it is often represented with a circle, an eight-spoked wheel (indicating motion), a spiral, and the Seal of Light created by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. |
What does that even mean?
All matter in the universe is potentially animate in the minds of the ancients. That is, it has an essence that governs its actions. Any material that acts in the world has animation.
In Pythagorean thought, this element was a fluidic substance, an etheric field that filled all things in the universe, not unlike the Force in Star Wars.
All four material elements are regarded as having more or less animation relative to their densities, as seen in the vertical model described in our Four Elements article.
Earth has little to no animation,* but it cannot be denied that water flows and the sea tosses, nor that the wind blows, and that fire consumes and dances and casts light and imparts its animation substances subject to its heat.
Animation, however, is a more sophisticated concept than more movement/less movement. It has two dimensions of consideration that are relevant to our research. These are the anima/animata (particular/general) axis and the masculine/feminine (shaping/generating) axis.
*Compiler's Note: The subject of animated earth will be covered in the *Earth* article.
Anima/Animus
You, dear reader, may already have some of your own ideas about what a “soul” is. Perhaps you think of it as the mind of a person that survives past death, the origin of ghosts and demons, and all manner of supernatural things. Perhaps you’re an atheist who thinks that souls are made-up nonsense.
Well, you’re wrong in both cases.
Both of these positions come from a misunderstanding of what a soul is. Even since antiquity, so much has been hitched to the term that a very simple, easy-to-grasp idea has been buried in ambiguities and associations.
Let’s tackle the disbelief in souls:
1) Go outside.
2) Find a bug.
Does the bug move? If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.
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| If it isn’t moving, it doesn’t have a soul. Because it’s dead. |
Let's do another:
1) Find a houseplant.
2) Does it photosynthesize?
3) Does it grow?
If yes, it has a soul because that’s what a soul is.
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| Yes, even this thing. Unless it's plastic. |
A soul, or animus, is simply the animating force of a discrete thing. You have a soul. Your dog has a soul. Your ficus plant has a soul.
Does a thing act under its own power? Does it respond to forces acting upon it? Does it move, grow, or shrink? Then it has an animus. The soul is the animating principle of the particular, simple as.
What about-
The notions of disembodied souls, immortal souls, and things like moral charge are secondary developments. They are personal/religious beliefs beyond the scope of this article. Our concern here is the baseline, lowest-common-denominator understanding. These innovations in the notion of animus will be explored in future articles, as will the soul/spirit distinction (or lack thereof).
Can one thing have more than one soul?
Many cultures believe in multiple souls or the soul in numerous distinct components and the loss of one lead to illness or death. This includes the dualistic notion of souls found in the Platonic/Homeric tradition, 19th-century Spiritualist belief, and ancient Chinese thought (Hun and Po).
Other traditions had even more complex notions of the human soul, including the Norse and, most famously, the Egyptians (whose soul could have anywhere from 3-8 facets). The traditional beliefs of the Hmong of Southeast Asia hold that chronic conditions may be caused by the loss of the soul of a particular body part, which must be called back to the body.
Don’t be afraid to play with poly-animate thinking in your own storytelling!
Animata
In anthropology, animism is the belief in individualized animating forces. In the same discipline, animatism is the belief in impersonal animating forces.
Is there a cosmic force that you regard as being impersonal, which is to say, without individuality or persona? Do you view luck as a force rather than a willful actor? Then luck is an animatistic force.
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| Charms like this attract luck as a force rather than signifying devotion to a person or persona of luck. |
You can readily find other animata elsewhere. Lightning is regarded as an animatistic force in many cultures, as are miasmas. Hell, you could consider the radiation coming off of uranium ore animata.
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| Radiation knows no reason; it cannot be negotiated with; it simply is. |
An incredibly influential animatistic notion in modern fantasy fiction is mana. Mana is a supernatural concept from the cultures of Oceania and Polynesia. Mana is as definitionally diverse as the cultures that believe it. Still, the through-line is that it is a potent supernatural force that can be invested in deities, persons, places, and things. In some places, the mana held by tribal chieftains would pollute where they walked with supernatural potency, causing people to become ill if it wasn’t ritually dispersed.*
*Anecdotal: This compiler cannot find old education materials from the anthropology lectures this compiler attended more than a decade ago.
A derived form of this concept is endemic to fantasy, especially in video games, where it is a manageable resource that fuels the abilities of spellcasting player characters.
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| 90% of our memory of Diablo II consists of staring at this thing. |
Animatistic forces such as mana provide many opportunities for storytellers, not just because they serve as a convenient resource for “fueling” magical action but because of their potential side effects. Suppose magic can be engaged as an impersonal substance with predictable behaviors and lingering effects. In that case, it encourages the storyteller to consider the long-term consequences of magic that don’t stem from the retribution of an intelligent supernatural actor.
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| Paizo’s Golarion setting has a region known as the Mana Wastes, full of magical dead zones and pockets of unpredictable wild magic due to a conflict between two powerful magical empires in the distant past. |
Masculine and Feminine
These are terms with a lot of baggage, especially in the current political climate, so we’ll cut to the chase and use the Hermetic definitions:
Masculine - That which shapes but does not generate.
Feminine - That which generates but does not shape.
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| Observe that the upward-oriented triangle (masculine) and the downward-oriented triangle (feminine) find union in the hexagrammatic Seal of Solomon. This will be explored further in our article on the *Pentagram*. |
Masculine and feminine are the binary characteristics of universal animation, the shaping and generating principles, respectively. All observable animation shapes, generates, or demonstrates some admixture of the two. They can either be creative or destructive. The actions of the sculptor and the vandal show the opposite polarities of shaping, while the soil of the field and the rust of the plow reveal the creative/destructive dimensions of the generating principle, nurturing the plants of the field or breaking a tool down from purpose shape to constituent matter.
These ideas of masculine and feminine as principles are damn-near universal, finding clear articulation in the West in Neoplatonic/Hermetic thought and in the East in Taoism (Yin/Yang). These definitions cut through the formal magical traditions, such as alchemy and Solomonic sorcery, and are an essential feature of many conceptions of enlightenment.
In alchemy, the state of enlightenment is communicated through the Philosopher’s Stone and its anthropomorphic icon, the Rebis. The Rebis is a bicephalic man/woman figure that expresses the hypostasis (transcendent unification) of these cosmic animating principles and, thus, a wholly liberated creative will.
This has global parallels, as can be seen in the androgynous bissu shamans of the Bugis culture in Thailand, as well as in the Maya-region shaman priests known as mother-fathers (Quiche: s. Chuchkahaw, pl. Chuchkahawib.)
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| The bissu Puang Matoa Saidi. |
The universality of these definitions will become more apparent throughout this archive’s development as we explore both cosmological structuring and magical practice. Additionally, we’ll review the numerous other associations wrapped up in “masculine” and “feminine” in our article on the *Tria Prima* of alchemy.
What about the sexes?
The sexes, male and female, are downstream of these animating forces. Sex is subordinate to masculine and feminine; masculine and feminine are not subordinate to sex.
Alternative Expression?
Perhaps you’re uncomfortable with the terms “masculine” and “feminine.” This might be for personal reasons, or these words won’t play well with your target audience. Are there other framing devices available?
Yes. Many.
Let's look at just one.
Wyrd: Fire and Ice
According to Nevill Drury in The Watkins Dictionary of Magic, the Anglo-Saxon concept of wyrd (Norse urd) is the notion in Anglo-Saxon sorcery that the universe is a complex interplay of the conflicting forces of fire and ice.
A quick internet search shows that…this may not be the normative case, as wyrd is usually used to describe fate, and the symbol for wyrd is a web describing the interplay of forces governing destiny.
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| This might not represent fire and ice. |
The Neopagan movement may have influenced Drury’s definition, which is not always accurate in recreating ancient beliefs.
However, the ancestral mythology of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse share Germanic origins. Norse mythology tells us that the universe was created by the violent meeting of fire and ice in the Ginnungagap (“yawning void”).
If fire and ice are the primordial duality in Germanic folklore, that’s a perfectly acceptable framing to exploit. If all animation in the universe is a consequential result of the clash of ice and fire, thinking of wyrd in terms of the interplay of fire and ice is valid, even if that may not have been how the Anglo-Saxons would frame it.
Sidenote: If anyone is interested in correcting us, feel free to namedrop a source.
Would we substitute?
While forces like fire and ice are rich in texture, they’re limiting as both refer to tangibles and come from people living in harsh northern environments. Such a framing would be unsuitable for a story set in a world primarily influenced by Egypt or Mesoamerica, as in both regions, ice would be a sufficiently uncommon phenomenon to prevent it from being thought coequal with fire (sun, stars, volcanic activity, etc.).
One of the significant advantages of the shaping/generating dichotomy is that it’s abstract enough to avoid these sorts of hiccups. It allows enough room for characters and cultures to make their own culturally relevant (if cosmically imperfect) interpretations of forces without leading to logical inconsistencies in the underlying systems you’ve devised for your stories.
In Summary
Quintessence, or soul, is a much simpler concept than its cultural baggage might suggest. A firm grasp of the simplest, most basic definitions will serve you well as you develop into more complex, opaque subject matter.
Bibliography
-Drury, N. (2007). The Watkins Dictionary of Magic (First South Asian). Watkins Publishing.
-Freidel, D. A., Schele, L., & Parker, J. (2001). Maya Cosmos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path. Perennial.
-Mythology & Fiction Explained. (2017a, October 17). The creation of the Universe - Norse mythology. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV9h08JOcSY
-National Geographic. (2017b, January 15). Shaman performs rite to protect a man’s soul from the underworld | national geographic. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UxIXIi1kR0
-Paizo, Inc. (n.d.). Mana Wastes. PathfinderWiki. https://pathfinderwiki.com/wiki/Mana_Wastes
-Wikimedia Foundation. (2023, April 25). Bissu. Wikipedia. https://id.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bissu
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