It is tempting to view Plato’s tripartite division of the soul in Phaedrus 245c–253e as an instantiation – whose conceptual complexity is easily overlooked when the image it conveys is turned into a myth in the modern sense of the term, i.e. into an object of belief – of what we have called a semiotic prism and what lies beyond it.
We should like to propose here a parallel division, which recurs in extra-modern conceptual worlds.
The key to deciphering it is an event: death. Or more exactly an object: the deceased, who paradoxically, by not being any more, becomes three things: body, ghost, and ancestor.(⦿)
The body of the deceased. “A dead body is a puzzle.”(⦼) When one dies one departs from the social body in which one belongs, i.e. from the family or the clan whose blood one’s own body carries – which explains that one’s body is actually not merely one’s: it is the fractalised body of the clan. Or better: it was; for the deceased is no longer part of that social body, but exterior to it. Such exteriority proves problematic, in the sense that it cannot be tolerated, or at least not unconditionally tolerated: either its evidence is denied (e.g. the body of the deceased is burnt, not only to conjure its corruption, which would make patent death’s cruel triumph over life, but also because it cannot be allowed to stand on its own outside the social body where it belongs) or else it is reincorporated into the social body (e.g. by being burnt in situ, so that its substance mixes inside the earth with the nutrients of its broader social body, or by eating it in an endo-cannibalist ritual).
The ghost of the deceased. Conversely, a deceased’s shadow wanders about the place where its family or clan lives, as a ghost. “Didn’t you see him?” – “Well, he was there, staring at me from behind the bush. He had a sad expression. He demanded me to help my brother to become a great hunter…” Now, why call someone’s ghost that someone’s shadow? It is not difficult to figure out why, with the help of a Daribi explanation:
Roy [Wagner]: “One evening in 2000 I was walking across the Karimui air-strip—the only really cleared area in the region—with some young Daribi kids. The kids were dumbfounded by their long shadows projected across the field by the setting sun. ‘Wow,’ they said, ‘SOULS!’ and then they giggled.”
Coyote: “That, too, is a funny way to put your whole existence.”
Roy: “Next day I took the matter up with my friend Danu, the magistrate: ‘Why is it that you people identify the animating principle, that thing you call the bidinoma, with the shadow, or name, or photograph of a person?’”
Coyote: “And he gave you the Daribi blessing, didn’t he: po mene, ‘no talk,’ an expression of extreme satisfaction or annoyance.”
Roy: “As a matter of fact he did not. He simply said ‘I’ll show you. Stand over there, Roy, and stare at your black shadow on the ground. When you are finished, look up at the blue sky and tell me what you see.’ I did as I was told, and when I looked up at the sky I saw a visual effect, a rods-and-cones afterimage of the dark silhouette I had just been staring at—a glowing, luminous shape of my body floating in the blue.”
Coyote: “And you said something like ‘That’s it?’ or ‘That’s all?’” Roy: “Something like that. And he said, ‘Well, it ANIMATED you, didn’t it?’”
Coyote: “So was it your impersonation looking at your expersonation, or your expersonation looking at your impersonation?”
Roy: “That’s IT, Coyote, you got it in one. Next time try flipping a coin with only one side. That very same point of befuddlement—‘a mere shadow of my former self ’ or ‘why do you folks equate the shadow with the soul,’ has a long, pompous, and very quizzical history in the annals of human self-examination.”
Coyote: “Don’t tell me, let me guess: ‘The first time as tragedy, the second time as pure farce.’”
Roy: “It’s even worse. Back in the days of Sir James Frazer, it was elevated to the status of a universal ‘primitive’ religion called ANIMISM.”
Coyote: “Whereas it was really luck in the double focus. DUMB luck.”
Roy: “Sure was, because much later, after Frazer and even Freud had had their tilt with it, it became the focal point of another, and this time truly primitive, pseudo-religion. This time it was called New Age Spirituality, the enlightened rediscovery of the chi, the aura, the subtle body, and the luminous egg.”(⊕)
Of course, a deceased’s ghost is far more ephemeral than a mystic egg. After a while (a few weeks, months, years…) it leaves you in psychological peace: when you manage to solve what you may need to solve in respect to its demands, you do not see it anymore. Put differently, the deceased’s “soul” (the deceased’s ψιχή, psyche) vanishes at last.
The deceased as an ancestor. Something of the deceased subsists for a longer while, though. Not only during the lifetime of the deceased’s immediate relatives, but also for some generations. Call it the deceased’s spirit, if you wish: it amounts the admixture of the most idiosyncratic and thus memorable traits of the deceased and the bits of wisdom and virtue that the deceased may have achieved in her/his lifetime. Ultimately, it is that collection of evocable (in personal terms) and transmissible (in educational terms) features that makes of the deceased an ancestor – as thin as the air or πνεῦμα (pneuma; Latin: spiritus) one breaths.
One day, however, the deceased will no longer be remembered, for there will be no one to remember her/him. Only then the deceased truly dies to dissolve anonymously into the impersonal realm where all the forgotten ancestors lie as a drop of water dissolves into the sea: leaving no trace behind; unless the myth – a song, a story – reclaims her/him for the future, a future that, nonetheless, will also come to pass one day.
(⦿) Cf. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (From the Enemy’s Point of View: Humanity and Divinity in an Amazonian Society [trans. Catherine V. Howard; Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992]), pp. 201-202: “Death disperses […] The person decomposes into three elements: the corpse, the terrestrial specter, and the celestial spirit.”
(⦼) James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (expanded edition; Durham [NC] and London: Duke University Press, 1994), p. 179.
(⊕) Roy Wagner, Coyote Anthropology (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 49-50.
Kwoi (ancestor board) from Papua New Guinea, National Museum of Scotland (ref. A.1951.368)