Bonus chapter

Jumping the shark

Greetings everyone 😊 I believe we are long overdue for one of these.

I am sure that many people think that the story has jumped many sharks with all the talk about spirits and souls what not, so I wanted to address some of that.

As we established before in the first bonus chapter, the power system of the story is basically modern science and even some theoretical science for the sci fi elements that are guided by ancient philosophy, with the premise that aether is real.  

Now, I am sure that to many of you, that statement sounds absurd, how could I claim that I am sticking to science and philosophy when I am talking about spirits and souls, not to mention they are doing rituals now?

And yeah 😅 I get it, buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut as Ken explained in chapter 39 when we talk about spirits and souls and when ancient people speak about spirits and souls, we mean very very different things.

First, when we talk about souls and spirits in the modern age, we talk about them as though they are some vague things that have no distinct definition or form.

like, we use the terms soul and spirit interchangeably, we also say that humans have spirits as a component of them but also refer to supernatural creatures as “spiritual beings” or beings of pure spirit.

In this way, we are basically using the terms spirit and soul as catch all terms to refer to everything that is immaterial and that we don’t know anything about, however, that couldn’t be any further from how ancient people used these terms.

For one souls and spirits meant specific things, and they were not one and the same, they were not interchangeable.

They also didn’t mean immaterial things, the soul and spirit being immaterial is acutely a very novel idea that developed relatively recently but the further back in time you go the more spirit and soul refer to physical material things.

They also didn’t use it as catch all terms for supernatural beings, for example, jinns are beings of fire that have a spirit and a soul but are not “pure spirit”, they have a spirit as a component of them like humans who are beings of earth, while angels are beings of light and also have souls as a component of them.

Side note: there was debate on whether or not angels have spirits cause, spirits have to do with will and many believed that angels not only wouldn’t disobey God but acutely couldn’t therefore they had no will therefore they had no spirit, or so the argument went.

Which is funny cause most people now refer to angels as beings of “pure spirit” when ancient people weren’t even sure if they had one.

But back to our main topic, not only did the words soul and spirit refer to very specific things but they also referred to very real things that to ancient people were a matter of fact and more importantly a matter of study.

We can see that people in ancient times studied the soul and the spirit, obviously, both Plato and Aristotle spoke a lot about the soul in fact Aristotle wrote a whole treatise on it called “on the soul” but I didn’t really like their writings on it, it was more on the vague side, in fact you can argue that the reason words soul and spirit have such vague meanings today is due to the dominance of Aristotle philosophy as time went on, and then deteriorated becoming even more and more vague until it became almost meaningless.

And by deteriorated I don’t mean that the philosophy itself deteriorated but I mean that it became so dominant that it basically became part of the pop culture of the normal man but the normal man didn’t know or understand the details of the philosophy just some vague idea of it and that vague idea of it is what spread in culture and stayed in it.

Think of it like the science of disease for us, most of us don’t know the different types of bacteria or the different types of viruses nor how each of them causes disease or how to differentiate them.

To us bacteria and viruses are just some vague terms that refer to something invisible we can’t see but that we more or less know is bad for you and we may confuse a bacteria with a virus or vice versa sometimes.

In that sense bacteria and viruses aren’t very different to us from souls and spirits; it’s a surface level vague understanding of what these things are that is so different from what it acutely is.

Anyway, I preferred more specific writings such as the Eastern Internal Alchemy; many of you may recognize it as the inspiration behind many of the wuxia elements that you know and love such as the different cores, the internal energy, and the meridians, and obviously, the one I picked for the story which is the ancient Egyptian system.

The ancient Egyptian system was so complex and so rich that I simply had to pick it.

Not only did it have a soul, spirit, and body as separate and distinct things but also it had many details such as how ghosts form, different kinds of ghosts, how to transfer life, how to fuse the soul and spirit, what form that fusion takes and why you would want to do it, the energy of that fusion and how it uses it to affect the world aka how to become a poltergeist except even better, and many many more things, true names, shadows, hearts.

So obviously it was the one I had to go with, but there are enough similarities between it and the Eastern internal alchemy to mix the two, so you can expect me to add some wuxia elements in the future 😝, though the novel won’t suddenly become a wuxia novel, it will just have some elements of it that work well with the current stuff established in the novel.

Now all of this was just to show  that we didn’t jump the shark, well depending on how you look at it we kinda did, since I am sure most people wouldn’t have expected us to end up here but our premise was a power system based on ancient philosophy and the soul was a very big and integral part of ancient philosophy that it would be criminal not to include it. 😝

Honestly, this is one of the scarier parts of the novel for me, since I know some people cringe whenever an author tries to blend souls and such with science but it is something that’s necessary for “spirit of Gaia” so I hope I handled it well and that you enjoy it.

comments and criticism on how I should’ve handled it or could’ve handled it better are more than welcome 😊

New chapter comes out Saturday I am fairly certain I will be able to bring it out on time😊.