Speaking in Riddles

The following story is told by the Arcadians. When Rhea had given birth to Poseidon, she laid him in a flock for him to live there with the lambs, and the spring too received its name just because the lambs pastured around it. Rhea, it is said, declared to Cronus that she had given birth to a horse, and gave him a foal to swallow instead of the child, just as later she gave him in place of Zeus a stone wrapped up in swaddling clothes.

When I began to write my history I was inclined to count these legends as foolishness, but on getting as far as Arcadia I grew to hold a more thoughtful view of them, which is this. In the days of old those Greeks who were considered wise spoke their sayings not straight out but in riddles, and so the legends about Cronus I conjectured to be one sort of Greek wisdom. In matters of divinity, therefore, I shall adopt the received tradition.

(Pausanias, Description of Greece VIII viii, as translated by William Henry Samuel Jones)

Baseless Speculation Time

1. Spirit is unity: it is a limitless mind, endlessly contemplating itself (for there is nothing else to contemplate).

2. So potent is spirit that the very ideas it contemplates are alive, and we call these souls.

3. Souls are unique expressions of life: the greatest are prime and express a single, pure nature; the rest are composite, expressing a harmony of primal natures.

4. The more composite a soul is, the weaker it is, and souls that are too weak to exist of themselves animate bodies, which act as a sort of support or crutch, allowing the soul to function even while weak.

5. Spirit is unlimited, but souls are limited by their natures; consequently, the spiritual world (which souls inhabit) is unlimited by such constraints as space and time, while the world of soul (which bodies inhabit) is limited by these.

6. A soul cannot change its composite nature (it is "baked in" to its very existence); however, by focusing on some aspects of it at the expense of others, a soul inhabiting a body may concentrate its power and gain enough strength to no longer require a body, at the cost of losing some measure of its expressive potential. (That is, it must act within the constraints of this purer nature, or else return to needing a body.)

7. Therefore, one might assume that if a soul's goal is to live in the material world, and to live well in it, then it should deliberately pursue the strategy of balancing its various natures. However, if a soul's goal is to leave the material world and live in the spiritual, then it should deliberately pursue a strategy of focusing on some natures at the expense of others.

(I am not certain of these points—indeed, on the basis that "all models are wrong, but some are useful," I am certain that there is at least something incorrect about each one—but I have a vague feeling that there's something to it. Certainly, I am pursuing the latter goal; this life is very weird; and my angel tells me that it only gets weirder from here...)