Note: This is a bit different (and shorter) than my previous posts. I’m now doing some culture-building, focused on the area of Kyol, a region in the subtropics. I’ll discuss Kyol more broadly later, but for now, here’s a bit of their religion. (I’ve been on airplanes for most of the past few weeks, so I unfortunately don’t have time for much more than this right now.)
The people of Kyol, like many on earth, divide the soul into two parts.
The first part is blood, the animating force. A newly conceived child takes a portion of its mother’s blood to sustain it, which then multiplies as it grows. This vital force in each individual is centered in the heart, which produces and purifies it.
The second part is bone, the part that allows for thinking and experiencing emotion. Bones aren’t transferred from the mother to the child – they are created upon conception. As such, it’s also the individual part of the soul – the part that distinguishes one person from another. This spiritual force is found in all the bones, but it’s most central in the skull.
The loci of these concentrations of spirit (the heart and skull) in part explains how this idea came about. If you stab someone in the heart, they generally die. But if you even slightly damage someone’s skull, they often start acting weirdly. This solid object that persists after death and looks similar to one’s face seems far more significant than the lump of jelly inside it. (Some historians theorize that the original two-soul system was specifically the heart and the skull, until it was later rationalized as blood and bone by philosophers.)
In the next posts, I’ll discuss the practical ramifications of this system, with particular regard to the afterlife and the disposal of the dead.