One of the more difficult words to define is soul. It is one of those words that entered the main stream of thought and as it did so, it lost much of it original intent as the breath of life.
Today we have Soul-mate, Soul-sister, Soul-music, Soul-train, and Soul-food. The word describes the sound post of a violin as well as the bore of a cannon. There are soul and body lashings, soul-candles, and soul-catchers. And let's not forget soul-ale. And then there are the expressions such as ' he's a lost soul', or 'poor soul'.
Spirit has just as many disparate uses. We talk of school spirit, team spirit, national spirit, company spirit, unclean spirit, the Holy Spirit, spirit of cooperation, and the human spirit. Expressions like 'his spirit is broken', 'that is a mean-spirited thing to do', winning spirit, or getting into the spirit of things, continue to show the mixed usage.
For the shaman there is a decided distinction between soul and spirit. In the shamanic world, spirit differs from Spirits also. Spirit is the élan; whereas, Spirits are entities unto themselves. Briefly, the soul is that part of the human that is alive and manifests in the consciousness of the individual. It is that aspect of the human that defines individuality. And like the individual, it grows, learns, and changes. It is present upon the conception of the human being and upon the death of the physical body, it seeks to return to whence it came, the Akasha.
The shaman understands this mobility of the soul and when it becomes ill, stolen, or corrupted by an evil entity, the human spirit withers and dissolves. Thus, the shaman is bound to mind-travel through an altered state of consciousness to non-ordinary reality, to locate the suffering soul, seek out a solution for its suffering, performs the necessary tasks of bringing health to the soul and returning it so the physical body may become well.
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