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Is the soul rune the life rune

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AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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- Soul represents the final stage in the progression of magical elements, because unlike its predecessors it is a concept and not a metaphor. The foregoing elements pick out some single aspect of reality as more or most important - the concept of soul does the same, but it is also more flexibly applicable to all that we experience - we identify individual simple, sentient, and sapient souls, souls that encompass other souls, and souls that animate whole worlds. The soul is life, the activity that is the condition for all further activity - all that is is by virtue of soul.

I could add a little more on astral, nebulous, elemental, catalytic, and Armadyl runes, and the runecrafting altar, but I will save that for later.

Anyway, this account is not helpful at all for addressing the opposite-ness of Zaros and Seren, but I hope it might co-exist with the spectrum-image. So I think your account, Armacus, is pretty good. I would only object to the idea that Zaros is wholly to be identified with death and that Seren is wholly to be identified with soul - there is more to being either of them.

Aquamancer, I have to agree with Cthris against you. I think soul is life - or at least I think developing the concepts in this Aristotelian direction is the most promising way to take the lore. I would want to say that the soul simply is the life of the body, not an entity whence something is transferred to the body. I would also want to treat quantified life-force or anima as something we experience interiorly, like desire, stirred by our psychosomatic (bodily and mental) grasp of things in the world.

Your analogy, on the contrary, is Cartesian, separating the mind and body as two distinct entities, whereas if we identify soul and life we need not really separate them from the living, fully functioning body.

04-Feb-2017 22:39:55

AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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Cthris said :
I disagree Aquamancer.

Let's start with blood:

My interpretation of life is that it is caused by sustaining a ratio of elements, oxygen, calcium, carbon etc. These elements form cells, which form the body. Bodies only can die when the life causing ratio is disrupted to a big enough degree. All deaths are a result of a disruption of the ratio.

For example:
When someone dies of choking they have died because the ratio was disrupted due deficit oxygen. Electrocution burns flesh, releasing some of the elements from the ratio, which possibly causes death. Poison introduces elements that caused a dilution in the ratios of individual cells and kills them, and if enough die body dies.

Essentially life is destroyed by taking or adding something too much to it. Even adding or taking away something just a little bit causes harm to the body.

My interpretation of the Blood is that it is that it represents this ratio of physical things, and is the life rune. Blood itself is a ratio of all the necessary elements for life To address your corpse argument. corpses may still have blood, but they lack some other element of the ratio, which is the cause of their death.


I’ll give an analogy of my account of life and blood.

The life ratio is like a bow. A bow is two material things (wood and sting) that have put arranged in a way so that there is a perfect ratio of tension allowing the bow to maintain its existence. Too much tension and either the wood, or the string snaps. Too little tension and the bow looses its form, and can no longer be considered a bow. I like this.

04-Feb-2017 22:40:09

AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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Because I have argued that we should treat souls as the life of bodies, I think we should treat the visible manifestation of souls without bodies as extraordinary occurrences requiring special explanation - requiring perhaps special senses on our part. Because souls can encompass other souls, as the Anima Mundi encompasses our own, we can say that those things that are self-sustaining have souls, like ourselves, while those parts of living things that are not self-sustaining do not possess souls of their own, e.g. some skin tissue. Then 'self-sustaining' needs to be defined, but I think it's worth it rather than making souls corporeal in the same manner as visible, living bodies.

With regard to bodies without souls, I think it's best to think of these as improperly animated or as lacking soul in the sense that no longer self-sustaining because they are sustained by the soul of another, such as a necromancer or magical construct. But as far as bodies participate in self-directed processes, they are related to souls in some manner.

The appearance of pure 'energy' is another strange phenomenon - it has not exactly received a good explanation in our world, with our mundane forces. Obviously, my account has lots of problems to address, but I hope this serves as an interesting contribution. Also, where's your nailbeast headcannon?

04-Feb-2017 22:40:30

Cthris
Dec Member 2023

Cthris

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Swolllliosis said :
So can we consider Soul Runes associated with Seren, when Death energy is associated with Zaros?
You could theorize that for sure! but it isn't necessarily true. All the accounts given to you so far are conjecture at this time.

AttilaSquare said :


I think it's clear that there are very obvious problems here by making the soul the life of the body:
A) How can any life be self-sustaining. Something that is self-sustaining is something that's continued existence relies purely on the nature of itself. Even the elder gods need sustenance.
B) There are far too many ghosts (Physical manifestations of souls) to consider them extraordinary, not to mention they arise naturally through will, and don't necessarily need a necromancer.
C) If you think about it, humans, animals, plants aren't really much more alive than colonies of insects if we only think of life as being made up of smaller lesser lives, or having parts of life in us. We are all just made up of individual living things with even smaller living things making up those things united for the cause of continued existence. Trying to make a distinction based on what has parts of living things in it is completely arbitrary. You could draw it between organelles and cells, cells and organs, organs and people, people and the anima mundi. It's far easier to just say what has souls is things that think, and the cause of the soul is mind channeled through the the ratio of life.


I don't see any reason to assume souls are anything but corporeal energy. Souls were even used as a substitute for divine energy to create the god gielinor showing they have an energy like nature.

05-Feb-2017 06:53:36 - Last edited on 05-Feb-2017 07:24:19 by Cthris

Cthris
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Cthris

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My theory about nail beasts came from that thread about the nail beasts.

Essentially, I noticed that the presence of the death altar attracted the dark beasts from their dark dimension. Now, Zaros said that life and death energy exists on a spectrum, so it's not totally out of the question that if there were beasts attracted to one side of the spectrum, there could be beasts attracted to the other side.

Using my reasoning for why the blood altar is actually the life altar I realized I should start looking in Morytania for some kind of beasts that had some relation with life. Low and behold, I realized the nail beasts were exactly what I was looking for. Not only were they fittingly named "beasts" but they also had a curious case of having their own spirit charm unique to them.

Turns out charms "Charms are the essence of a living being - you could think of them as part of a creature's soul." (Charming Imp) are physical pieces of creature souls.

Now as I reasoned before, the blood mind matrix builds stronger souls. To use my analogy, the nail beasts are connected to the blood/life altar like the dark beasts are, thus they would be tapped into life energy and have bigger bows/life ratio. Bigger bows means more potential kinetic/soul energy. Now Orab supposed "I posit that the soul is perhaps more closely linked to biology" which leads me to believe that souls only grow as big as their biological make-up/life ratio allows them to grow. Since I presumed nail beasts have bigger life ratios, they should naturally grow bigger souls, perhaps souls that are even stronger than human souls.

Now Draken's magic has heavily corrupted the area, corrupting even human souls. (i.e. Ghasts) Perhaps the nail beasts have been similarly affected. Perhaps without the corruption they even could be sapient, and intelligent. Perhaps they truly could reflect "life beasts"

05-Feb-2017 07:19:00 - Last edited on 05-Feb-2017 07:25:33 by Cthris

AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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Cthris said :
A) 'Self-sustaining' requires further clarification. Aristotle suggests that things which take in nutrients and reproduce themselves in the form of some kind of individual unit count as self-sustaining. Obviously if we denied this label even to the elder goddesses then it would have no meaning at all.

B) That is fair, but also arguable. I could argue that souls take on ethereal appearances when their purpose requires their self-manifestation and that such self-manifestation is required when they have failed to fulfill certain purposes during their normal span of life - though common such a situation does depart from some kind of norm, just not statistical normality.

C) I think you exaggerate here. Human body parts aren't nearly as independent as individual insects, nor can the human body survive the analogously severe rearrangements and traumas that a colony of insects can. Certain bacterial colonies within the human gut can surely survive in many kinds of environment, but a human kidney is unlikely to find any environment in which we might honestly call it self-sustaining. An ecosystem might be called self-sustaining, but this is where the classical Aristotelian concepts of substance and soul begin to be stretched. A lot hangs on the clarification of self-sustaining - as a biological concept, this is less clear-cut than chemical and physical concepts.

The ratio concept is promising, but then it becomes unclear what distinctively marks the living. A rock exhibits certain ratios of chemicals. If we say that things that think have souls, then we deny that plants have souls, except for elder trees and perhaps a few other special plants - then we have seriously contradicted the lore, for the elder goddesses sought maximal production of non-thinking and non-perceiving anima.

What energy is is a debate. That 'corporeal energy' is not an oxymoron requires explanation.

05-Feb-2017 14:21:29

AttilaSquare

AttilaSquare

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Cthris said :
Essentially, I noticed that the presence of the death altar attracted the dark beasts from their dark dimension. Now, Zaros said that life and death energy exists on a spectrum, so it's not totally out of the question that if there were beasts attracted to one side of the spectrum, there could be beasts attracted to the other side.

Using my reasoning for why the blood altar is actually the life altar I realized I should start looking in Morytania for some kind of beasts that had some relation with life. Low and behold, I realized the nail beasts were exactly what I was looking for. Not only were they fittingly named "beasts" but they also had a curious case of having their own spirit charm unique to them.

Turns out charms "Charms are the essence of a living being - you could think of them as part of a creature's soul." (Charming Imp) are physical pieces of creature souls.

Now as I reasoned before, the blood mind matrix builds stronger souls. To use my analogy, the nail beasts are connected to the blood/life altar like the dark beasts are, thus they would be tapped into life energy and have bigger bows/life ratio. Bigger bows means more potential kinetic/soul energy. Now Orab supposed "I posit that the soul is perhaps more closely linked to biology" which leads me to believe that souls only grow as big as their biological make-up/life ratio allows them to grow. Since I presumed nail beasts have bigger life ratios, they should naturally grow bigger souls, perhaps souls that are even stronger than human souls.

Now Draken's magic has heavily corrupted the area, corrupting even human souls. (i.e. Ghasts) Perhaps the nail beasts have been similarly affected. Perhaps without the corruption they even could be sapient, and intelligent. Perhaps they truly could reflect "life beasts" That's cool. I wrote some headcannon on this topic myself, here .

05-Feb-2017 14:21:45

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