A Brief and Speculative Essay On Mortal Nature

by
Hieronymous Draal
School of Draconic Studies, Drakenberg

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It is a well documented that dragonewts and dragonkind have no spiritual content and yet they are not purely physical beings in the manner of an automaton. Their continuous cycle of death and rebirth attests to the latter and many eminent spirit sages (and the dragonewts themselves) can confirm the former.

So what part of the dragonewt's self survives the death and rebirth process? The dragonewts have referred to the transference of souls. Their hatred of vampires is based on the loss of souls from the rebirth cycle. Most people have understood the word soul to be synonymous with spirit. This is clearly not the case - dragonewts have no regard for spirit.

It would appear then, at least from a draconic perspective, that the mortal self is made up of three parts - the body, the spirit and the soul, and that the dragon kind have but two parts - body and soul.

While discussing these ideas with colleagues, Abdhoul al Fazaak, a visiting scholar from Necropolis, gave me an interesting insight into the workings of the cult of Christos Farlae. It is commonly said that vampires sell their souls for eternal existence. People usually believe this to mean that their spirit is consumed by Christos Farlae and vampires are purely physical beings but this is not so. Vampires have their spirits bound tightly within their bodies - this is what enables them to attack their victim's spirit through physical contact. So it would appear that vampires too are creatures of two components - having body and spirit but no soul.

The implication from studying the natures of dragonewts and vampires is that the soul not the spirit is necessary for rebirth - dragonewts lack spirit and can be reborn, vampires have spirits but when separated from them (e.g. with the Rune magic Sever Spirit) are not reborn but cease to be.

This leads me to some speculations on the inter-relationship between the three components of the self. For mortals, I believe it may be depicted thus:

	The body houses the spirit and the spirit houses the soul. The magical power used for fueling spells and such largely resides in the spirit. The last drop of essence, which none dare cast, resides in the soul and binds all three components together. Loss of this destroys both the spirit and the soul and renders the body dead. On separation of the body and spirit, the soul journeys to hell before being reborn.
	For the dragonewt, the soul has expanded and takes on some of the roles of the spirit. It keeps the magical essence neccessary to maintain the dragonewt's life and powers its spells. If the body is destroyed, the soul returns to the Dragon Queen for rebirth.
	For the vampire, there is no soul, and all of its magical essence, not just the last point, is bound to the body. This explains why a vampire is so hard to destroy through mere physical damage. The spirit is much more able to maintain its ties to the body and restore the physical form.

The existence of 2 component beings of body/spirit and body/soul, leads me to suspect that the generally symetrical nature of the world would have beings of a spirit/soul nature. I suspect that ghosts and/or other non-corporeal entities may fall into this category. This may be summarized by the accompanying diagram.

These ideas are highly speculative and further study will be required to refine them into a coherent theory that is consistent with all the metaphysical evidence.