Imagining the Soul: A History
By Rosalie Osmond
Sutton Publishing, 246 pages
Reviewed by Catherine MacLennan
The cover of Rosalie Osmond's Imagining the Soul: A History features a blurry blue butterfly on a white background. This immediately creates the unfortunate impression that it might be some kind of unappetizing "spirituality"-lite book, but it is not, it is a history of the imagining of the soul, and winged creatures - butterflies, birds and bees - comprised some of the earliest depictions of the soul. In the Iliad, Homer describes a death as "the soul fluttering free of his limbs;" in the Odyssey "the soul, flying off like a dream, flutters." Osmond's Imagining the Soul examines the persistent paradox of philosophers, artists and writers and their depictions of the soul: "while it has nearly always been defined as spiritual and invisible, it has with equal consistency been imagined as visible, a concrete entity." Osmond discusses the soul's various representations over time, placing them in their socio-historical contexts and reflects on what it may say about a certain period, or today.
Osmond surveys the many complicated concepts the ancient Greeks and Egyptians had of the soul, and traces the influences of the Greeks to early Christian thinkers: the idea of body and soul dualism, as well as concepts related to incorporeity and immortality. In one chapter, Osmond considers the idea of the "Soul as Beautiful Woman." Again this is a concept that originated with the Greeks, with the story of Psyche, a pagan myth later rendered "symbolic" and more Christian-friendly by the bishop of Ruspe in the 6th century. Later, the Soul as Beautiful Woman appears in the Archbishop of Tours' (1056-1133) "encounter" called 'Of the Complaint and Conflict of the Flesh and Spirit or Soul.' While he is preoccupied with worldly affairs, a female figure wearing mourning clothes appears before him. She tells him "I am amazed that you have so forgotten me," and he eventually realizes that it is his own soul speaking to him. James Howell, the Royal Historiographer of 1661, produced a 'body and soul dialogue' called The Vision, which features the appearance of a 'phantasm' that eventually takes the shape of a woman. The beautiful woman-soul also appears as Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy. Osmond states that this concept pretty much died out in medieval times, though there are vestiges of it that survive in works of art in later eras. William Blake's notable collection of drawings that deal with the subject of the soul are his illustrations to the Robert Blair poem The Grave. In these illustrations, the soul is once again depicted as a separate being, and as female. In Blake's The Reunion of the Soul and Body, the woman (Soul) embraces the man (Body) passionately, and they kiss on the lips. [Louis Schiavonetti did engravings after Blake's illustrations on this series; Osmond relates that, to Blake's his chagrin Schiavonetti received much more money for his engravings than Blake did for his original drawings. In The Soul Hovering over the Body Reluctantly Parting with Life, the female (Soul) parts with sadness from the male (Body).The Soul Exploring the Recess of the Grave, depicts the female (Soul) entering a cave, viewing death (a dead body in flames) while a mortal male (Body) hovers on top, anxiously wondering what she sees.
The Soul as Beautiful Woman theme appears again with the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who preferred medieval subject matter to contemporary life, and often painted beautiful women as principal figures. Osmond notes that Rossetti's Sybilla Palmifera, featuring a beautiful woman as central figure, also has two butterflies fluttering over her shoulder.
Modern artists combine elements of earlier depictions of the soul with contemporary modes of expression. Paul Nash's The Soul Visiting the Mansions of the Dead, 1932 [Listed simply as Mansions of the Dead at the Tate site] incorporates ancient ideas of the soul with a modern style as winged creatures soar through an innovative abstracted idea of the route and landscape that the soul must travel (a vision of heaven as an Ikea bookscase). A painting from Swedish artist Hilma Af Klint's Altar Paintings series shows a triangle merging towards a golden circle, which Osmond believes can be interpreted as "an ascent leading to the circle of eternity." Other ancient-influenced contemporary representations of the soul that Osmond cites are Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely Bones, with its ghost-like murdered soul-character, and an episode of The Simpsons where Bart foolishly sells his soul for five dollars. Osmond argues that while much of the old ideas and constructions of the soul have been abandoned some of the attitudes remain in disguised and unacknowledged forms:
"Sophisticated as we may believe ourselves, I would claim that the general fear of death and even more the fear of a misspent life, a life directed to the wrong ends, is with us today. And we still externalize our temptations and fates. 'The devil tempted me,' is usually said jocularly today, and we have largely given up believing in burning witches. But 'something got into me' is frequently a more serious expression of what we claim has led to an action. The most common modern way (and probably the one that is most analogous to the body and soul dialogue) of shedding responsibility for action is to plead abnormal brain chemistry. Here the chemicals, hormones or receptors in the brain are the uncontrollable elements that are not amenable to reason and force the person to act in a way for which it can be argued that he/she as a whole person cannot be held accountable. Thus these elements within the brain, in the popular imagination, take on an independent life of their own, causing us to act in ways that are not directly under the control of the will."
But the word soul today, Osmond correctly notes, has become taboo. As the above quotation indicates, people today instead speak of the 'brain,' the 'mind' or 'consciousness.' Science, specifically scientific reductionism, has taken over such discussions, should they happen at all. This newer way of looking at the world leads some to rejoice, though Osmond views some of those rejoicing as just being a different kind of believer:
"Jonathan Miller has said that religion (and therefore presumably a belief in a soul) is 'a form of mental illness.' If a belief that one will survive forever is empowering, so is a conviction that one can predict the future down to the last incinerated fragment of an imploding universe."
Osmond wonders if in embracing a worldview that limits itself to the knowable, provable, and physical we are missing something, and quotes in full a poem by Czeslaw Milosz:
The Second Space
The heavenly halls are so spacious!
Ascend to them on stairs of air.
Above white clouds the hanging celestial gardens.
A soul tears away from the body and soars.
It remembers that there's up and down.
Have we really lost faith in a second space?
They've dissolved, disappeared, both Heaven and Hell?
Without unearthly meadows how will one meet salvation?
Where will the gathering of the damned find its abode?
Let us weep, lament the enormous loss.
Let us smear our faces with coal, disarrange our hair.
Let us implore, so that it is returned to us,
The second space.