Book Review

Soul: An Archaeology – Readings from Socrates to Ray Charles
By: Phil Cousineau
Publisher: San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994.
ISBN 0-06-250243-3

Why do we ponder the question, what is soul? The author answers, “Because something undeniable presses in on us: beauty, time, death, the holiness of the world, a nostalgia for the universal.” In this book, Cousineau has collected readings about the soul from a wide variety of cultural contexts and religious beliefs. He finds that the question of the soul engages “the most profound mythic questions that have always intrigued human beings: Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where do we go when we die?”

The book is divided into seven sections. Part 1, entitled “The Fall of the Soul into Time,” offers readings ranging from the Genesis myth in the Bible to the conceptions of the North American Indians, Aristotle, and the African-American musician Ray Charles. Mystics, philosophers, and poets have contemplated the mysterious idea that the origin of life does not “begin with our birth alone.” As William Wordsworth wrote,

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting
And Cometh from afar.

An old Jewish legend, “The Angel and the Unborn Soul,” describes the soul being sent against its will down from the Seventh Heaven into the womb, where it is taught by an angel that if it will live according to God’s commandments during life it will return to heaven, but that if it disobeys those commandments it will be “doomed to the other place.” After nine months, the soul, again against its will, comes into the world and immediately forgets all it has learned.

Creation myths in many cultures explore the notion that the soul has been created by a higher being and has “fallen into time.” Similarly, William Irwin Thompson, in his book The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light, likens the soul to Humpty Dumpty, whose fall from the wall is the

fall into time, and neither God’s animals nor His angels can put him back into the world beyond time…. [This] fall is the archetype that stands over our understanding of time. The soul is, like Humpty Dumpty on the wall, above time, seeing past, present, and future at once. From the point of view of the ego, down in time, everything is linear; the past is behind, and the future is up ahead.

Part 2, “The Seat of the Soul,” collects readings offering various metaphors for the soul. Saint Teresa of Avila, a 16th-century Spanish Carmelite nun, says the soul is “as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions…. I can find nothing with which to compare the great beauty of a soul and its great capacity.” She says that we don’t understand God and the soul because our interest is in outer things. “All our interest is centred in the rough setting of the diamond and in the outer wall of the castle – that is to say, in these bodies of ours.” Other contemplations of the Seat of the Soul appear from across the ages: from the Roman statesman Cicero (106-43 BCE), the 11th-century German prophet and mystic Hildegard of Bingen, the 13th-century Italian philosopher Thomas Aquinas, the 16th-century French philosopher Rene Descartes, the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman, and the 20th-century Swiss psychologist Carl Jung.

Part 3 of the book, “Heart and Soul,” explores the relationship between the soul and love. Meister Eckhart, a 14th-century German mystic, wrote:

God loves the soul so deeply
that were anyone to take away from God
the divine love of the soul,
that person would kill God.
…
It is a joy to God

to have poured out
the divine nature and being
completely into us
who are divine images.

Part 4, “Soul Crisis,” focuses on a condition that shamans have called “soul loss.” In modern terminology we might call it alienation, depression, or loneliness. Or in the author’s words, “pain in the core of our being where we know there was once something full and vital”; “a hole where once was soul.” Albert Schweitzer, a 20th-century theologian, writes, “You realize that your soul suffers if you live superficially. People need times in which to concentrate, when they can search their inmost selves. It is tragic that most men have not achieved this feeling of self-awareness. And finally when they hear the inner voice, they do not want to listen anymore.”

Part 5, on “Soul Work,” explores the question “How should I actually live my life?” The American poet Robert Bly writes, “When we fight for the soul and its life, we receive as reward not fame, not wages, not friends, but what is already in the soul, a freshness that no one can destroy, that animals and trees share.”

Part 6, “The World Soul,” is about the sacredness of the universal energy that is beyond the individual soul, enlivening the cosmos. The Greeks called it the soul of the universe, psyche tou kosmou; the Romans called it the soul of the world, anima mundi; Ralph Waldo Emerson called it the Over-Soul; and the Eskimos called it Sila, “an overarching power that asks us not to be afraid, to be respectful of the spirit, the genius, the intangible forces hidden beneath the surface of all things.”

Part 7, “The Soul and Destiny,” asks how we reconcile the unknown aspects of life and death, looking for “patterns in the belief of life after death” and offering readings about life after death from sources as diverse as Sri Ramakrishna and the Haitian zombie tradition. The author describes reincarnation as “worldwide conviction of the long journey of the soul.” The 6th-century Welsh poet Taliesin, who was thought to be the traditional inspiration for the character of Merlin in the King Arthur legends, wrote about the shape-shifting nature of the soul: “I have been in many shapes before I attained a congenial form…. There is nothing in which I have not been.” The 12th-century Sufi poet Jalal-Uddin Rumi wrote:

I died a mineral, and became a plant.
I died a plant and rose an animal.
I died an animal and I was a man.
Why should I fear? When was I less by dying?
Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar
With the blessed angels; but even from angelhood
I must pass on. All except God perishes.
When I have sacrificed my angel soul,
I shall become that which no mind ever conceived.
O, let me not exist! for Non-Existence proclaims,
“To Him we shall return.”

In conclusion, by reading about the soul by writers, mystics, philosophers, psychologists, and poets across time, the author says, we see that “myths, images, philosophies of soul remind us of the long story, the eternal aspect of ourselves.” When we listen to these voices, he says,

the hard shell of modern life is ripped off in an impassioned cry for genuine soul searching … down deep in your soul where infinity is echoing, deep down where the backbeat of Eternity resounds, the deep bass line underneath the melody of all things.