Chapter 3: The Seraphic interpretation of the Soul (excerpt)

One of the more unique aspects of the Seraphic tenets is its conception of the soul. While reincarnation itself is an ancient concept, this interpretation is one that is bizarrely specific. This aspect alone explained and elaborated on at length several times in the text, amounting to a full 50 out of its 397 pages dedicated to explaining what the soul is and how its cycle of reincarnation works. Thus I have decided to dedicate an entire chapter to explaining in the simplest possible way the metaphysics of both, which will be no small feat.

To start with the very basics, the soul is the consciousness of a living being. It inhabits the body of the being but is also its own separate entity. When the body dies, the soul returns to “Latum Alterum,” which is where souls are created, returned, and sent into new bodies. This cycle occurs as follows:

the creation of a soul > the placement of a soul inside of a living body > the soul living out a life in that body > the body perishing and the soul returning to Latum Alterum > the soul lingers in Latum Alterum for a period of time > the soul is placed in a new body and the cycle continues

Thus like many mythologies, Seraphic belief is divided between the land of the living, and the land of the dead. Though perhaps it is better seen as a divide between the temporary flesh of the material world and the immaterial perpetual life of the soul. Souls can reincarnate as any species of being and it is implied, however not outright stated, that there is a sort of “karmic force” that determines what form the soul will take next. It is however clearly stated that a soul can become “corrupted” by strong negative emotions such as hate, which can damage the soul and cause it and its physical form to change in peculiar ways. It is from this damage that the first demons would later be created, just before the War of the Seraphs.

Just taken on its own the Seraphic concept of the soul could fill its own book, and has! For the sake of brevity I will necessarily have to skip many of the interesting, yet unimportant details regarding it (for further reading on the subject I recommend either my previous paper I wrote on the subject in 2015, or the book “The Seraphic Soul” by Professor Molly Ellis of the University of Cambridge). Even with the number of pages dedicated to the concept, there are still many aspects left vague or unclear. Presumably what happened was that the author drew from incomplete sources, with whatever answers there were lost to time, or perhaps in his increasing madness, he simply forgot to include them.

One interesting aspect that the text never elaborates on is the origin of the soul. There is no specific creation moment for Latum Alterum, perhaps implying it has always existed? It is explained that One was the very first soul on this planet, however there is no elaboration on what that entails. Did all other souls spawn from One just as the Seraphs did?