Mystical Mythology of the World

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GHOSTS

Etymology explains even more about the characteristics attributed to ghosts through the centuries. Ghost is created in part by way of spirit, and spirit by way of breath.

The Book of Genesis and many other world mythologies tell a similar story: God breathed into an inert form, and the creature then stirred with life. There has also been a widespread belief that each newborn becomes one of us in drawing its first breath.

Each dying person leaves the world by exhaling the last breath, sometimes depicted as a soul bird. The breath is seen as life. Expelling the final breath is "giving up the ghost." The spirit is on its way, the body stays behind. 

So in traditional accounts, spirit was breath, but more than breath: It became a subtle, immaterial essence that departs from a person at death. This idea is at the core of theological dualism, the belief that a person is composed of a material, perishable body and an immaterial, imperishable essence. Greek and Christian thought held that imagination, judgment, appreciation of beauty, and moral sense are functions of the spirit within humans. The spirit is an individual's higher self, something of which survives bodily death in many religious accounts. In Western societies, people tend to speak of this surviving element as the soul.

Ghosts, however, do not necessarily emanate from the refined spirit of divinity within. It is fairly common among world cultures to believe in another spirit that accompanies them throughout life. This is a shadowy sort of spirit that could be thought of as a duplicate image of the physical body. The German term doppelganger clearly conveys the idea of a second spirit that moves mysteriously through one's life, sometimes serving as the ruthless Mr. Hyde to the everyday cultivated Dr. Jekyll. This shadow spirit is apt to leave the body from time to time and linger around a person's place of death and burial. A ghost, then, might either be a blessed spirit on a mission of mercy, or the tortured and malevolent image of a body that suffered an anguished death.

'Who knocks?' 'I, who was beautiful
Beyond all dreams to restore,
I from the roots of the dark thorn am hither,
And knock on the door.'

'Who speaks?' 'I--once was my speech
Sweet as the bird's on the air,
When echo lurks by the waters to heed;
'Tis I speak thee fair.'


Walter de la Mare, The Ghost


 

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