"I'm a blood-sucking fiend! Look at my outfit!"
"First of all, we must also put an end to that other and more disastrous "atomism" that one Christianity has taught best and longest, "the atomism of soul".
Let this expression signify the belief that the soul is something indestructible, eternal indivisible that it is a monad, an atamon: this belief must be thrown out of science!"
Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future
Friedrich Nietzsche
A Jarful of Sense-Impressions
"When you become a vampire the demon takes your body, but it doesn't get your soul.
That's gone...
No conscience, no remorse... It's an easy way to live.
You have no idea what it's like to have done the things I've done... and to care."
"I've had a demon inside me for a couple hundred years - just waiting for a good fight."
"In order to understand how Whedon, an atheist and an existentialist, might have arrived at an ontological mythology of the soul in the first place, it will be helpful to consider very briefly the philosophical and theological underpinnings of the traditional (and still popular) understanding of the soul in the West as well as the manner in which such doctrines affected the subsequent development of vampire folklore in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. The way in which Whedon adopted and adapted that folklore initially, and how he evolved that mythology over the life-span of the series, will also be considered by making a careful comparison of the way Whedon variously permitted both ontological and existential emphases in the first season of BtVS, where the mythology is initially established, and the final season of Angel, where it reaches its final expression among a cast that includes two ensouled vampires as well as a third soulless demon who gives many evidences of having integrated herself into a social and moral environment conditioned largely by human values.
Throughout it will be observed that Whedon and his writers allow the viewer’s understanding to swing like a pendulum between the ontological and existential views of the soul without ever wholly discounting either.
The concept of the soul finds its most primitive written roots in religious and mythopoeic texts such as the Sanskrit Rig Veda, the Sumerian Descent of Inanna into Hell and Homer’s Iliad. The earliest Greek philosophers understood the soul to be a cosmological agent by which all things, including the sun and moon, moved (see Green and Groff 17ff; see also Aristotle 403b). It wasn’t until Aristotle, however, that a clear and systematic elaboration of this doctrine emerged in a single work with respect to human beings. In his much-studied treatise On the Soul, Aristotle extends the notions of his philosophical predecessors by arguing that the individual human soul lends the body its capacity for life by serving as its animating force. Among a number of metaphors to illustrate this point Aristotle suggests that the body is to the physical eye as the soul is to the eye’s ability to see. In this way Aristotle understood the human soul to be inseparable from the body: a body without a soul isn’t an active body (Greek soma) at all but merely a lifeless corpse (Greek nekros).[4] Similarly, the soul without the body is as unthinkable a proposition as vision is without an eye. Though not understood as the seat of individual personality, the soul for Aristotle is the body’s indispensable animating force without which the it cannot live or move.
For the doctrine common among today’s major monotheistic faiths that the soul is an immortal spirit inhabiting the body and lending it intelligence, will, and personality, one must turn to the discursive but influential writings of Plato. In addition to functioning as the body’s animating life force, the soul is, as Plato described it, in command of the body (Georgias 493a), the seat of all knowledge (Meno 86a), and an immortal spirit separate from the body (Meno 86b). By locating within the soul both the life-force of the body and human knowledge, Plato is the first to set forth a doctrine that allows for personal immortality in a separable soul with memories intact. This marks an enormous and important distinction from both Aristotle’s assertion that a soul without a body is unthinkable and Homer’s depiction of souls as imbecilic shadows divorced from their previous lives and memories (see Green and Groff 50ff; Iliad XXIII). Plato’s thought was adopted and adapted by some of the earliest Christian apologists and had enormous influence on the subsequent development of the Christian doctrine of the human soul, primarily through the writings of St. Augustine (MacDonald 143ff.). From there the concept of the soul as an immortal spirit animating the body as the seat of human will, intelligence, and conscience, has pervaded every corner of Western philosophy and culture."
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