St. Paul mentions an ecstatic experience in which he was "caught up even to the third heaven", but, as he says, "whether in the body, I know not, or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth." And this is the dilemma confronting many otherworld journeyers.

It is, I think, too easy to dismiss the conviction of many of them that they were physically lifted into another realm, such as an alien spacecraft. This, after all, is what it felt like; and it is a conviction shared by all members of traditional cultures - although, as we shall see, with an important difference in viewpoint. Thus, although I do not share the conviction, I want to stress that it is ancient and respectable and, I think, nearer to the truth of the matter than not to believe in any kind of otherworld journey at all. However, using the model of daimonic reality ... it is possible to make otherworld journeys intelligible, without recourse to a belief in an actual, physical experience. To do this, I will briefly consider the relationship between soul and body, beginning with a few elementary remarks about different kinds of daimonic states.

 In order to journey into the daimonic realm, the shaman goes into a trance or semi-trance in which he is either unconscious of the ordinary world or only dimly conscious of it, respectively. In other words, in the state of trance (or ecstasy) the Otherworld constitutes his only reality; in the semi-trance he retains one foot in this world, enabling him to relay his otherworld itinerary to an audience. His procedure is analogous both to that of modern mediums, who either allow spirits to possess them fully or who act as intermediaries between spirits and audience, passing messages between them; and to that of hypnotic subjects who are either fully "asleep," in which case, like the trance medium, they have no memory of what they have said or what was said through them, or only partially "asleep" - in which case they are able to describe, and remember, what they (or some part of themselves) are experiencing. It is a measure of the shaman's superior control over his journey, that he is able to remember all that befell him while in a full trance, that is, while he is dead to this world. However, all these states are more or less controlled, if only (in the medium's case) by his or her "spirit guide" or personal daimon; or in the case of the hypnotized, by the hypnotist who, like a guide, sets the agenda for the session and intervenes if the daimons grow too importunate.

Spontaneous , involuntary and uncontrolled journeys into the Otherworld can be highly successful. They can result, for example, in mystical revelations which enhance the lives of the recipients. But they can also be highly perilous, resulting in one of two undesirable conditions which used to be called "loss of soul" and "possession by spirits". The first, analogous to what we now call neurosis, occurs when we lose touch with the Otherworld; the second, analogous to psychosis, occurs when we are too much in touch with the Otherworld, becoming overwhelmed by it. (The nature of both these conditions will become clearer in the course of this chapter).

The use of the word "soul," as in "loss of soul", is rather different from the way I have been using the word. Hitherto, I have taken "soul" to refer to two distinct, but unrelated, images. Firstly, soul is synonymous with the daimonic realm itself, the realm of Imagination, and is really an abbreviation for the collective Anima Mundi, or World-Soul. Secondly, soul refers to whatever images the World-Soul itself uses to represent itself. Archetypally, this image is usually feminine and appears, for example, as a female daimon or goddess who, as Jung would say, "personifies the collective unconscious." Now the third use of "soul" refers to the image by which we, as individuals, are represented in the World-Soul.

Traditional views of human nature have always allowed for (at least) two "souls" of the latter kind. In ancient Egypt, for instance, they were known as the ka and the ba; in China, hun and p'o. One of these souls inhabits the body and is the equivalent of what, faute de mieux, we call the ego. I will call it the rational ego to distinguish it from the second soul, variously called, in other cultures, the shadow-soul, ghost-soul, death-soul, image-soul and dream-soul, for which our culture has either the word "soul" or else no word, because it is not generally believed to exist. However, it does exist and can be thought of as an ego, in the sense that it confers identity and individuality. It enables us, that is - like the rational ego - to say "I." But it is an ego, not of consciousness, but of the unconscious; not a waking, but a dream ego; not a rational ego, but an irrational ego. I will call it the daimonic ego. Like the rational ego, it has a body - not a physical one but a dream-body, a "subtle" body such as daimons are imagined as having, an "astral" body as some esoteric doctrines say: in short, a daimonic body.

The combination of rational ego and physical body is not directly analogous to the daimonic ego and daimonic body because the latter are not, strictly speaking, experienced as separate. The daimonic body immediately reflects the daimonic ego, and vice versa. It is an imaginative body, an image, as we know from dreams, when it can wear whatever clothes it wishes and can even change its shape altogether. Suddenly it can shift from a position of observing someone to becoming that person - that is, it embodies the way in which the daimonic ego shifts its point of view, looking out of the eyes of a person whom the moment before it was watching, or feeling the emotions of someone in whom it was previously inducing those emotions.

Thus it is this daimonic ego-body, so to speak, which is the "soul" that can be "lost," the soul that, in the shaman, makes otherworld journeys. It is this which leaves the physical body in the "out-of-the-body" experiences or in fashionable "near-death experiences" when, typically, we "die" on the operating table, only to find that we are floating above our bodies, able to observe what is going on and to hear what the surgeons are saying (they are startled to have their words repeated to them later, when we recover). It is this soul, too, which can be seen by us, or others, in those cases of "bilocation" when our doppelgängers (doubles) appear mysteriously. It is this soul which, in Christian mystics, ascends towards the Godhead, sparking the debate as to whether it remains intact during mystical union (as a sense of identity) or whether it is, finally, dissolved in, or subsumed by, God.

The daimonic and rational egos are not as separate as, for the sake of convenience, I have made them out to be. They constantly flow into each other, just as our waking lives and dream lives influence each other. The daimonic ego can at any time dispossess consciousness of its rational ego as, for instance, when we are absorbed in some imaginative activity or when we are seized by a visionary experience. Conversely, the rational ego can traduce the daimonic, carrying over into dreams and visions those "daylight" attitudes which are wholly inappropriate to the twilight world of the daimons. Naturally, the rational ego is often frightened by the irrational images it encounters there. It tries to run away or lash out - only to find that it cannot move, because such literal muscular actions have no power to move the daimonic body.

Similarly, when we wake in the night, as abductees so often do, to find "aliens" in the room, we cannot move because our physical bodies are asleep and only the rational ego has woken. Actually, I ought to say that it is the daimonic ego which "wakes;" but since we do not recognize or understand it, we imagine that it is the rational ego - the latter is so robust, so adamant, that it imposes its rational viewpoint on the daimonic ego so that we come to believe that the nocturnal events are literally occurring. The fact that we seem to wake in our bedrooms is a metaphor for this literalizing activity of the rational ego; for, in fact, we wake up in the daimonic realm on which the image of our familiar, daylight, "rational" bedroom has been imposed. When the aliens, intruding into this image from the daimonic side, "float" our bodies up into their "spacecraft," this is not only the daimonic body leaving the physical body, but also the daimonic ego leaving the image of the literal bedroom and entering daimonic space proper, where it is increasingly pressurized to give up its rational, literalizing standpoint. But this, precisely, is initiation: the threatening and, finally, dismantling of the rational standpoint by the alien daimonic world in order to instate its own, daimonic ego.

 It should now become apparent that the division I have made between the two kinds of ego is only a manner of speaking. In reality, there is only a single ego, but with two perspectives: the waking, conscious, rational, literalizing ego is simply another aspect of the dreaming, unconscious, irrational, daimonic ego, as if they were two sides of a single coin. But the shape-shifting daimonic ego can assume any number of different perspectives, all more or less daimonic, all members of the same family as it were, like the heroes of Greek mythology. Only the rational ego promotes its own single, literalistic perspective as the only perspective, while simultaneously denying - demonizing - all others.

Bodies

One of the things a study of otherworld journeys teaches us is that we cannot imagine life without a body. We cannot exist as bare discarnate egos, even in the "life to come." "It is sown a natural body;" wrote St. Paul, "it is raised a spiritual body." And we cannot help but envisage this spiritual body as something like the "subtle" - the daimonic - body which can separate from, and survive the physical.

Paul was writing, of course, long before the Church Council of 869, which officially decided that we humans are divided into two parts - a body and a spirit (thus losing the category of "soul"). He still conceived of life, including spiritual life, as bodily; and the word he uses for "body,"whether "natural" or "spiritual," is soma. He contrasts this in his Epistles with another kind of body, for which he uses another Greek word, sarx. Sometimes translated as "flesh" (as in "the sins of the flesh"), sarx referred exclusively to the evil possibilities of bodily life. Soma, on the other hand, referred to all the possibilities of bodily life, good or evil. The key point here is that neither word referred exclusively to the physical body. Rather, soma referred to all perspectives on bodily life, of which the physical was only one; sarx referred soley to the literal perspective that would reduce all bodily life to the physical, to mere flesh.

 In my scheme of things, the daimonic body (soma) is no more separate from the physical body (sarx) than their two kinds of ego - they are simply two different perspectives. And this confronts us with a disconcerting idea: that our physical bodies are not necessarily literal... The sense that our bodies are literally real is a construct of the rational ego which, while it does not identify itself with the body (it sees the body as its vehicle), nevertheless allies itself so closely with the body as to impose its perspective on the body. It makes our physical reality the only reality - makes of our physical reality a literal reality. This leads to the erroneous belief that, with physical death, we cease to exist. But our physical death releases the daimonic body. Moreover, if we undergo initiatory death, which destroys the rational ego's literal perspective, the physical body is deliteralized, freed from its single perspective, released from sarx, as it were. It becomes, in fact, daimonic. If this is the case, we might expect the physical body, now daimonized, to be able to contravene what we call physical laws.

It can, of course. We think immediately of fakirs who can bury themselves for days at a time in the earth, or of Zen Buddhist monks who are able, like Jesus, to walk on water. The spiritual training necessary for such feats has fallen into desuetude in our culture, but in monastic times they were common enough for men like St. John of the Cross to warn of the danger of confusing them with sanctity. A famous example of daimonic activity in a physical body (it was even suspected of being demonic, the work of the Devil) was repeated levitations of St. Teresa of Avila. She experienced "raptures," not unlike the shaman's celestial journey, in which "...the Lord catches up the soul ... and carries it right out of itself ... and begins to show it features of the Kingdom He has prepared for it." The raptures were sometimes so violent that she not only felt her soul being swept up by God, but was also lifted bodily off the ground so that her sisters had to hold her down. (This is not all that exceptional - more than 100 Catholic saints were said to have levitated.)

We might say that, unlike the abductees whose rational egos were floated up in their daimonic bodies, St. Teresa's daimonic ego remained in the physical body, which was sufficiently deliteralized as to simulate the celestial ascent of its daimonic counterpart. She was aware, however, that her levitations were not in good taste - she would shout, "Put me down, God!" - nor a sign of spiritual advencement (we remember that the well-known psychic, but otherwise ordinary man, D.D. Home, could float into the air at will). It is as if she knew that her celestial ascent should really - like the shaman's - be taking place less ostentatiously, in the daimonic body alone and without any accompanying physical flights. It was as if, in other words, she had an inkling of the literalizing influence of Christian dogma which, by polarizing man into either a spirit or a body, abolished the daimonic "both-and" perspective and so literalized spiritual ascent as physical "flight." (Analogously, Christian dogma literalizes spiritual rebirth as a "resurrection of the body.")

Christian or post-Christian cultures can only view the physical body in a literal way. For example, the UFO's light-beam paralyses its victims before they are snatched into the Otherworld. Because the experience seems "real" to these abductees, they assume that it must be literal - and therefore that their physical bodies have been taken into "spacecraft." Non-Christian, traditional cultures also seem to view the physical body in a literal way. For instance, as Lady Wilde writes, describing fairy abductions among the Irish: "The evil influence of the fairy glance [like the UFO's light-beam] does not kill, but it throws the object into a death-like trance, in which the real body is carried off to some fairy mansion, while a log of wood, or some ugly deformed creature is left in its place, clothed with the shadow of the stolen form..." But what on the surface seems like literalism on the part of fairy lore - the "real body" is taken - is actually the reverse: the physical body is imagined in the first instance as daimonic. The "real body" is the daimonic body which, once taken to the Otherworld, leaves behind (as Lady Gregory puts it) "a body in its likeness or the likeness of a body." This expression attempts to describe the physical body when it is deprived of its daimonic ego-body - when it has "lost its soul." It becomes inanimate like a block of wood; an empty, ugly husk, barely recognizable as the "stolen" person. This, metaphorically, is how the physical body appears when, deprived of its daimonic counterpart, it becomes only physical - becomes literal.

The belief that the body left behind is actually a replacement (i.e. that an exchange has been made) expresses the reluctance on the part of traditional cultures to separate body and soul. They implicitly recognize that the physical and daimonic bodies are only two aspects of, two perspectives on, the same thing, as if the body were only the physical manifestation of soul, and soul the spiritual manifestation of body. They recognize, that is, that we humans are simultaneously quasi-physical, quasi-spiritual. We, too, are daimonic.

A chapter from Patrick Harpur's remarkable book Daimonic Reality

http://deoxy.org/soulbody.htm