Collective Souls: Of Contracts, Blood and the Soul

Who will Save Your Soul?
 
I will be discussing a lot of different things we have seen over the years concerning the soul within the confines of the world of the Sookie Books and True Blood and mythology in general. I broach this topic mainly because of the way the last Sookie Book begins with Copley Carmichael and his chauffeur selling their souls to the devil but there is more I want to talk about than that particular scene but that is the impetus.
 
Besides the deal with the devil, there is a lot of consideration about the soul in the Sookie Books. In Dead Until Dark, Sookie asks Bill if he thinks he has lost his soul as the Catholic Church has been teaching in the days after the Great Revelation. Bill tells Sookie he didn’t think so because even after all that time, he was not vicious and cruel though he could be both, and he tried only to eat bad people and never ate a child.
 
Though Eric is pretty much indifferent to the state of his soul, he does seem to understand the notion of karma which is intertwined with the Eastern belief in the soul when in Dead and Gone Sookie goes to see Eric at Fangtasia and tells him all the bad stuff that has been happening to her and he says to her, “You must not be living right.” And in Dead to the World he seems to question the idea of a God who would ask his followers to simply stand there and let something bad happen to them.
 
In Dead Ever After, Sookie is confronted not only with creatures who have made the Faustian deal, but are now soulless and thus immune to magik, the notion that she is not sure Vampires have a soul and are therefore damned which makes the idea of her being made vampire despicable (hypocrite).
 
In prior seasons of True Blood there has been issues of possession and release of restless souls and the introduction of contracts signed in blood for the life (soul) of someone else and we have in Dead Reckoning the notion of contracting arranged marriages that are basically unbreakable. And of course we cannot ignore what has happened to Bill since he drank the blood of Lilith and become something more than himself and possibly something more than Vampire.
 
So one of the first things I think must be discussed is the question: Who has a soul and who doesn’t. It is not as clear cut as one would think.
 
Then Sings My Soul
 
I remember reading once about a doctor who wanted to test the theory that there is a way to measure the soul. He tried different ways to try to scientifically identify the soul. There was no rush of light or a wispy ethereal bit of something that escaped out of the mouth. What he did find was that the dead often weighed a little less than the living, at least 3 ounces. This was not a consistent observation and he could only find this anomaly a few times and it was not enough to prove the existence of the soul, but it is evocative, particularly when you think of the Egyptians who believed the soul could only go on to the afterlife if it was weighed against the weight of a feather and if your soul was lighter than the feather, then the soul was going to the afterlife and if it wasn’t, it would be devoured by the crocodile headed god of the underworld.
 
Philosophers and Religious thinkers have contemplated and written millions of words on the soul, what it is, what it is composed of and the quality of the soul as it goes through the process of physical death and into the world of pure spirit.
 
Christians believe the soul is the only bit of the human being that is immortal. The nurturing of the soul is the important task in the life of a Christian and salvation of the soul relies on the belief in Christ and his sacrifice to redeem the soul from the original sin, which was not sex, sports fans, but the disobeying of God’s command not to over reach his orders to become “knowledgeable” and lose one’s innocence of  evil.
 
The person is blessed with the soul from conception. The verse many point at is the verse that the Lord has known me from my foundations (Isaiah) and in the New Testament when Mary goes to see her cousin Elizabeth who is six months gone in pregnancy with John the Baptist and Mary is some three months pregnant with Christ and Elizabeth declares the babe leapt in her womb at the coming of her Lord and Saviour.
 
Jews believe the soul comes from the Guff and enters into the child when it is born and takes its first breath.
 
Buddhists believe the soul is a particle of the One Soul and when you become enlightened, once you die you rejoin with the One Soul and if you are not enlightened, then your soul is sent back to earth in something or someone else to relive life and someday becomes enlightened.
 
Jainists believe in animism, which says there are souls in everything, living or manmade, since all manmade things are made of living things, including rocks and sand, the manmade things have a soul as well. They are so strict in the belief of souls in all things they will even sweep the road gently before them to move along the insects and even the bacteria to avoid as much as they can, killing a living soul.
 
Pre Christian Europeans believed in the ideas of multiple things that make up the soul. Self recognition, recognizing others as beings of soul, active thought (as Descartes said “I think therefore I am”) and the subduing of self for the good of all, including giving one’s life for the safety of other lives were all parts which made up the soul.  Others believed the soul  is part animal desire and part control and it is the middle of these parts is the soul. Still others believe that merely contemplating the soul was evidence of the soul.
 
Some scholars believe there is a difference between the spirit and the soul. The spirit is that spark of energy that makes us sentient and this is the thing that comes to us in instinct and the drive for survival. The soul is the intellect which learns and appreciates knowledge, seeks answers and forges deep relationships. In Freudian thought this is the Ego and the Id.
 
So the next logical step is to consider what happens when the body dies and what happens to the soul. Some argue that once the body dies that is all there is to the soul, it dies too. Others believe that the body dies but the soul goes on to some greater reward. And then there are some who believe there are beings who may not have souls and therefore do not have an afterlife.
 
What does it Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Own Soul?
 
The folklore says that for whatever reason, the Vampire has gained immortality of the body and supernatural abilities but have lost their souls and are therefore damned. But is evidence of a soul is the intellect, the Vampire has a soul. It may be Other and therefore are not vouchsafed the same sort of reward when they meet the true death. Amelia in Dead Ever After explains to Sookie that there are some beings who are immune to magik, and this sort of being is a being without a soul. As we have seen through the Sookie Books and through True Blood, the Vampire is a species that is very much affected by magik, Eric is cursed by Marnie to lose his memory in both the books and the show and a Vampire sent to do harm to Sookie is affected by Amelia’s wards in Dead Ever After.
 
There are some folklorists who say the notion of a Vampire with a soul, that is, a Vampire with compassion, is a modern romantic construct and has nothing to do with the legends and lore of the vampire. I would point out the fact that Vampires in lore often make companions with whom they can share the pleasures and complexities of immortality and lighten their loneliness. Lilith’s own tale is a tale of a creature who wants love but cannot get it in any sort of equal terms. So the soul of the Vampire is not a romantic construct.
 
Vampires are not the only creatures of lore with a questionable soul. Within our Sookie Books/True Blood universe, we have the fae, maenads, and the two-natured not to mention whatever Dr. Ludwig is and Mr. Cataliades and Diantha who are half demons but not necessarily the devil. Are these creatures considered “without soul”?
 
The fae are categorized as not possessing a human soul, but a soul of other. Depending upon what lore you might follow, the fae were heavenly creatures who were accidentally swept from heaven during Lucifer’s rebellion and though they were not bad enough for hell, they were not important enough to be gathered back up from earth and returned to heaven. So the most you could say is the fae possess an ambiguous soul.  Their rank is just different in the scheme of all living creatures.
 
The maenad was once a human but were transformed because of their extreme devotion to Bacchus they have given themselves over the pagan god’s will. If you are a Christian, you may consider the pagan gods as the devil fooling the early humans into not recognizing the true God, so they have lost their souls.
 
The two-natured are problematic because they are both human and animal. If you belong to a shamanistic religion, like the religion of the Norse or the Native Americans and to a small degree the Celts, then you consider the two-natured especially blessed by the gods who allow you to be transformed into the mighty beasts of the mountains and fields and jungles. Christians however believe the ability to change your shape from one form to another, you are either cursed by God as in the case of Nebuchadnezzar who was cursed by God to be a beast of the field, which some call a werewolf. Witches were thought of as being the Lamia or Lilith which appeared in the form of an owl. Gerald of Cambresis tells the story of the Irish so cursed by lycanthropy by God that is they could go seven years and not kill anyone in their were forms then the curse would be lifted.
 
Since we really do not know what Dr. Ludwig is, we cannot say she has a soul. If she is at best some sort of supernatural, then she may very well have a soul similar to the fae. In my story Dead Again, I have made her an Elemental, a very magikally powerful supernatural creature that shares space with the fae, the Angels and other go betweens for humans and the gods.
 
A Soul by Any Other Name would Sell as Sweet
 
If we think of the soul as a commodity you can “sell” for some favor, you have to consider who would gain the most by buying your soul and to sell or buy anything you must have a contract.
 
If you think of life, you sign contracts all the time. When you buy or rent a house, you sign a mortgage or lease agreement. If you write a check, that check is a statement to the vendor that you have the funds sufficient in your bank to have the contract (the check) honored and your debt discharged. If you have a credit card, you promise the credit card company that you will pay back the money they lend you on your behalf for goods and services. If you get married, divorced, adopt or foster a child, you sign contracts and pay fees that say these things are legal and binding with all the rights and responsibilities of these contracts.
 
The contract is the thing. There are good solid contracts that give equal benefits for equal pay. Then there are some that are full of loop holes. One of the most famous stories of a contract is chock full of loopholes.
 
Faust by Christopher Marlowe is the story of a man who has spent his entire life to attain knowledge but nothing else and he finds a way to conjure Mephistopheles, the deal maker in Hell. Faust believes he has figured out a way to make a deal with the devil which ensures he gets everything he bargains for but he can get out of handing over his soul. 
 
This popular concept is recorded only once in the Bible. Jesus is in the wilderness for 40 days and nights to prepare him for the trials ahead when he begins his ministry. During his period of meditation and fasting, the Devil appears to him and he tells Jesus to throw himself off the side of a cliff, fore if he be the son of God, then angels will be sent to catch him lest his foot dash against a stone. Then he is told to turn the stones to be made into dread so he might eat. Finally the Devil takes Jesus to a high place and says to him to see all the cities of the world that he can give them to Jesus if he would bow down and worship the devil and each time Jesus turns down the deal.
 
Judas is thought to have sold his soul for thirty pieces of silver to deliver Christ to his enemies. And the Woman of Endor often called a witch, is thought to have sold her soul for her powers, but there is no obvious tale that proves this.
 
One of the conundrums of the “Sell Your Soul to the Devil” is the state of Original Sin. If we believe that we are all sinners and we have to be redeemed, that suggests we already belong to someone. Christ’s death and resurrection cancels the “contract” that was made for us in Eden by our parents, namely Adam and Eve who took the contract with the devil when breaking the one command God gave them to have knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, from the moment we are conceived or born, we belong to the devil so we don’t have to make the deal with the devil. Or do we?
 
One of the things that happens is when we make the ubiquitous deal with the devil, we lose hope of salvation. Now there is only one sin that cannot be forgiven according to scripture and that is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. What constitutes blasphemy of the Holy Spirit I have no clue, but I imagine it must be fairly drastic. It must be the dishonoring of God in some genuinely crude way and it must also deny the existence of saving grace and it must entail the outward show of blasphemy like dishonoring holy books and relics and sacramentals and doing other tasteless things. In the Malleus Malificarum, the witches supposedly kissed the devil’s second face which was found between the buttocks and then spitting upon or trampling the Bible or a Crucifix or some other relic.
 
This is of course ridiculous because Witches or Pagans do not willfully disrespect other people’s religions for three reasons: 1) Pagans generally respect all faiths even faiths that are not their own. 2) The symbols of other religions have little or no meaning to them and they find it illogical to disrespect the symbols. To insult these religious objects recognizes their power. 3) Pagans do not believe in the Christian concept of the devil, but instead believe in the evil inside each of us so there is no one to do a deal with.
 
What the notion of the Deal does it kills the person’s hope of salvation. They are doomed because they signed a contract and there is no way out of the contract.
 
Contracts with other supernatural beings are just as tricky. The tale of Rumplestiltskin is one of those contract deals where the contract is full of loopholes and the loopholes are actually the thing that undoes the contract in the faery tale. Dealing with the fae is always dodgy as they reckon truth and promises differently from humans. Andy Bellefleur made a contract with Maurella who made him touch her light which meant little to Andy, and apparently ignorance is not a defense to the contract.
 
 
Even contracts with Vampires are tricky. In Season Four, when Sookie discovers Eric has bought her house, he explains, “If I owned the house, I owned you.” The marriage Eric forges with Sookie in Dead and Gone is a necessary maneuver but it leaves her in a situation where she is contractually bound to Eric until Dead Ever After when she has to be ritually divorced by Eric so he will be free to marry Freyda.
 
The contract which sold Sookie to Warlow was made in the language of the fae and was written in the blood of the contractee. What the contract basically says is that Sookie, the first fae bearing descendent of John Stackhouse, would belong to Warlow. What that entails we don’t know, but since he is the child of Lilith mentioned in the Vampire Bible, his powers may be considerable.
 
But as we know from Adam and Eve, who exchanged their innocence for knowledge, contracts can be made in more than one way. One of those ways can be the sharing of self. Sex, the sharing of a kiss, a handshake, sharing of a drink can constitute a contract. For Bill, the ultimate fulfillment of a contract between him and Lilith was composed of Bill’s consumption of her blood. In exchange, Bill is endowed with additional powers, like telekinesis, telling the future and being able to withstand being staked among others. Presumably, the appearance of the three spectres who enter him in his office is the other half of the deal: Bill gets all these powers, while Lilith gets some unknown quantity.
 
“Soul” Survivor
 
Is there a way out of the conundrum our Bill finds himself? We are not sure, but we have seen other instances of souls being saved. Tara’s soul was saved from the Maenad by Bill and Sookie when they went into her head using Bill’s glamoury and Sookie’s telepathy. Jesus used the blood of the dead witch to counter Marnie’s spell that had Sookie trapped in the ring of fire. Marnie made blood deals with the dead to contact the soul of Antonia to increase her powers and Antonia used her presence in Marnie to have revenge for the torment she suffered at the hands of Vampires. Then the ghost of Marnie collected the power of Jesus by possessing Lafayette and killing Jesus to get his magik through bloodletting, which is a way of making a contract.
 
Can Bill be saved in some way? You might consider exorcism, which is the extraction of the possessing spirit and forcing it to release the host for the contract. Bill may have to come to some realization or personal revelation that appeals to his old self and he may have to be the one to break the contract he has made. Or, if possible, Lilith must be killed…or in her proxy…Warlow may have to be killed.
 
Whatever the solution is, it just goes to show you….beware the contracts you make, you may not be able to get out them.
 
Sources:
 
The Douay Rheims Catholic Bible, The Witch Book, The Encyclopedia of the Occult, The Guff and other Jewish Tales, Western Philosophy, The Book, The Bhagavad-Gita,  The Upanishads, The Koran, Summa Theologica, Search for the Soul, Greek Religious Thought, Religions of Egypt, The Book of the Dead, True Blood, The Southern Vampire Mysteries 1-13, The Book of Spiritualism, Dr. Faustus, Grimm’s Fairy Tales