CYCLE TEN

1. The concept of ghosts, or spiritual and/or soulful presences having human form, would be inconceivable without due reference to a tradition of religious belief rooted in the phenomenal, and embracing, besides anthropomorphism, both humanism and nonconformism. Such a tradition, avowedly Christian, will tend to encourage a bodily projection of spirit and/or soul, in keeping with its phenomenal limitations.

2. Hence the notion of ghosts is only credible, it seems to me, on the basis of an extrapolation of spirit and/or soul from the human form in its entirety. For air, the substance of spirit, and blood, the substance of soul, share a common passage through the veins, and the veins encompass all parts of the body, including, of course, the head and nether limbs.

3. Thus there could be no philosophical difficulty in extrapolating either bloody or airy presences, corresponding to the concept of ghosts, from the human form, and in endowing them with supernatural significance, the former effectively diabolical, the latter divine, which is a distinction, after all, between soul and spirit, Hell and Heaven. Yet such presences are still tied, for all their ostensibly supernatural significance, to a phenomenal tradition, or one in which both the soul and the spirit are subordinated, in typically Christian fashion, to the mind and the id of nonconformist and humanist convention, being coloured and subverted thereby.