The three-part division of the human being into body, soul and spirit is all but universal. Now, knowing you have a body is easy enough, but in these materialistic times soul and spirit have been forgotten, at best viewed as things that cannot be known, only superstitiously “believed” in.
Sometimes Hollywood’s special brand of magic can help us understand metaphysical truths, so let us take flight to the land of the pharaohs via the 1999 film, The Mummy, one of the silver screen’s dozens of depictions of ancient Egypt and its mysteries of death and resurrection.
In a flashback scene, the priest Imhotep uses necromancy to re-animate his lover, Anck Su Namum, whose mummified corpse lies on a stone slab. So much for the body, but the animated sequence that ensues helps us visualize the invisible soul.
Using his powers of sorcery, Imhotep summons his lover’s soul from a murky pool connected to the waters of the underworld. It rises as a kind of cloudy, electromagnetic-energy field that contains all of Anck Su Namun’s memories and emotions, including her love for Imhotep.
When it is sucked back into her body, she is not merely a living organism once again, but “herself,” which we can now see was not the physical body but the cloud-energy that animates it.
As for the third part of the ternary—the spirit—that, of course, is the Supreme Principle that has made possible the body, the soul and everything else in the universe.
As the poet said, most people lead lives of quiet desperation, driven by an unquenchable thirst to gratify bodily needs with material things. Those seeking awakening from a somnambulistic existence must disentangle from the body the ego’s sense of “me” and begin to identify it with that cloudy energy field the animation department at The Mummy has helped us visualize.
The forces magnetized in this cloud seek actualization of things that are far loftier than the limited conception of our lives would dare admit. Clues as to what they are can be obtained from our astrological birth chart.
The soul’s energy field lives outside space and time, and through imagination acts as a bridge between the physical body and the transcendent world of the spirit. That which cannot be satisfied on the physical plane of earthly life can still be actualized in the soul, which is why it is better to be poor with a rich imagination than to have all the wealth in the world but a withered inner garden.
