On Selling Your Soul for Immortality
Topic: Selling Your Soul for Immortality
This sermon’s topic is the concept of exchanging your soul,
or an equivalent, to attain immortality. We will be discussing two examples
from literature and even one from American history. This is not quite the same
thing as a Faustian bargain, as Faust sold his soul in exchange for knowledge
and power, but it is similar. The books we are discussing are My Soul to Keep
by Tananarive Due and The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge. The example from history
is Robert Leroy Johnson, who is rumored to have sold his soul to become a
famous musician, which is itself a kind of immortality. (As people are still
listening to his music to this day, I would say he succeeded.)
In My Soul to Keep, Due introduces us to a character who
attained immortality by way of a ritual and an infusion of some rather
remarkable blood. The catch is that the blood is said to come from the wounds
of Christ, collected and used without his permission, so the acceptance of the
blood and the resulting immortality condemn one’s soul. Dawit, the immortal
character, professes atheism, but his Catholic wife Jessica, who is the true
protagonist of the series, expresses her concern for his soul when he tells her
about the origins of his unnatural longevity. When he performs the ritual on
her, making her an immortal against her will, it triggers profound changes in
her and she goes on a personal crusade to use her special blood to help others.
Joan D. Vinge writes of a queen who rules the planet of
Tiamat. She is kept perpetually youthful by using an extract called the Water
of Life, which is harvested from the blood of marine mammals that are sacred to
the majority of the population of the planet. This, too, is a kind of bargain
against Death by sacrificing your basic humanity: knowing its profane origins
but wanting it anyway. The Snow Queen never finds out that the
creatures providing the blood are actually intelligent, which just makes the
whole thing worse.
Path doctrine teaches us that we are souls inhabiting
bodies, not bodies hosting souls. So it is not really possible to “sell your
soul,” although it is possible to corrupt or taint your soul with your choices
and actions. You can warp your Ka and lose your sense of what is right and
wrong by sacrificing your humanity. In My Soul to Keep, Jessica strives to
redeem herself and maintain her humanity by helping others. In The Snow Queen,
the titular queen is a cold, heartless monster in a beautiful shell because of
her love for power and her use of the Water of Life. She suffers, and causes
others to suffer as a result. Interestingly enough, Robert Leroy Johnson did
not appear to experience any psychic or moral harm from his bargain with the
Devil. By all accounts, he was a decent enough guy, just making people happy by
playing his music. He did die young, at the age of 27, of unknown causes, but
his work carries on. He has become a legend, named the first rock star, among
other things, so it could be said that he also attained a kind of immortality.
Personally, I believe that it is what we do with the
blessings the Universe bestows upon us that defines who we are and what path
our Ka will take. You can address your own suffering and choose to impose no
harm upon others, or you can make others suffer because you do not recognize
your own humanity. You can make decisions that corrupt your Self and warp your
Ka, and it usually starts with thinking of yourself as a thing to be sold.
A question to ponder: Is subjugating yourself or “selling
your soul” to a self-professed benevolent entity any better than selling it to
a malevolent entity? Are you still treating yourself like a thing, as the 8th
Core Tenet advises us not to do?
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