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avevale_intelligencerSouls have always puzzled me. Not being a member of the Church of the Pauline Heresy, I've never been too clear as to what one is, or whether I have one or not. In fact, I've often suspected that the soul was invented, or adopted, by religious authorities, of whatever stripe, as something that We have and They don't: if you want to exploit, persecute or slaughter someone, well, that's all right, they haven't got souls like real people. This was, I believe, once said of people whose skin was a different colour: it has always been said of elves, faeries, mermaids...and vampires.
In the Buffyverse, of course, this hypothesis is claimed as fact by the Watchers' Council, that body so well-known for openness, honesty and human compassion. They maintain that anyone turned by a vampire loses his or her soul and becomes an empty shell inhabited by a demon. This is one of the core concepts of vampirism as it is perceived by the vampire hunter, and makes the job much less morally dubious. After all, when you stake a vampire, you're not really killing something, well, not a real person like us. Killing demons is all right. They don't have souls. Against this hypothesis, however, we can now set a number of facts picked up from the last five or six seasons of Buffy and Angel, which seem to indicate that the truth (at least within the context of this fictional series) is far otherwise.
Vampires in general, and Angel in particular, have complete continuity of memory, identity and personality from human to vampire (and back again), the only difference being the apparent lack of compassion, love, guilt, self-loathing and other typically human qualities. I say "apparent" when I should say "mythical:" we have seen that vampires are perfectly capable of experiencing love and the rest, while we have seen plenty of human beings who function quite happily without any of the above traits, and one presumes that they have souls.
Demons, as we have seen, come in all shades of good and evil. The "evil" ones, i.e. the ones that hurt humans (this being the only moral yardstick that seems to be applied) usually have some kind of reason for their evildoing: either they got stuck with a really nasty reproductive cycle, or they're exercising their fundamental right to practise their religion, or maybe it's just simple survival. Very few demons seem to want to eviscerate humans just for fun. Humans, of course, do it all the time and with gusto...and one presumes that they have souls.
Vampires have to drink blood to live. Buffy-type vamps have it easier than some, in that they can survive on animal blood, even dead animal blood. You don't see many humans making the moral choice to live on cold cabbage water and nothing else, though, and it's a moot point how necessary the act of killing is to a vampire. Whatever else they do, they have to have access to a liquid whose proper place is inside a living being, so for them to survive something must be hurt, if not die. The same, of course,is true of humans: we just dress it up fancier. And one presumes that we have souls.
So: if a soul is not identity, memory or personality, what is it? Well, when the gypsies made their all-time winning bid for Most Ineptly Designed Curse and Angelus supposedly got his soul back, he suddenly became very very guilt-ridden. The soul, therefore, would seem to consist mostly of conscience, or superego. What effect did this sudden inrush of guilt have on Angel? Answer: It completely messed him up and stopped him doing anything (except, apparently, biting rats, who (not having souls) don't count) for most of fifty years. Only Whistler's intervention on behalf of the Powers That Be, who had presumably run out of patience, gave him the notion that he might actually be able to do some good. That, of course, and the burgeoning charms of a certain young Slayer in the rough.
Let's now turn to Spike. Seemingly an unregenerate, unrepentant vampire, he showed no change in his nature after the Initiative's implant stopped him harming humans. Under the influence of his love for Buffy, however, he has of late turned into a considerable force for good despite having (as Doc pointed out) no trace of a soul anywhere. Compassion he has shown, self-loathing he has expressed, and he has repeatedly put himself in the way of a considerable degree of harm for people who wouldn't spit on him if he were on fire. Okay, he still does bad things, but it should be obvious by now that (a) a soul is not necessary to make a being "good," (b) vampires are not all predestined for evil, and (c) Spike's efforts at self-transformation are worth about a hundred of Angel's self-obsessed guilt trips.
Update: at the end of season six of Buffy, Spike went off to Africa or somewhere similar and apparently "got his soul back." How he managed to conceive and carry through this operation without having the soul in the first place is left unexamined: once he gets over his brief bout of insanity, though, there seems very little difference between the Spike of season seven and the Spike of season six. The reason being, of course, that there is no difference: the whole Africa thing simply fulfilled his expectations of what getting a soul would be like. And that's the key: vampires think of themselves as soulless because they're told that they are. It makes the evildoing maybe a bit easier: nothing to lose, and all that. There are some problems with this: the scene with Anya in the bar (in "Beneath You"), for instance; but the evidence for is so much more persuasive than the evidence against. Oh, and when D'Hoffryn casually speaks of "the life and soul of a vengeance demon" (in "Selfless") it kind of blows the whole human/demon dichotomy out of the window.
It will also be seen that wishing a soul on Angel was about as worthwhile as wishing an emotion chip on Data: a quick and dirty fix to contrive something that didn't need contriving. (Is there anyone, apart from the Next Gen production team, who didn't see that Data had emotions from day one? They're a natural consequence of a mind's interactions with the real world, for pete's sake.) For in Spike's achievement is the key to Angel's true redemption. Yes, he could atone for his past deeds: but only as Angelus, as the being who did the deeds. Not by agonising, not by tormenting himself, and not by doing the Powers That Be's dirty work for them, but by abandoning the makeshift "soul" he has been lumbered with and then wilfully turning his back on the darkness. Perhaps, if Angelus had truly loved Buffy the way Spike does, he might have managed it before now.
(The bulk of this article was written many years ago. Since then, we have seen Angel flirt with darkness, make love with Darla without experiencing any change, and become a beast worse than he has ever been in Pylea. Nevertheless, he remains a vampire with a "soul" tacked on, and the point, I think, stands.)
Whether the points I have raised have been considered by Messrs Whedon, Greenwalt, Noxon et al I do not know. Maybe Spike will revert to type and have to be killed. Maybe he will emulate Darla (and do we really believe she sacrificed herself because she had a baby's soul inside her?) and destroy himself for love. Maybe Angel will never go willingly all the way into the darkness so as to find his own true way to the light. Or maybe Buffy and her friends will explode the myth, and force the Watchers' Council to recognise that the beings they seek to exterminate are sentient, intelligent creatures just as they are, with their own paths to walk, their own quests to pursue, and the same goals as all living things: redemption, and transcendence.
May we all find them.
Update: well, Spike did destroy himself for love, or try to. The Watchers' Council got exploded, though rather more literally than I had in mind. Angel advanced no further along his own path, and indeed ended rather with a whimper than any kind of bang. And the myth stood, at the end of both series, even more undermined than when I started this article, but uncontradicted. I remain less than satisfied, and still confused as to whether the writers knew what they were covertly saying, or whether in some yet-to-be-made movie or series the question will ever be readdressed. I certainly hope so.
In the Buffyverse, of course, this hypothesis is claimed as fact by the Watchers' Council, that body so well-known for openness, honesty and human compassion. They maintain that anyone turned by a vampire loses his or her soul and becomes an empty shell inhabited by a demon. This is one of the core concepts of vampirism as it is perceived by the vampire hunter, and makes the job much less morally dubious. After all, when you stake a vampire, you're not really killing something, well, not a real person like us. Killing demons is all right. They don't have souls. Against this hypothesis, however, we can now set a number of facts picked up from the last five or six seasons of Buffy and Angel, which seem to indicate that the truth (at least within the context of this fictional series) is far otherwise.
Vampires in general, and Angel in particular, have complete continuity of memory, identity and personality from human to vampire (and back again), the only difference being the apparent lack of compassion, love, guilt, self-loathing and other typically human qualities. I say "apparent" when I should say "mythical:" we have seen that vampires are perfectly capable of experiencing love and the rest, while we have seen plenty of human beings who function quite happily without any of the above traits, and one presumes that they have souls.
Demons, as we have seen, come in all shades of good and evil. The "evil" ones, i.e. the ones that hurt humans (this being the only moral yardstick that seems to be applied) usually have some kind of reason for their evildoing: either they got stuck with a really nasty reproductive cycle, or they're exercising their fundamental right to practise their religion, or maybe it's just simple survival. Very few demons seem to want to eviscerate humans just for fun. Humans, of course, do it all the time and with gusto...and one presumes that they have souls.
Vampires have to drink blood to live. Buffy-type vamps have it easier than some, in that they can survive on animal blood, even dead animal blood. You don't see many humans making the moral choice to live on cold cabbage water and nothing else, though, and it's a moot point how necessary the act of killing is to a vampire. Whatever else they do, they have to have access to a liquid whose proper place is inside a living being, so for them to survive something must be hurt, if not die. The same, of course,is true of humans: we just dress it up fancier. And one presumes that we have souls.
So: if a soul is not identity, memory or personality, what is it? Well, when the gypsies made their all-time winning bid for Most Ineptly Designed Curse and Angelus supposedly got his soul back, he suddenly became very very guilt-ridden. The soul, therefore, would seem to consist mostly of conscience, or superego. What effect did this sudden inrush of guilt have on Angel? Answer: It completely messed him up and stopped him doing anything (except, apparently, biting rats, who (not having souls) don't count) for most of fifty years. Only Whistler's intervention on behalf of the Powers That Be, who had presumably run out of patience, gave him the notion that he might actually be able to do some good. That, of course, and the burgeoning charms of a certain young Slayer in the rough.
Let's now turn to Spike. Seemingly an unregenerate, unrepentant vampire, he showed no change in his nature after the Initiative's implant stopped him harming humans. Under the influence of his love for Buffy, however, he has of late turned into a considerable force for good despite having (as Doc pointed out) no trace of a soul anywhere. Compassion he has shown, self-loathing he has expressed, and he has repeatedly put himself in the way of a considerable degree of harm for people who wouldn't spit on him if he were on fire. Okay, he still does bad things, but it should be obvious by now that (a) a soul is not necessary to make a being "good," (b) vampires are not all predestined for evil, and (c) Spike's efforts at self-transformation are worth about a hundred of Angel's self-obsessed guilt trips.
Update: at the end of season six of Buffy, Spike went off to Africa or somewhere similar and apparently "got his soul back." How he managed to conceive and carry through this operation without having the soul in the first place is left unexamined: once he gets over his brief bout of insanity, though, there seems very little difference between the Spike of season seven and the Spike of season six. The reason being, of course, that there is no difference: the whole Africa thing simply fulfilled his expectations of what getting a soul would be like. And that's the key: vampires think of themselves as soulless because they're told that they are. It makes the evildoing maybe a bit easier: nothing to lose, and all that. There are some problems with this: the scene with Anya in the bar (in "Beneath You"), for instance; but the evidence for is so much more persuasive than the evidence against. Oh, and when D'Hoffryn casually speaks of "the life and soul of a vengeance demon" (in "Selfless") it kind of blows the whole human/demon dichotomy out of the window.
It will also be seen that wishing a soul on Angel was about as worthwhile as wishing an emotion chip on Data: a quick and dirty fix to contrive something that didn't need contriving. (Is there anyone, apart from the Next Gen production team, who didn't see that Data had emotions from day one? They're a natural consequence of a mind's interactions with the real world, for pete's sake.) For in Spike's achievement is the key to Angel's true redemption. Yes, he could atone for his past deeds: but only as Angelus, as the being who did the deeds. Not by agonising, not by tormenting himself, and not by doing the Powers That Be's dirty work for them, but by abandoning the makeshift "soul" he has been lumbered with and then wilfully turning his back on the darkness. Perhaps, if Angelus had truly loved Buffy the way Spike does, he might have managed it before now.
(The bulk of this article was written many years ago. Since then, we have seen Angel flirt with darkness, make love with Darla without experiencing any change, and become a beast worse than he has ever been in Pylea. Nevertheless, he remains a vampire with a "soul" tacked on, and the point, I think, stands.)
Whether the points I have raised have been considered by Messrs Whedon, Greenwalt, Noxon et al I do not know. Maybe Spike will revert to type and have to be killed. Maybe he will emulate Darla (and do we really believe she sacrificed herself because she had a baby's soul inside her?) and destroy himself for love. Maybe Angel will never go willingly all the way into the darkness so as to find his own true way to the light. Or maybe Buffy and her friends will explode the myth, and force the Watchers' Council to recognise that the beings they seek to exterminate are sentient, intelligent creatures just as they are, with their own paths to walk, their own quests to pursue, and the same goals as all living things: redemption, and transcendence.
May we all find them.
Update: well, Spike did destroy himself for love, or try to. The Watchers' Council got exploded, though rather more literally than I had in mind. Angel advanced no further along his own path, and indeed ended rather with a whimper than any kind of bang. And the myth stood, at the end of both series, even more undermined than when I started this article, but uncontradicted. I remain less than satisfied, and still confused as to whether the writers knew what they were covertly saying, or whether in some yet-to-be-made movie or series the question will ever be readdressed. I certainly hope so.