Spirit

Breathe out on a cold morning and watch it go. A pale coil that was inside you a moment ago hangs in the air, thins, and is gone. A great many languages built their word for the invisible part of a person out of exactly that, which is why the English word for the most abstract thing in mythology began as one of the most physical. Latin spiritus meant breath, from a root meaning to blow, and it pushed aside the older animus during the imperial period. Greek pneuma meant breath too. Hebrew ruach meant wind, breath, and spirit at once, and when the Vulgate rendered ruach as pneuma and pneuma as spiritus, the chain was welded shut. Every later argument about the nature of the soul is being conducted in vocabulary borrowed from a lung.

What the word actually names is not a creature. It is a category, and one of the widest any mythology keeps. Under it sit household guardians, the owners of animals, the powers in weather and stone, the intelligences a shaman negotiates with, the ancestors who still expect their share, and the ones that arrive at night with a grievance. Grouping them together is a translator’s convenience more than a native fact, and the traditions themselves usually cut the category up along a line the English word hides.

Robert Codrington found that line in the Banks’ Islands in the 1880s and set it out in his 1891 study of Melanesian religion. The Melanesians he worked among distinguished between a tindalo, the ghost of a dead person who had become powerful, and a vui, a spirit who had never been a man at all. The distinction was practical, because it determined who you approached and how. Something similar runs through most of the world. Rome kept the manes, the deified dead, in one register and the lares, the guardians of the household and the crossroads, in another, and neither was quite the same as a person’s genius, the divine double that came into the world with him and was pictured as a crested snake.

At the hearth shrine, the arrangement was mundane. A little food went to the lares before the household ate, the shrine was tended, the snake was painted on the plaster below the figures, and nothing happened, which was the point.

The Greeks had a story about where one class of spirit came from. Hesiod, listing the ages of the world, says that when the golden race died Zeus did not send them under the earth but made them daimones: kindly, warding off harm, guardians of mortal men, roaming everywhere over the earth clothed in mist, keeping watch on judgements and cruel deeds, and giving wealth. It is a striking image, an entire vanished generation still walking about invisibly and taking an interest in whether the courts are honest. It also shows how easily one kind of spirit turns into another. Those daimones are the dead, and they are guardians, and by the later philosophers they will be something closer to a personal conscience.

Where the category gets genuinely strange is in traditions that let a person come apart. Early Chinese thought divided the soul into hun and po, and the Zuo zhuan already assumes the split: the po is generated first, at birth, and the yang aspect that follows is the hun. At death they separate, the hun rising toward heaven and the ancestors, the po sinking with the body toward the earth and the Yellow Springs. One person, two destinations, and a funeral obligation to both.

Elsewhere the emphasis falls not on individual spirits at all but on a quality that runs through everything. Among Algonquian-speaking peoples, manitou is spiritual power present in the world generally, in animals, plants, weather, places and events, and it can be spoken of as a force or personified as a being. It was one of the first Algonquian words Europeans wrote down. Thomas Harriot recorded mantoac, glossed as gods, in his 1585 wordlist, and the seventeenth-century Jesuit Relations return to the term repeatedly, usually while getting it slightly wrong.

The idea that all of this constitutes a single phenomenon is itself an artefact of the nineteenth century. Edward Burnett Tylor, in Primitive Culture in 1871, defined animism as the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general, and proposed that the whole apparatus began with two observations available to anyone: people appear in dreams after they are dead, and a body stops breathing at the moment it stops being a person. From the ghost-soul seen in dream and vision, Tylor argued, everything else followed. He also called it a childlike conception that cultures grew out of, which is the part that has not aged, and later anthropology has spent a long time dismantling the ladder he built while keeping the observation at the bottom of it.

Their powers are the ones you would expect of something without a body. They go where they like and are not seen doing it. They can enter a person, an animal, a stone, a house. They know things they were not told. They give and withhold: game, weather, luck, illness, the wealth Hesiod’s daimones hand out.

The limits are just as consistent, and they are mostly social. A spirit that is not fed becomes a problem. Ovid describes the lemures loose in Rome when the Lemuria went unobserved and the dead were not properly honoured. Spirits are frequently tied to a place, an object, a family or a name, and can be shut out of one by ritual, or removed from a person by a specialist whose whole profession is expulsion. A soul that comes apart can be scattered, which is why so much funeral practice is really an act of housekeeping. And the largest limitation is the one the word itself keeps admitting: nobody has ever produced one. The evidence for spirits has always been what they are said to have done, plus the fact that the room went cold.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a spirit in mythology?

A spirit is an unseen, person-like power that acts on the world without having a body of its own. The word covers an enormous range of beings across cultures, including household guardians, nature powers, the souls of the dead, and the intelligences that shamans and ritual specialists deal with. It is best understood as a category rather than a single creature.

What is the difference between a spirit and a ghost?

A ghost is specifically the surviving spirit of someone who died, while spirit is the broader category that also includes beings who were never human. Melanesian tradition in the Banks’ Islands, recorded by Robert Codrington in 1891, marks this exact division: a tindalo is the powerful ghost of a dead person, and a vui is a spirit that never was a man. Many traditions keep a similar distinction because it determines how each kind is approached.

Where does the word “spirit” come from?

It comes from Latin spiritus, meaning breath, from a root meaning to blow. The same equation of breath with the soul appears in Greek pneuma and Hebrew ruach, which mean breath or wind, and the Latin Bible’s habit of translating ruach as pneuma and pneuma as spiritus fixed the association in English.

Can spirits be driven away or harmed?

Most traditions treat spirits as manageable rather than killable, usually through offering, avoidance, or ritual expulsion. Their weaknesses tend to be social: a spirit that is not fed or remembered turns hostile, which is what Ovid describes when the Roman dead were neglected at the Lemuria. Spirits are also frequently bound to a particular place, object, family or name, which limits where they can act.

Do all cultures believe in spirits?

Belief in spirits is close to universal in the recorded ethnographic and mythological material, though the shape it takes varies enormously. Edward Burnett Tylor called this animism in 1871 and defined it as the doctrine of souls and other spiritual beings in general, arguing it grew out of dreams of the dead and the observation that breath stops at death. His evolutionary framing has been heavily criticised since, but the underlying pattern he noticed has held up.

Related Entries

Ghost, Shade, Spectre, Wraith, Revenant, Poltergeist, Manes, Lares, Genius loci, Daemon, Ba, Kami, Manitou, Djinn, Elemental