Spirit (supernatural entity)

A spirit —in the sense in which the word is used in folklore and ethnography— is an "immaterial being", a "supernatural agent", the "soul of a deceased person", an "invisible entity" or the "soul of a seriously suffering person".

Thus, a spirit would have a form of existing and thinking; it would exist without being generally visible; often popular traditions endow it with miraculous powers and more or less occult influences on the physical world.

It is not uncommon for a "living" person to feel the presence of a spirit shortly after a loved one dies, under conditions of grief and emotion related to the death. This presence sometimes manifests itself several years after the death.

Typology
Spirits can be classified according to the science in charge of their study: angels and demons belong to theology, ghosts and spirits to metapsychology, fairies and gnomes to folklore, the souls of the dead to the cult of the dead, spiritualism, magic, necromancy. However, there are frequent hesitations. In the first century, for example, Justin thought that the demons mentioned in the Gospels were disembodied souls.

Alternatively, a historical approach can be taken. Medieval texts are full of planetary spirits (inhabitants of the planets), angelic spirits (angels, archangels, guardian angels, etc.), nature spirits (undines, sylphs, etc.), place spirits, etc.

Spirits are often classified by the worlds they inhabit: underworld, earth, atmospheric, or heaven.

They are also classified as good and bad, or as neutral: the word "devil" is pejorative, but the word "demon" changes the value.

In 17th century Europe, spirits included angels, demons, and disembodied souls. Dom Calmet, a specialist on the subject, explained that he was writing "on the apparitions of angels, demons and souls separated from the body". The Lalande dictionary follows suit: "God, angels, demons, disembodied souls of people after death are the spirits".

In some cultures, the "spirits of nature" refers to the elementals, spirits linked to the four classical elements:gnomes for earth, undines for water, sylphs for air, salamanders for fire).

Greeks
In his Theogony, written in the 7th century B.C., Hesiod distinguishes five categories of powers: superior demons or gods (golden race), inferior demons (silver race), deceased from the Hades (bronze race), heroes without posthumous promotion, and humans of the past (iron race).

Pythagoras sees souls or spirits everywhere, as detached particles of the ether:

Pythagoras identifies four types of spiritual beings: gods, heroes, demons, and humans. While the gods are immortal souls, the humans are mortal souls. Gods inhabit the stars, glorious heroes inhabit the ether, and demons inhabit the earth. The heroes are the demigods.

A little bit similar to Hesiod, in Timaeus, Plato mentions gods, demons, inhabitants in the Hades, heroes and humans of the past.

Romans
The Romans admitted gods, goddesses, masons (souls of the dead), lares (tutelary spirits protecting houses, etc.), genies (spirits presiding over the destiny of a place, a group, or an individual), lemurs (specters of the dead), etc.

Theologians began thinking of angels in the 3rd century, with Origen and the Cappadocians (Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea).

Justin Martyr (2nd century) was the first to see the gods of paganism as messengers of the Devil (Apologies, I, 5, 25-27). Numerous theologians would follow him, including Tertullian (De spectaculis) and Lactantius (4th century).

The Neoplatonist Porphyry of Tyre (c. 260) carefully asks how to distinguish high-ranking divine beings (gods, archangels, angels, demons, heroes, archons of the cosmos or matter) from mere souls, not to mention malignant spirits (antitheoi):

Pagan angels and archangels have Persian origin.

Saint Augustine equates angels with uncreated light, born of the Word; he believes that demons have celestial bodies; he considers fauns to be monstrous children between women and devils.

In the 5th century, Martianus Capella described a world inhabited by spirits, satyrs, etc:

In his Commentary on Timaeus (439), Proclus admits nine levels of reality: One, being, life, mind, reason, animals, plants, animate beings, and prime matter. He posits a hierarchy of gods in nine degrees: 1) the One, the first god; 2) the henads; 3) the intelligible gods; 4) the intelligible-intellective gods; 5) the intellective gods; 6) the hyper cosmic gods; 7) the encosmic gods; 8) the universal souls; 9) the angels, demons, heroes (according to Pierre Hadot).

Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, c. 490, influenced by Proclos and Saint Paul, classified the heavenly spirits into three triads, thus forming the nine heavenly choirs (from top to bottom): Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Lordships, Powers, Dominions, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels.

Middle Age
Michel Psellos, a great Byzantine scholar of the 12th century, lists six categories of demons in a famous treatise used by Ronsard: Treated by energy dialogue or devil's operation (translated 1511). His categories are: igneous spirits, aerial spirits, terrestrial spirits, aquatic spirits, subterranean spirits, and tenebrous spirits.

Honorius Augustodunensis (1075-1157), in his Elucidarium, admits the existence of spirits such as angels, demons, and disembodied souls. He argues that "angels have bodies of ether, demons of air, humans of earth".

In his prose novel Merlin (7th to 8th century), Robert de Boron introduces his heroes as children of a virgin and a devil, who is therefore an incubus, a sexual demon.

The novel Huon de Bordeaux (early 13th century) mixes two categories of spirits: the spirits spoken of by theologians (angels, demons, etc.), and the spirits spoken of by storytellers (dwarfs, giants, ogres, evil animals, etc).

In 1398, 1241, 1270 and 1277, the Paris Faculty of Theology condemned the thesis that other eternal entities existed in addition to God.

Renaissance
Paracelsus counts seven races of soulless creatures: the human-shaped but soulless and spiritless genii (inanimata) of the Elements, the giants and dwarfs, and the dwarfs on Earth.

He believes in the genies of the four Elements. Earth, by spontaneous generation, produces dwarves guarding the treasures beneath the mountain; water produces undines; fire, salamanders; air, elves. Then there are the giants and dwarves who come from the air but live on the earth. The book is called A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits (Liber de Nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris et de caeteris spiritibus).

The Germans developed an "astonishing proliferation of supernatural creatures:" primordial giants (who personified "the great supernatural forces"), dwarves (who "are the dead"), elves (alves), trölls ("gigantic dead"), landvaettir ("tutelary deities of places"), disir, fylgja ("female figure following or accompanying each human being and embodies his destiny"), hamr ("form that everyone carries and which escapes from its support"), hamingja (form applied to the entire family), hugr ("spirit of the world").

Johann Weyer is a witchcraft specialist, with his De praestigiis daemonorum ac incantationibus (1563). He classifies demons by their elemental nature (fire, water, air, earth, and subterranean), and by their habitat (demons of the four cardinal points, day and night demons, wood demons, mountain demons, country demons, domestic demons).

17th and subsequent centuries
In his novel The Count of Gabalis, or Interviews on the Secret Sciences (1670), Abbé Henri de Montfaucon de Villars correlates demons and elements, simplifying Psellus and continuing Paracelsus. Sylphs are of air; undines, water; gnomes, earth; salamanders, fire.

Rationalist Descartes uses the physiological term "animal spirits" to refer to corpuscles composed of the "most vivid and subtle" parts of the blood, which move the body as they circulate from brain to muscle (Discours de la méthode, V) (1637). These are not entities, then; they are nerve impulses.

In the spiritualism codified by Allan Kardec, the word "spirits" denotes the souls of the deceased with whom a medium can communicate. Kardec's first book is entitled: ''The Spirits Book, which contain the principles of Spiritist doctrine on the immortality of the soul, the nature of spirits and their relationship with mankind; moral laws, the present life, the future life and the future of mankind. According to the teachings given by the Higher Spirits through various mediums collected and organized by Allan Kardec (1857)'', he affirms:

Edward Tylor, one of the founders of anthropology, introduced the concept of animism in 1871 to provide, according to him, "a rudimentary definition of religion," and he posits "the minimal definition of religion as the belief in spiritual beings, within the framework of evolutionism:"

Sub-Saharan Africa
According to Pierre Alexandre, in Sub-Saharan Africa:

For Ernst Dammann, in addition to nature spirits, which consist of "a large number of protective spirits of houses, settlements, professions, and social classes", there are "animal spirits" (e.g. spirits attached to giraffes among the Nuer), "auxiliary spirits" ("found in drums, gourds, baskets, etc."), and certain civilizing heroes.

Haiti
In Haiti (voodoo):

Native Americans
Concerning the Amerindians, according to A. Métraux:

In principle, the same representations are found in North America, although they do not dominate religion there to the same degree as in the tropical jungles of South America. Belief in a personal tutelary genie, which can be inherited or acquired through a vision, and which in some cases can be bought or sold, exists in both Americas.

In Mesoamerica, the nahual, both human and animal (or divine), is a tutelar deity.

Among the Lakota, the practice of vision questing enables them to communicate with the spirits.

Japan
In Japan: kami:

Mesopotomia
In Mesopotamia, the Assyro-Babylonians admitted gods (ilum), planetary genies, ancestral gods (ilû abbêni), personal gods (ilîni), spirits of the dead (etemmû), and numerous demons (udug).

Mongolia
In Mongolia (the case of the Buryats): Specialists in Mongolian shamanism have proposed "a classification of the various entities inhabiting the supernature of the Mongols."

The Mongolian Buryats admit: tenger (atmospheric skies and the spirits that reside there), ancestors (masters of places and waters), zajaan (spirits of the deceased victims of unnatural death), and spirits from the souls of the dead. In addition, shamans know: auxiliaries (zoomorphic and protective spirits), udxa (the shaman's protective spirits seen collectively as a shamanic lineage or ancestry), troublemakers (ongon), wandering souls of the recently dead, mythical founders and legendary ancestors (such as Buxa Nojon, Dajan Deerx), local master-spirits (of the forest or a locality).

Siberia
In Siberia (the case of the Tungus), in the context of shamanism and even "before the establishment of shamanism", "master spirits are the 'masters' of certain animal species, of territories where game roosts, of natural phenomena such as fire, lightning, wind, etc."

The Tungus address various spirits, without the intermediary of the shaman: fire master-spirits, forest master-spirits, water master-spirits, clan territories master-spirits, sites master-spirits, and mythical territories master-spirits. The Tungus shaman, on the other hand, addresses shamanic spirits: shamanic ancestors, zoomorphic spirits serving the shaman, spirits likely to be mastered by the shaman (which excludes the great celestial deity and the master spirits of fire, forest, and water).

Buddhism
In Theravada Buddhism, there are up to 31 planes of existence with, from the lowest to the highest: beings of the underworld, hungry spirits (petâ), demigods (asurâ), deities (devâ), including Brahmâ (in planes 12-14). In addition, there are minor earthly deities such as genies (yakkhâ and yakkhinî), snakes (Nâgâ), spirits associated with nature, or spirits of ancestors or Indian gods, local gods, and mythological or historical heroes.

Tibetan Buddhism classifies "nature spirits into eight types of being: minor gods, lords of death, harmful demons, wrathful mothers, rock demons, king-spirits, spirits of natural wealth and water spirits."

Christianity
Christian theologians regard spirits as demons, fallen angels. Saint Augustine likened the demons of Greco-Roman paganism to fallen angels, rebelling against divine authority and wishing to lead man into evil.

Islam
In Islam, the Quran refers to the science of the soul as a science reserved exclusively for God:

Interpretation
Auguste Comte's positivism, according to his law of three stages, brings belief in spirits into the most remote era or conception, that of the theological stage, more precisely into its second phase, polytheism, where "life is finally withdrawn from material objects, to be mysteriously transported to various fictitious beings, usually invisible, whose continuous active intervention henceforth becomes the source of all external phenomena, and even then of human phenomena."

Spiritual entities

 * Angel
 * Deity
 * Demon
 * Elemental
 * Elf
 * Fairy
 * Gnome
 * Nymph
 * Cultural depictions of salamanders
 * Tutelary deity
 * Undine

Beliefs and practices

 * Animism
 * Espiritismo
 * Shamanism
 * Spiritualism (beliefs)
 * Spiritualism (movement)
 * Theurgy