A Paper presented to Felkin College on 25th
August 2006
By V.W.Fra Dennis F.G. Whittle VI
Element of Life and Soul
Breathing air into the lungs is the first action
after birth
-
and death
comes with the final breath_
Since air is life, it has been identified
with man's soul or spiritual
essence in
mane religions. Learning to control breathing is
therefore the basis of
many Eastern
paths to spiritual enlightenment.
The First Man, according to the book of Genesis,
was fashioned from earth by the hand of God, who
then breathed life into him through his nose
- a
process imagined
by some
commentators as being like the blowing up of a
bladder. God "breathed into his nostrils the
breath of life: and a living being". This
connection between breath
and the
source of life is found in many religions and
myths.
In a legend of the Australian aborigines, for
instance, the god Pundjel fashioned two male
figures from a mixture of clay and bark- After
smoothing their bodies by a series of magical
passes encompassing them front head to foot.
he then lay upon them
-
each in turn
- and blew into their mouths, their nostrils and their navels. After
some
time they came to life and moved about
Similarly a commentator on the Koran says that
the body of Adam was originally a
clay figure which took 40 years to dry, after
which God endowed it with the breath of life.
The name Adam is a Hebrew word possibly coming
from a root which means
'red' and so connected with the red clay of the
first roan 's
body. The red colour
further connected it with blood.
the
-water
of life, in the sense that without blood a man
dies.
According to Satumius and Basilides [who taught
at Antioch and Alexandria respectively in the
second century AD], the first man was made by
seven evil angels,
led by the god of the Jews.
who said 'Come, let us make man after our
image
".
They fashioned a being of enormous proportions but it could only crawl
along the ground until the good supreme Creator
himself endowed it with air, the divine spirit
or
soul. In other words, it needed to be
impregnated with pneuma
(in Greek
)
or
prang (in
Sanskrit] - terms which refer not to mere
breath but to life-giving vital air
or 'spirit".
Only after this could the crawling creature
stand upright and become
truly man.
The identity of breath and soul is established
in early mythologies of widely separated
peoples.
In
Fiji.
for
instance, people suffering from bronchitis or
asthma were
considered to run the risk of losing their
souls. A magician was employed to capture
the sick
man's-butterfly '
[as his
wavering breath was called] and secure it firmly
to the
body again
.
This he did
with spells and conjurations. Also in
Fiji,
when
the canoe of
a chief was launched
,
a number of men were sacrificed so that their souls [or breath] might
supply a wind of good luck for the sails of the
craft.
In ancient
times the breath of the dying was believed to
re-enter the living. The
Algonquins
[Ottawa Indians] buried their dead children in
frequented places so that
the souls
might re-enter future mothers there. A similar
idea is at the root of a |