The Secret History Quotes

“The Free Soul, also called the Wandering Soul, the Water Soul, or the Dreaming Soul, is the soul that pre-existed the body and the obtaining of the breath soul. It is often depicted as emerging from the "depths" of the world, from the Underworld or a Netherworld. That the Earth Indweller (the Earth and Underworld Mother) is believed to be the source of free souls automatically positions the free soul as taking some kind of "birth" inside the earth, and emerging from its depths. The "waters below" or the watery abyss that has been conceptualized mythically as the Underworld (and psychologically viewed as the deep, dark interior world of the subconscious and dreams) gives the free soul the name "water soul", making its character distinctive to the windy breath soul. Merkur writes: "The free soul, which can leave and return to the body in sleep, trances, and illnesses without causing loss of life, is a genuinely distinct type of soul. Either it is (conceived of) as miniature and located in the body, or it follows the body as though it were a shadow. It has and imparts the shape and personality of the person or creature, according to the respective species and, at least in humans, individuality. It is the seat of all illness, for its loss (or injury) causes illness (to manifest in the body.) It is also the site of spirit-intrusion. Through illness, the free soul can be an indirect cause of death. However, shamans may journey safely out of their bodies as free souls during their so-called spirit flights.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“Basically put, the "multiple souls" or the "two souls" model posits that each person is a triad of communicating, relating powers- a body alongside two souls- a breath soul, and a free soul (also called a wandering soul.) These terms have become standard anthropological terms used in studies of primal anthropologies. Several of the above authors mentioned utilize these terms in their own studies. I will commence now in describing the two-souls perspective. It will be important to quote Merkur here, before I begin. "In all, Soul dualism is an ideological system, designed not to describe but to explain psychological phenomenon. It is a system of psychology that is based on phenomenological data of psychic experience and systematized through philosophical speculation.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“The re-emergence of this "Serpent Power" in the land was viewed as responsible for the seasonal re-greening of the earth in many traditional cultures in the past; the legendary Green Man figure is rooted in nothing other than the Master Spirit of this world in an anthropomorphic form, representing that power coming forth again- "The God Who Comes.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“This is why he appears in so much folklore and in so many of the myths of earlier religions as a mysterious chthonic and land-based figure, not just a sky or air-based presence. So great is the aesthetic distinction between the realm of sky and the realm of earth, that we see in the evolution of myth (in nearly all places) two distinct Gods often forming from this: a fatherly, usually more severe and distant "Sky" God, and a more sensual, wild, tricky, or dangerous "Earth" God or spirit, who might be his son and sometimes his adversary.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“But a breathing being can't hold on to the breath forever, and can't stay shape-shifted in just one shape forever: the dynamism of the occurrence and the Fateful laws of reality don't allow for the kind of effort it takes to maintain that perpetually. So when they gave up the breath and shifted their shapes at the ends of their lives, they just sank back down to their birth country in the interior of the world, before (sometimes) "flying back up" to do it again.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“The answer to questions like "where did the basic cosmos- structure itself, with all its natural dynamism, come from?" is both simple, and complex at the same time. The answer is that it didn't come from anywhere; it always was.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“Merkur goes behind Rasmussen and says what needed to be said in the shortest, most perfect manner: "Indwellers can be termed personifications of natural forces only from a Western point of view. To Inuit thought, indwellers are the powers that constitute Nature.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft

“The Indweller is a power immanent inside of a particular phenomenon. By indwelling the phenomenon, the phenomenon is rendered "real" or rendered potent, powerful, and able to be interacted with by others- it becomes a vibrant presence in the intersubjective world. Merkur quotes Nicholas Gubser's description of the Indwellers in this way: "An inua (indweller) is not the personality or even a characteristic of an object or phenomenon, although an inua itself may have a personality. The spirit (or indweller) of an object or phenomenon may be thought of, in the case of so-called "inanimate" objects, as the essential existing force of that object. Without an indweller or spirit, an object might still occupy space, and have weight, but it would have no meaning, it would have no real existence. When an object is invested or inhabited by an indweller, it is a part of nature of which we are aware.”
― Robin Artisson, The Secret History: Cosmos, History, Post-Mortem Transformation Mysteries, and the Dark Spiritual Ecology of Witchcraft