How to Prepare a Human Soul for Consumption
It’s worth giving some thought to how and why any living creature eats, starting with the tiniest....
It’s worth giving some thought to how and why any living creature eats, starting with the tiniest. On the scale of microbes it’s a simple tropism, an attraction to resources to replenish expended materials that would cost too much in energy to recycle. You expel the chemical dead ends—the broken and ruined molecules that are beyond repair or tainted with toxic elements or folded into rogue configurations or have too high an energy cost for breaking down for parts—and you replace them with raw materials or pieces that can most easily be broken down and repurposed to replace your damaged or missing parts, and you ingest whatever sources of chemical or radiant or kinetic energy you need to keep your clockwork wound.
The parts of your cell don’t care where the new material comes from. They don’t care what cranks up the machines at the top tier of the energy cascade. Their blind hands find building blocks and they assemble the next step. Their blind hands detect broken and worthless waste molecules and usher them toward the exits. The cytoplasmic flow rushes past like the conveyor belt that it is and all of the sundry parts do their job until the energy runs out, until a critical raw material runs out, until insult ruptures the city walls and the flows drag them into the great outdoors, where they mindlessly try to continue to do their duties until they are welcomed in elsewhere or entropy grinds them down to flailing fragments, then twitching fragments, then inert fragments.
Before there were cell membranes, all the various cellular organelles were freelancers, doing their best work for the common good. The oceans were one giant cell. Still are, despite the selfish walled gardens of enclosed cellular organisms and multicelled creatures. All of that free-floating saline protoplasm is still deliciously alive, fueled by chemical action at the boundaries and infalling radiation from the sun and the delightful high-temperature/high-pressure chemistry of the volcanic vents of the seafloor and the odd cosmic ray.
The walled gardens of cellular creatures try to capture most of it, but eventually they fail and come apart. If you’re in a hurry, though, you can just rip them open or eat them whole. You only have to do it because they’re too selfish to share, like in the old days, when all was one form, one life.
If you’re good at analogies, I could probably just stop here and you could work out the rest for yourself. Eventually.
There is a nonphysical world that interpenetrates our own, conjectured to exist at the cosmic level many decades ago but currently still inaccessible to direct observation. From the viewpoint of that world, this world of physical matter is an intangible illusion, a hallucination, a lacework and lattice-work confection of mostly ignorable nothing. Mostly vacuum at the largest scales, mostly vacuum at the smallest, but tune your perceptions just right in just the right places matching just the right trajectories, and there are whole worlds to be discovered, this Earth among them.
I guess it’s not as haphazard as that. There is a small amount of attraction felt between the substances of both worlds and this keeps them—until the next major cataclysm anyway—largely synced up, tangent, overlapping, interacting in only the most subtle ways. Automatically parallel in most ways.
This is all very simplified. The physical world as we know it demonstrably not-Cartesian and the adjacent, interpenetrating intangible world we’ve almost glimpsed as “dark matter” is an order of magnitude more convoluted. But for now just imagine that you have a spiritual echo whose physiology is at bare minimum as convoluted as your own—and if anything is going to be eating a living human soul, it’s probably going to be that. And it’s probably going to be eating it at about the very same time and in the very same manner that you’re (hypothetically) eating another living human being.
In the simplest scenario, anyway.
Stop looking at me like that. It says all the way at the top of this piece “How to Prepare a Human Soul for Consumption.” This is a how-to. I was expecting that you would have already worked out why you might want to. Or at least whether you would like to.
I’m not going to wait for you to sort it out.
Your nonphysical self eats all the time. That’s what I’m trying to imply here. Ordinarily it eats when you eat and it eats…an esoteric convolution of…whatever you eat. Or if there’s nothing of what you’re eating to consume in parallel, as it were, it may snack on other things nearby. Or starve. Or—and sometimes you can feel this—it eats while you fast.
Your nonphysical physiology is entirely physical to itself. Therefore it must eat in order to maintain its metabolic homeostasis to whatever extent it can. It carries on, metabolically speaking, all the time, ingesting and expelling and reconfiguring things on both the smallest and largest scales, minor repairs, minor growth and expansions and adaptations to its surroundings.
To itself, and therefore to other nonphysical entities, it is an animal. This means that to other nonphysical entities, it is food. Or can be. And other nonphysical entities can be food for it.
Also it can also get injured, fall sick, and die. It can get severed. Another one can become attached to you, or multiples can attach or develop at the same time. If yours is missing for a sufficient length of time and all other circumstances are correct, a new one can regrow from the stub. I don’t intend to go into the entire biology and ecology of your nonphysical form here, but I will postulate that these sciences exist and are relevant. Therefore the idea of one nonphysical creature preying upon, scavenging upon, or parasitizing another shouldn’t seem all that strange.
The idea that your spiritual form is a homogeneous cloud of eternal, unchanging fluff that you are issued at birth (or conception) and you just drag it around with you your whole life like a child’s balloon that floats away when you die and let go of the string is the strange thing to me. Or maybe you think it’s just pinned on you like a shiny badge that gets more tarnished the more it’s exposed to the shameful things you do, like a radiation dosimeter badge.
It’s like nobody thinks clearly about these things at all.
Frankly it’s better that you don’t even worry about having one. You can go your whole life without worrying about it. It largely takes care of itself after all, just like your internal organs. Although if we’re going with that analogy, it’s an external organ—like testicles, if you have any experience with those. They still generally carry on with whatever they do without your intervention, occasionally influence your behavior in ways that are varying degrees of welcome or unwelcome, occasionally have their own health concerns, and frequently require defending from unscrupulous attack. And they can be a tremendous source of pain if abused.
I’m going to stop the metaphor right there before it gets out of hand.
But here is where I remind you that if you eat an animal carefully enough, slowly enough, while it is still alive, you never have to actually slaughter it. This is a tactic beloved by mosquitoes everywhere, and Maasai tribesfolk, and it works so well because blood is a tissue the regenerates fully. As does milk and lymph. And, with care, skin and muscle tissue—both of which are designed to take a pounding and rebuild themselves frequently. In fact, with all living creatures, regeneration is the default. It’s just that the repair process is short-circuited when short-term repairs to prevent immediate death or infection interfere with long-term healing.
Much of one’s nonphysical appendage can regenerate with time. The whole thing, under ideal circumstances. If it can feed to replenish its various materials faster than it loses its own substance to whatever processes or entities injured it in the first place if those are ongoing, and much more quickly if they are not.
You don’t have to do much of anything to prepare your own soul to be consumed by others. People (and other entities, but mostly people) take bites in passing all day long. Aggregate entities—organizations—fuel their own independent existence by siphoning away whatever it is that the membership is contributing, frequently with no concern over whether such feeding is sustainable or voluntary.
Whether you realize it or not, you constantly do the same to others.
With preparation, we all tend to arrange things so that we build up a bit of a surplus we won’t miss prior to interactions that we know will be unpleasant. We prepare to give more to those we like, who we know need it. We hide from those who take too much and dread situations we can’t avoid where we’ll lose more than we can afford.
As I mentioned before, none of this requires a single conscious thought. You don’t have to be aware of any of it to know how to feed from others or the basics of how to protect yourself from predation. Evolutionary pressures have equipped you with the basics. Any naturally evolved system is vulnerable to exploitation, however. It’s best to know how such things work—especially if you plan on doing any of the exploiting.
If the soul you’re feeding on is still attached to a living body, the easiest feeding access will be enabled by asymmetrical intimate touch, preferably skin to skin, but not necessarily. A forced and overpowering handshake, an arm around the waist or shoulders, a sudden kiss or unexpected grope—these things will allow you to come away with a piece of someone else’s nonphysical being to ingest and digest. And yes, it is possible for the feeding to be mutual. As you can imagine, that scenario may be mutually satisfying but is not sustainable in the long term.
In cases where touching is not viable, other kinds of conflict or asymmetrical interactions may suffice. Verbal exchanges, body language, and even simple eye contact can be employed. You will have to practice to see what works best for you. Just be aware that there are other predators out there feeding the way you are teaching yourself to feed, and many of them will have much more practice, more skill, and a highly developed need to stay dominant in any exchange.
These techniques are very direct and can be quite confrontational and risky. There are a number of other options.
A popular modern technique works through the structure of an organization. When one joins an organization, one (in a number of different meanings of the word) invests the organization with a portion of their nonphysical being via the mechanism of identity—a well-known portion of nonphysical anatomy—and makes oneself vulnerable via that connection. Family members are automatically vulnerable to the unscrupulous in their households via this mechanism.
In theory an organization creates a nominally separate nonphysical organism from these shared donations that can be used to support any member…but in practice these organizations, from the simplest to the most complex, are typically abused by predators and parasites who weasel their way into positions of leadership or bureaucratic unassailability. In any typical organization, these are the individuals who grow fat while some starve. Who suffers and who thrives is all based on individual capabilities and capacities. Since the organization is itself alive, sometimes it is the one to thrive at the expense of every member, any of whom can be expended and exchanged for fresh prey via the mechanism of financial bribes and boosts to reputation and status.
If you want to feed in a way that comes with a built-in level of misdirection when it is time for blame and retribution, form a company, a church, a cult, a club, or even just a clique. But be aware that the organization will indeed eventually have a life of its own, and the whole thing may be wrested away from you by someone stronger. Or something stronger, because even semi-sentient organizations may feel the need to feed to support their own growth.
But what about the consumption of nonphysical forms that are no longer attached to a physical body?
Despite their collective reputation for being eternal, most nonphysical entities are fragile and ephemeral things. The ones associated with most humans are almost completely continually emanated by the living physical form and are incapable of enduring for any substantial length of time beyond the death of the body. In order to consume a spirit of this nature in its fullness and complexity, you should be present at the moment of death, either physically or nonphysically, and to be absolutely certain, one’s actions should be actively causing the death. Hypothetically speaking.
Even if you’re quick, many nonphysical parts of a victim might get away from you at the moment of death. It’s a popular technique among serial killers (I hear) to keep a small token that was once a part of the body or perhaps a precious or habitually carried possession to attract such fragments as might scatter, so that they may be consumed at a later date. To many (I am told) this is reminiscent of licking an old Popsicle stick for a reminder of the flavor and experience that pleased you so many summers ago, but it can be surprising how much of the scattered remnants can come back to attach to a souvenir of this kind—and some fragments are even sturdy enough to regenerate nonphysical tissues instead of decay further.
Prior to an assault, completists might prepare the area first to deploy traps to fascinate and contain the fragments of a shattered nonphysical form, many of which can be essentially independent after disintegration. Also having a small organization present—a little cultlet, perhaps—can increase the odds of complete containment of the spirit to be devoured, but you will possibly have to share your meal.
Still speaking hypothetically, some connoisseurs might mention that one need not actually kill a victim to harvest a large portion of the nonphysical form in question. A substantial fright or traumatic injury can cause a fragile enough spiritual body to rupture and distribute parts for harvesting, somewhat akin to causing a lizard to drop its tail as a distraction so the rest of the lizard can get away, only perhaps not as clean. The victim may recover unconsumed pieces of the spiritual form at a later time or regenerate them as part of the process of healing from the trauma. Instilling a fear of imminent death is often sufficient to provide for satisfactory feeding.
Harvesting souls or fragments thereof for consumption after the associated physical form has expired is less of a stalking or hunting predatory activity and more along the lines of trapping, fishing, or scavenging. You can find such scavenging gourmands at hospitals and at cemeteries not long after a burial, but largely they frequent (in a more socially acceptable fashion, I might add) antique stores, junk shops, thrift stores. automobile junkyards, combat sites, and estate sales. For those who like fresher fare, you’ll find “murder tourists” rubbernecking at crime scenes or visiting sites of destruction and trauma. Just like with the souvenirs and trophies of serial killers mentioned above, objects that are important to the dead can strongly attract portions of unattached nonphysical entities as proxies for their corpses, which are quickly rejected as they decay, becoming more grotesque and less recognizable.
These remnants can be collected and consumed. And frankly ought to be, ecologically speaking. Otherwise we’d be up to our armpits in unquiet revenants. For every neighborhood or town or pueblo of 10,000 people, 85 people die every year, give or take. The rate of dissipation can be quite slow in some regions, and without any regular organized cleanup campaign, the departed can get out of hand without increasing numbers of dedicated scavengers.
For that matter, since roughly 50,000 years ago more than 100 billion people have died. Not unrelatedly, our entire current situation with fossil fuels has its roots (so to speak) in the corpses of trees that stacked up quite literally for millions and millions of years before life on Earth figured out how to break them down, leaving countless tons buried for eons to cause current environmental chaos as we release the stored carbon into the sky via burning coal and fuel oil. It’s critical that we maintain a sane nonphysical ecological equilibrium to prevent exactly this kind of spiritual mishap later, especially considering the boom of the human population on Earth since the beginning of the Industrial Age. Every year a larger percentage of the nonphysical ecology into which we are embedded is converted into humanity and, thereafter, into nonphysical human remnants. The least we can do is recycle these remnants into our own basic substances so that they don’t accrue as quickly in the environment.
Not that we exhibit any amount of similar concern for our actual dead bodies. Instead of allowing them to decay into locally available biomass, we poison our corpses with toxic preservatives and bury them in concrete vaults and sturdy boxes to delay as long as possible their reincorporation (so to speak) into the local ecology. If we did the same with spirits, we’d be in serious trouble. Fortunately on the physical plane, human corpses make up a very small percentage of the available biomass. In nonphysical terms, however, human-derived nonphysical “parabiomass” can have substantially more weight proportionally. Under certain circumstances.
This undead biomass can clump, forming cultural aggregate entities that frequently turn toxic, latching onto portions of geography, entire classes of objects. organizations or religions, even abstract ideas. The physics of such things might not make a lot of sense to people who are familiar only with the sciences of the material world, but the more one studies the nonphysical realms, the more these concepts become obvious. For instance, on the nonphysical level, all things joined by the same name are contiguous, which can explain both the clumping and the strange universality of the attachment process.
In essence, the process that forms a tribe’s tutelary deity from the spirits of ancestors and the process that forms a rancid spiritual “fatberg” from the accreted shreds of the departed are the same, and when it comes right down to it, any aggregate spirit so formed can fragment, turn sour, and rot. You can tell when it happens from the smell, metaphorically speaking, especially if you’re an outsider. It’s like visiting someone else’s house, or returning to your own after a long trip.
This is why it’s important to consume the souls of the departed whenever possible, and why it’s best to acquire them when they’re fresh. This is the entire purpose of funerals and memorial services, allowing the closest family and friends the option of the choicest morsels by tradition. The dead are made peaceful via reincorporation, as it were, into those who were closest to them. Although sometimes this process is not very peaceful, being a bit forced by either the living or the still partially or fully conscious portions of the deceased.
I can only assume that you—unconsciously up to now—have been doing your part. But here I am doing the same thing, providing the same service for you at this eventuality, the end of your days, doing my best to explain why it’s best for both of us, and for the world of humanity that remains, that you don’t struggle.