Arscil Soul

An Arscil Soul is the fundamental common denominator of all paranormal beings and goddesses that live in Arscil and Palo Duro Canyon. An Arscil Soul is any soul that has been powered or created, in some way, by Iretha, the prime deity of Canyon Lore and the mother goddess of Arscil. Only beings who possess Arscil Souls can work in the paranormal arts, and as such they are the only beings who can perform the unexplainable. They are distinct and unrelated from normal souls (such as those of humans outside the canyon) by the element of Iretha's own soul that is embedded into every Arscil Soul.

Source Theory

The main theory for the source of the Arscil Souls, and what their nature is, is as follows, and is known as the Dissociative Entanglement Theory (DET). In DET, all Arscil Souls are entangled together in a way very similar to entangled particles in quantum mechanics. Here, although the particles share the same wavefunction, they have dissociated in other properties, such as distance (they can be any arbitrary distance from each other) and spin (they have opposite quantum spins). Entangled particles can form when a pair of interacting particles dissociates to form these two particles that share this one wavefunction. Similarly, Arscil Souls are souls with divergent properties, but all with a common source they had dissociated from at some point in the past. The DET states that Iretha is the ultimate source, and when she dissociated parts of her soul to create other souls, they remained entangled to her soul, though possesses its own divergent properties (including personality, embodying only one aspect of Iretha's personality).

Enlightenment

Enlightenment: enlightenment describes an awareness of one's own reality and their place within it. Enlightenment can bring with it the power to realize changes in reality. An enlightened enough soul can blend (blur the lines between) more and more of real reality and their own psychological reality (created by their imagination), allowing more and more of their psychological processes to be imposed onto reality. Achieving the point where the use of powers becomes fully conscious is known as reaching divinity. In DET, when Iretha's soul dissociates, the dissociated components are blocked from understanding the whole, and thus exist at a lower level of enlightenment than Iretha herself. This principle extends to other beings creating their own beings, covered below under power tempering.

Power tempering: power tempering describes not necessarily an artificial restriction on how powerful a certain being could get, but a natural barrier that depends on the enlightenment level of the being who initially elevated the new being to a new enlightenment level. Since enlightenment deals with an increased ability to impose imagination onto reality, a being's own imagination is limited by how much the being that created them's imagination extends. After a being reaches the same power level as their creator, they must have to expand their imaginative abilities on their own.

Enlightenment Stage

An Enlightenment Stage describes various levels of awareness about the nature of reality that an Arscil Soul possesses. Each level of awareness represents a different power level. Of course, the enlightenment stages are not discrete and there are numerous sub-stages within each stage to form a continuous spectrum, but the stages form broad categories for classifying souls. The stages are as follows:

Base: The base enlightenment level is little or no enlightenment at all. Arscil Souls that typically possess the base enlightenment level are humans who are native to Palo Duro Canyon. Although beings with a base enlightenment level can do little under their own power, they may have subconscious/unconscious abilities or soul additions (like auras). In addition, they have the ability to contact paranormal beings, allowing for summoning demons to occur.

Low: A low enlightenment level describes very little soul power, but enough to put the being at a considerable advantage over a base enlightenment level being. Beings with this level can do outright things under their own soul's power. Still, most of the elements of the soul's power operates under conscious awareness. Most paranormal beings, such as Yrina, have a low enlightenment level. Their increased health, agility, strength, and durability come from a continued unconscious use of their soul power. In addition, it is possible for some humans to attain a low enlightenment level with the help of the goddesses: witches are a good example of this. The Ancients, before they went almost extinct, had a low enlightenment level.

Intermediate: An intermediate enlightenment level describes a half-divinity. Demigoddesses are a good example of a being in an intermediate stage. In addition, an evolving goddess (a being who will eventually become a goddess) are in this stage, and will rapidly, with the help of medium enlightenment beings, achieve the medium enlightenment level as well.

Medium: A medium enlightenment level describes the first stage of divinity, where a being gains full conscious ability to use their soul powers. Beings of medium enlightenment can create beings of lower enlightenment, up to a certain limiting point. They can, with ease, create low enlightenment beings, and they can also create intermediate beings with a little more difficulty. They can then "inspire" these intermediate beings to evolve quickly into medium beings. However, once the other being reaches around the same level as the being who created it, the original being can do little to improve the power of the new being. Most notably, these beings, since their power is conscious, are effectively immortal. Even if you kill their material body, their soul remains together and conscious under its own power and awareness. Canyon Goddesses as well as Ire Goddesses have medium enlightenment levels.

High: a high enlightenment level describes a pure form of divinity. High Goddesses can create souls of any degree with ease. However, there is such a large gap between the medium and high enlightenment levels that it could take millions or billions of years to form new High Goddesses simply through imaginative inspiration processes. Goddesses with a high enlightenment level have the most direct connection with Iretha and her influence.

Iretha: Iretha's enlightenment level is the highest, and the ultimate Arscil Soul. It is not known if any other being or goddess has achieved the same level as her. Such a process could take millions or billions of years to evolve.

Divinity

Divinity is the state of being divine, of having powers that far exceed that of a normal being. Being granted divinity causes the power and range of one's soul to dramatically increase. Divinity refers to Arscil Souls that have achieved at least a medium enlightenment level and have full conscious control over their ability to impose psychological reality onto physical reality.

Divinity being granted is the main way a being can ascend enlightenment levels within the canyon. The maximum amount of enlightenment that can be provided by a divinity giver is equal to the divinity giver's own enlightenment level (since you can't share what you haven't realized yet). In most cases, the divinity giver will only impart a small amount of enlightenment into the recipient's soul. This allows the recipient to develop skills on their own with experience while also preventing givers from straining themselves too much.

Human souls can also gain divinity by passing a trial in Arscil. After passing, the goddesses then approve, and once that happens, a High Goddess will provide your divinity.

Catalysts

A catalyst is an Arscil Soul made of hundreds of other souls compacted into a single one. Some paranormal beings are formed this way instead of the usual way of being granted further enlightenment by a higher soul.

The goddess facilitating the catalyst causes one soul's psychic element to be imposed upon the psychic reality of another soul. The process is continuously repeated. The greater perspectives the souls have as more and more merge together cause the whole bunch of souls to reach a sort of mini-enlightenment that boosts their collective enlightenment level. This makes the catalyst stronger than the individual souls. However, the process is considered immoral.

Mechanics

This section will attempt to document the mechanics of the Arscil Soul and how having a more powerful soul/imagination (and achieve enlightenments) can shape reality. It does so by introducing a new theory known as Paranormal Complete Theory (PCT).

The paranormal complete theory states that rather than derive their power from a technological source, the goddesses have derived their power from a psychic element. A psychic element is a hypothesized non-physical field that gives rise to most paranormal phenomenon. Ghost sightings, possession, curses, time skips, etc. are all related to happenings in this state. The psychic element deals with a separation of consciousness and material- while material (such as neurons) can give rise to consciousness, consciousness ultimately exists in a different realm or existence. That way, even when our physical bodies die out, our consciousness can remain, stored in some metaphysical field.

In the PCT theory, a species can develop more and more until, as a whole, they begin to increase their conscious strength (through enlightenment). This allows them to be able to associate their consciousnesses more and more with the psychic element. What happens is the psychic element allows the soul to create its own reality, known as a psychic imagination. However, a strong consciousness will not only be able to create this in the psychic element, but will actually be able to impose this onto the real world, overlaying their own psyche into physical existence. This actually makes psychology, with powerful enough consciousnesses, a physical science- structures, thoughts, ideas, and other elements of the psyche become real things. How the imposition works exactly is unknown; the only thing that is known is that it takes an extremely large connection with the psychic element to get it to happen. Of course, like IQ, the strength of the psychic element across a population may fall on a distribution. The advancement of psychic strength increases slowly over time within a species.

As the psychic force is immaterial, translating your soul to the element and back can put you anywhere in the universe you can imagine. Obviously, humans cannot do this by themselves yet and require goddesses to help them out. Many other powers of the goddesses can be explained as well. Psychology itself becomes a material science so to speak with a high enough amount of psychic connection. Therefore, forming certain personas, identities, personalities, etc. minor to the main personality can cause a physical split in addition to the psychological split. This is the mechanism by which goddesses can form canyon beings. In addition, a connection to the psychic force can allow one to manifest certain items, and perhaps even entire bodies. By being able to manifest a body, this allows for the concept of regeneration seen in healing and in Arscil when one dies. It may even explain the Barrier as being a form of mental block- for more information, see the Barrier article.

In PCT, divinity is achieved by a being with an already powerful psyche inducing a state of psychological enlightenment in the target. The state of enlightenment not only expands the mental abilities of the recipient (like thinking speed or perception), it (since psychology is a material science with the psychic element) increases entanglement with the psychic element. This allows for a greater amount of manifestation powers. In PCT, goddesses lose no power through granting divinity as they just are able to inspire other beings. Since you can't teach something to someone else you don't know, the maximum enlightenment given to other beings is clearly limited by the goddess' own power and level of enlightenment. By developing their powers, the goddesses can continue to unlock their mental blocks and gain higher enlightenment, so their power can increase that way.

On Arscil, much of the evolution towards transcendence that would be required to form psychic elements as powerful as the goddesses were bypassed due to Iretha, who acted as an enlightener to all Arscil Souls and their psychic elements. Thanks to her, they can develop further enlightenment much faster than any natural evolution would allow.