Biology in B&W is best understood as a duality between body and spirit. Life is defined by the characteristics of our bodies, our spirits, and the bonds between them. (For more detailed discussion on how life is influenced by the characteristics of the body, spirit, and environment, see Umwelt.)
Spirit
A spirit is the thing that gives life, matter, and intelligence. All matter is infused with some degree of spirit, even dead earth and stone. As spirits become more sophisticated, they confer, first, life and then, later, sapience. If a spirit is sapient, it is considered a person. As a spirit develops, it grows in intelligence and power, gains ability to interface with bodies, and its individuality becomes visible.
All spirit is alive, but a spirit must be developed past a certain point to be able to bring its body to life. Background spirit, the spirit that is omnipresent in matter, is a collective of infant spirits. These spirits are not yet able to evidence their individuality or impress their image on the world, so they appear as a homogeneous energy field spanning the cosmoi. Plants, animals, and intelligent life all have spirits of cognizable intelligence.
Spirits are not created and have neither beginning nor end. Although they may exist, grow, and change with time, every spirit has existed in some form always. Although spirit gives all physical matter its form, spirit itself exists physically. It is not, so to speak, immaterial, but a more primordial form of matter than that which we can perceive.
On a personal level, the spirit is what could be called the original self. Our spirits are our emotional world and our means of accessing each others’ emotional worlds. As humans, we have sapient spirits, which enable advanced communication, contemplation, and abstraction, among other things. The individuality of the spirit stems from the ideas that make up a spirit. Plato believed that ideas had their own existence and they do, in the form of people. Spirits are composed of ideas. These ideas are, eo ipso, true: an untrue idea can appear in a spirit’s composition, but it manifests as a flaw or vacuum, a nothingness, in the spirit. Only true ideas positively manifest as a somethingness, composing a spirit. Like ideas, spirits exist in an infinite number and can grow more sophisticated ex nihilo.
Almost all spirits are a dynamic, radiant hodgepodge of beautiful thoughts and concepts. It is possible for a single spirit to grow from a single idea, but this is rare. A single idea can never be complex enough to form a spirit, so it must necessarily take on additional ideas as it grows. These ideas can be very specific. Consider the following case. There is a spirit that has been positively identified as being born from the idea of democracy as it developed in the minds of people born in la Gran Colombia after 1821 through la Gran Colombia’s dissolution. Named Bogota, she first heard of Earth and la Gran Colombia when this identification occurred, and has still never visited Earth, living several cosmoi away. Bogota exemplifies how an idea can be divorced from the context it corresponds to (la Gran Colombia, Earth), if any physical context exists. Bogota, the spirit, has always existed, before the Earth even formed, before Bolívar ever declared War to the Death. Even if la Gran Colombia never came into being, Bogota would still exist.
Bodies & Souls
A soul is the union of body and spirit. Spirits prefer to have a body. Without spirits, there is no matter, but without a body beyond the spirit, they can only influence the material world in trivial ways. Spirits are all made from a single substance, while bodies are not. Pure spirits are split into a few classifications: roaming spirits, sedentary spirits, and primal wills. Contrast with how many species exist. Both spirits and souls vary individually, but spirits’ differences are almost purely individual, while bodies differ individually and as classes.
If a spirit is joined with a body through the process of birth, the resulting soul is considered Natural Life. Birth is a special capacity of spirits that allows for a special union of soul and body. A spirit can only use this special capacity once. Birth is only possible with bodies that can interface with spirits and have no spirit inhabiting it. After birth, the spirit’s bodies prior to birth are suppressed, but not lost. These memories are gradually recovered after death. A spirit is not destroyed with the destruction of body, whether the former soul was natural life or otherwise. Spirits, after death, feel a primordial urge to migrate. This urge leads most spirits beyond the known cosmoi and, exploiting unknown mechanisms, travel to realms unknown.
The capacity of natural life to be born and die is essential for spirits. Spirits exist uncreated and live in and beyond the known cosmoi. As pure spirits, they have little ability to physically influence the world. Spirits return to this condition after death, but the process of becoming a soul matures the spirit. This maturation includes any growth the spirit underwent in terms of its character during life, but it does not end there. The matured spirit is also physically more advanced and gains little-understood abilities tied to the postmortem migration. Living beings have proven incapable of understanding these abilities and mature spirits incapable or uninterested in explaining them.
The typical development of a spirit is summarized as follows: Immature → Intelligent → Natural Life → Mature → Migration.
Those spirits that reject the urge to migrate and come to possess bodies are known as undead. There are a number of undead species. Since birth is unavailable to undead spirits, the bodies must be built to completion beforehand. By becoming undead, these spirits also lose the special abilities possessed by mature spirits (these abilities are regained when the undead return to death). This category also includes spirits whose migration is interrupted for whatever reason. As an example of this latter case, Clockwork Zombies do not choose to return to life. Their spirits are captured by a mechanical body designed to host spirits.
In contrast to natural life, constructs are bodies with a spirit that has never been born. Construct species differ from undead species because they use parts of the birth mechanism to gain a body. The process does not constitute birth and living as a construct usually does not produce the same physical maturation effects on the spirit. Consequently, this process is often caused deficient birth. Death of a construct’s body or the spirit abandoning the body also does not have the same effect as death does on spirits in natural life. Some natural life species began as construct species that evolved to support birth: golems and patchwork tsukumogami.
A body without a spirit reverts to dead matter, passively maintained by some spirit besides the former possessor. How a body gains a spirit of its own depends on the species, but a spirit cannot possess a body and form a soul unless the body can, to some degree, influence itself and give the spirit some freedom to influence the material world in a meaningful way. This is the difference between spirits that reside in unliving objects and souls; the unliving objects don’t work for soul formation because the spirit cannot make any meaningful choice that influences the physical world as a rock or river.
Not all souls fit a 1 body to 1 spirit (1:1) ratio. While n:1 and 1:n ratios are the most common, there exist species and individuals with m:n ratios. These unconventional arrangements require both a body with appropriate characteristics and a spirit with a compatible disposition.
Examples: Mons typically have 2 bodies and 1 spirit, but which 2 bodies the mon controls isn’t fixed (2:1). A mon spirit can shift possession from inhabiting one compatible body to inhabit another (their bodies being specially configured to transfer the spirit in such a fashion). Echidna has an arbitrary number of bodies that correspond to her single spirit (1:n). Tsukumogami often have multiple spirits in a single body (n:1). Blighted persons share their body in part with Blight, a primal will (1:2). While some spirits may be content to inhabit a single plant lifeform (1:1), more sophisticated plant spirits may have an entire forest as their body (1:large n).
When dealing with natural life, spirit and body matches are never that far off the mark. The existence of a soul implies that the body and spirit are highly compatible (this statement should be interpreted at a high level of abstraction). The diversity of physical bodies reflects this fact: some spirits are compatible with only one species of physical body. Furthermore, a spirit may not be able to inhabit all bodies of a compatible species, requiring an even closer match. The body and spirit must be able to physically and emotionally interface. Disease, disorder, and trauma may impact the quality of interface, but they do not erase original compatibility. Constructs and undead do not have the same guarantee, but since their spirits usually choose their bodies, the matches are decent.
By way of note, the term soul may be interpreted in some cases as the union of any group of things that has become universally and deeply integrated into each other, such that they can be described as a single object, but the biological interpretation is the default.
While individual souls are usually understood in isolation, it is important to understand that communities constitute a soul of sorts. Pulling from a previous example, Bogota is dependent on all the ideas around her for her identity: the ideas that birthed la Gran Colombia, the ideas that have come from her own, the ideas that she has lived alongside. The ideas that build my spirit themselves depend on the ideas of other spirits. My ideas, and thereby my spirit, grow as I learn about the ideas and truths of others. In turn, if I teach others truth, my life bleeds into theirs. All life flows in and out of each other. Even the spirits of the dead are influenced by the growth or decay of the ideas they left among the living. To live is to search for true ideas. It’s a collective endeavor and, for every mind lost from the collective or injured by falsehood, we are all the worse off.
List of a Few Sapient Species
See the Sapient Species Tag for all articles about specific species. The animal species tag is available for unintelligent specimens.
Natural Life: life resulting from a spirit being born into a body. Has no memory of life prior to birth. The spirit typically disappears at death.
- Adamin
- Axolotl
- Blizoop
- Elemental
- Gibs
- GKG
- Golem
- Human
- Inclusions
- Leviathan (abbreviated as Levy)
- Mons
- Patchwork Tsukumogami
- Squiffle
- Template
- Vampircille
- Vampire
Constructs: a body inhabited by a spirit that has never been born into a body. Memory is normal. The spirit typically does not disappear at death.
- Anima, or Wild Spirits
- Teruterubozu
- Tsukumogami
- Possessor (also a modifier)
Undead: a body inhabited by a spirit that has been born into a body. Undead retain their memories from life.
- Abhartach
- Clockwork Zombie
- Nosferatu
- Soucouyant
- Teruterubozu
Species Modifiers: Species that do not have their own form, but the form of other races.
- Blighted Person
- Umcoeur