The term ‘Free Soul’ enters the depth-psychology corpus principally through Jan N. Bremmer’s landmark comparative study of archaic Greek religion, where it designates one half of a cross-cultural dual-soul typology: a soul that represents the person as a whole yet functions exclusively outside the body — active in dream, trance, and after death, but passive and locationally obscure while its owner wakes. Bremmer, drawing on Arbman and the Hultkrantz school of Scandinavian anthropology, establishes the free soul’s defining features: it carries no psychological or physical attributes, it merely represents the individual, and it is structurally dependent on the body even as the body is reciprocally dependent on it. The free soul’s ecstatic career — journeying during sleep or shamanic trance, enabling bilocation, wandering north to acquire wisdom — links archaic Greek figures such as Aristeas and Hermotimos to North Eurasian shamanism. Within the broader corpus, the term occasionally migrates toward related but distinct idioms: Aurobindo’s liberated soul that acts from ‘free soulhood’ draws on Vedantic categories of purusha and prakriti rather than on Bremmer’s anthropological schema, while Plotinus addresses the freedom of soul in terms of self-disposal and the soul’s orientation toward the Good. The conceptual tension between the free soul as an archaic cosmological entity and the free soul as a soteriological achievement in Indian and Neoplatonic thought marks the principal fault line any careful reader must navigate.
The free soul, therefore, is always active outside the body; it is not bound to it like the body souls… The free soul never has any physical or psychological attributes; it only represents the individual.
Bremmer’s definitive formulation: the free soul is constitutively extracorporeal, bearing no psychic attributes but functioning solely as the person’s representative, and it cannot survive once the body dies.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983thesis
The occasions of bilocation — sleep, trance, and death — are those when the free soul leaves the body, and it seems very likely that the key to this type of story is to be found in the concept of the free soul.
Bremmer argues that ancient bilocation narratives — including one recorded by Augustine — are structurally intelligible only through the free soul concept, which posits the entire person as departing the body during altered states.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983thesis
it seems that here, as in the case of Hermotimos, the intellectual soul has been identified with the free soul. Hippocrates gives a much more interesting description of the soul’s behavior during sleep.
Bremmer traces the progressive identification of the intellectual ego-soul with the free soul in Greek tradition, using Hippocratic testimony to show the free soul assuming full cognitive and motor function once the body is at rest.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983thesis
The Aristeas legend then reveals the journey of the free soul in a trance but not so far any influence from shamanism. The legend of Hermotimos recounted by Apollonius also presents the free soul wandering away during a trance.
Bremmer examines the legends of Aristeas and Hermotimos as Greek instances of the free soul’s trance-journey, situating them within but carefully distinguishing them from Eurasian shamanic practice.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
it appears probable that the life-soul, in its character a breath-soul, has emancipated itself from its immediate physical functions and in consequence of its airy consistency been assimilated with and finally absorbed the conception of the free-soul.
Bremmer recounts Arbman’s thesis of how the originally distinct free soul becomes absorbed by the breath-soul across multiple linguistic traditions, explaining the emergence of unitary soul concepts.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
TWO. THE SOUL OF THE LIVING 13 The Free Soul The Ego Souls The Soul Animals Conclusion
Bremmer’s table of contents establishes the free soul as a discrete, primary category within his taxonomy of the soul of the living, structurally prior to and distinguished from the ego souls.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
killed, the free soul goes to the protector, who then insures the rebirth of the animal.
Bremmer extends the free soul concept to animals in the context of hunting religion, demonstrating that the free soul’s journey after death undergirds beliefs in divine protectors and the ethic against overkilling.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
the ego-soul shows its close kinship with our concept of the ego, it manifests certain peculiar features which makes it clear that it is not an expression for the individual’s own personality, but a being within the individual which endows him with thought and will.
Bremmer distinguishes the ego-soul from the free soul by its interiority and psychological functions, clarifying the dual-soul typology through contrast with Hultkrantz’s comparative anthropological data.
, The Early Greek Concept of the Soul, 1983supporting
a free soulhood spontaneously welling out in works of a supreme Truth and Love will replace human virtue.
Aurobindo employs ‘free soulhood’ as a soteriological category in which the liberated soul’s spontaneous expression of divine Truth supersedes conventional moral effort, representing a distinctly Vedantic valence of soul-freedom.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
The state of the liberated soul is that of the Purusha who is for ever free. Its consciousness is a transcendence and an all-comprehending unity.
Aurobindo identifies the free soul with the eternally liberated Purusha, whose all-unifying consciousness transcends all individual exclusion — a position that resonates structurally with, yet differs categorically from, Bremmer’s archaic free soul.
, The Synthesis of Yoga, 1948supporting
Acting towards the good, it must all the more possess self-disposal for by that Act it is directed towards the Principle from which it proceeds, and this its act is self-centred and must entail its very greatest good.
Plotinus grounds the soul’s freedom in its self-directed orientation toward the Good and the Intellectual-Principle, framing soul-freedom as a metaphysical self-disposal rather than an extracorporeal journey.
, The Six Enneads, 270aside
There is Law, but there is also spiritual freedom… the soul’s power of choice is increasingly felt: for Prakriti is the field of law and process, but the soul, the Purusha, is the giver of the sanction.
Aurobindo argues that the soul’s freedom operates increasingly as one moves inward beyond the mechanical determinism of body and life, positioning Purusha’s sanctioning power as the foundation of genuine spiritual liberty.
, The Life Divine, 1939aside