The Soul is a history of the human mind, from the earliest expression of self-consciousness to its unshakeable beliefs in the great religions and political systems.
Everyone thinks they have one, but nobody knows what it is.
For thousands of years the soul was an 'organ', an entity, something that was part of all of us, that survived the death of the body and ventured to the underworld, or to heaven or hell.
The soul could be saved, condemned, tortured, bought.
And then, mysteriously, the 'soul' disappeared. The Enlightenment called it the 'Mind'. And today, neuroscientists demonstrate that the mind is the creation of the brain.
The 'religious soul' lives on, in the minds of the faithful, while the secular 'soul' means whatever you want it to mean.
In The Soul- An Epic History of the Human Mind veteran war historian Paul Ham embarks on a journey that has never been attempted- to restore the idea of the soul to the human story and to show how belief in, and beliefs arising from, the soul/mind have driven human history.
The Soul tells the story of the inner 'I', the strange essence of ourselves, and how it has been animated, immortalized, loved, armed, inflamed, enslaved, illuminated and enlightened over 250,000 years- from the dawn of self-consciousness among the earliest Sapiens to the ancient Hindu and Egyptian ideas of immortality and rebirth; from the Jewish self-conception of the 'Chosen' to the Ancient Chinese and Greek theories of soul; from the rise of the Christian spirit that broke the Roman Empire to the Islamic conquests and crusading Christians; from the divided souls of the Reformation to the 'rational' soul/mind of the Enlightenment; from the missionary spirit that harvested souls for western empires to the earliest recognition of the souls/minds of women.
We enter the dark night of the soul under totalitarian rule; contemplate the harrowing and fragmentation of the modern mind; and glimpse the rise of the synthetic spirit of artificial intelligence.
The Soul is much more than a mesmerizing narrative and uniquely accessible way of explaining the human story. It transforms our understanding of how history works. It persuasively demonstrates that the beliefs of the soul/mind are the engines of human history.
About the Author
Paul Ham is the author of 12 books, including Passchendaele- Requiem for Doomed Youth (2016), 1914- The Year the World Ended (2013), Hiroshima Nagasaki (2011), Vietnam- The Australian War (2007) and Kokoda (2004).Passchendaele won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction.
Hiroshima Nagasaki was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award for History and is being made into a 6-part TV series by an American-British-Australian production team. Vietnam won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister's Literary Award (2008). Kokoda was shortlisted for the Walkley Award for Non-Fiction and the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction. Sandakan- The Untold Story of the Sandakan Death Marches, was published in 2012 and was also shortlisted for the 2013 Prime Minister's Literary Award for History.A former Sunday Times correspondent, with a Master's degree from the London School of Economics, Paul lives in Paris and devotes his time to writing history and (when possible) to teaching Narrative History at Sciences Po, France's preeminent tertiary school for the humanities.
