Okay, so I’m supposed to be writing about Fire principle and Water principle tonight. And I really do want to write about that, but it’s not taking my attention nearly as much as Soul Retrieval is, so I’m going to postpone what I was planning on writing for another topic entirely.

John and I just watched the last two episodes of Dollhouse, Season 1. I’ve seen them before, John hasn’t. Beware, if you haven’t seen it the rest of this post might spoil some pieces of it.

Now that the spoiler warning is out of the way, we can get going. The premise of Dollhouse is that there is a secret corporate project that takes people, supposedly volunteers but the line is obviously not demarcated well, and backs their memory/personality up to a disk. Then takes posession of the body for use in whatever they are currently being paid for. The Dollhouse imprints the Actives, or Dolls, with a constructed personality and a set of parameters that will govern their behavior when out on engagement. When not on an engagement the Actives live in a paradisical building where they are sheltered from all forms of stress and their every need is cared for.

One of the big themes of the first season, and strongly highlighted in the last two episdoes is responsibility, culpability, and self-responsibility. We see the responsibility card played time and again. From a woman who nobly understands the necessity and value of death and accepts her end with grace, to a little girl who blames herself for not escaping her abusive guardian, to a religious sect abdicating their own reason in the name of faith in their leader.

The last two episodes spring upon us the idea that the people who volunteer to become Actives are doing so to escape their troubles, but could be seen to be abdicating all personal responsibility, which is of course a dream that many of us have had at one time or another, so it strikes kind of hard.

The main plot element of the last episode involves an Active finding herself confronted by her own original personality imprinted upon another body. There is discussion of evolution, and of the betterness of the imprinted (compositely imprinted) active versus the weak-willed person who ‘abandoned’ her body and life to the care of the Dollhouse.

We could examine these elements, and many supporting elements for days, and it would be great fun, but I’m not as interested in the analysis of this theme as I am a comparison it brought to mind.

There is a technique used in many neopagan communities, known as soul retrieval. The idea is that at certain times in our life, for one reason or another, a piece of our soul, part of our personality, splits from the primary personality and runs away somewhere. This is often caused by some sort of traumatic event, but often these events are seemingly insignificant, and actually trigger an unseen current or hotspot.

I’ve seen soul retrieval done well and poorly, and I have my own thoughts about it’s use (and abuse, and overuse). But the technique is essentially a method of finding the missling piece(s) of a persons soul, dialoging/interfacing with them, and inviting/convincing them to return to the person to help make them whole.

The paralell between a person who abandons their body to escape their challenges, living this husk, this physical shell to be filled by another light, and the hidden/severed part of the soul in a soul retrieveal context is interesting. As shown in Dollhouse, the super-personality that evolves after the piece of the soul has left can turn out well, or very poorly. In some ways, protecting the lost pieces of our soul, recognizing they are their and yearning to be whole again is a primary responsibility of the surviving soul.

But another paralell is the realization that Alpha nd Echo, after being imprinted with all their prior personalities, find themselves in the situation of being the consummate actor. Like we must do, they explore the lines between welf, and the masks that we wear for ourselves and the people around us. Assuming the personalities and masks we do is an important and powerful skill, but who are we when we allow ourselves to be.

I suspect that one of the reasons so many people work so hard to never be truly alone, is to avoid facing themselves. If we assume that the concept of soul division as postulated above is true, then perhaps many of us are living our lives as relatively mindless people, moving from one costume to another, filling the roles we must to survive and succeed, and tending to our inner soul, the escaped truth of self when we can, often scarcely.

Well that’s a depressing thought. I can’t keep my eyes open, you get where I’m going I’m sure.

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