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In the comics and MCU (probably), I concluded a person is formed by a body, a soul and spirit. The “consciousness” is more like a consequence of those or a “condition” of being awake and aware.
The “body” is the Physical Body + the Astral Body. They need one another to survive, in other words, if you don’t have a special training or special mystic powers, if your Astral and Physical Body get split, you’ll die after some time. Even Doctor Strange is said to “be in danger” if he stays out of his Physical Body for over 12 hours. The body starts to die. It’s a fact the Astral Body is more “free” than the Physical Body, in a sense it carries the person’s “consciousness” when it gets separated from the body. Also, destroy the Astral Body and the Physical Body dies, HOWEVER, bring the body back to life and the Astral Body might wake up. These bodies interact A LOT, meaning they’re VERY connected.
It’s possible for Physical Bodies to live without Astral Bodies and vice versa, but not in normal conditions. Ghosts could be Astral Bodies who lost their Physical Bodies…and Mindless Ones Physical Bodies that lost their Astral Bodies. We don’t know for certain.
The Soul and the Spirit. Many think it’s the same, but it’s not. The Spirit is the “living force” someone IS. Spirit includes personality, willpower, determination, choices, memories and emotions, mostly. The Soul, by the other hands, is the pure essence of life someone has. It’s the most private, intimate part of someone’s existence and it carries the person’s natural tendencies, as if it had been the origin of everything that person is, it’s their ultimate presence in reality.
But what does that mean? It means a person can live without parts of their existence. A person can live without their Soul, Spirit and Body, as long as their “consciousness” still is “happening”.
Someone’s “consciousness” normally is a property they have as a WHOLE.
In the comics, Mephisto took Stephen’s soul and is using it to claim “property” over him by trying to control him. His body got “empty” so Mephisto placed a Ghost Rider inside, as to say, controlling the body, but we have to remember Stephen’s Spirit still exists, along with his consciousness, that right now is trapped between his body and soul. It exists and it’s locked inside Mephisto’s illusion. Stephen still can use his Spirit to “take over” the illusion and end it while being conscious.
What if someone has their consciousness destroyed? Well, they stop being aware, they stop thinking, they lose who they were, but their soul, body and spirit still remains. Those parts still can carry some of the person’s consciousness, like in those ghost movies where a bad spirit lives in a house and bad things happen because of that, but the spirit has no idea of who they were and they just instinctively make bad things happen because they’re lost and suffering.
We already saw Doctor Strange without his soul before, when he was a Black Priest. That’s why he still could feel and talk. Not having your soul however means losing a great deal of your original essence. Doctor Strange as the Black Priest destroyed realities and planets in order to achieve a greater good, but even so, normal Stephen would never be able to do that and keep doing that and think coldly like a strategist and KEEP doing that the way we saw Black Priest Stephen doing. After that saga, Stephen REMEMBERS what happened and he hates himself for it. It’s an huge regret he carries and that will never go away. Yeah, he HAD to destroy like, 10 Earths to save 1000 Earths, in order to save the universe, but still, it’s not in his ESSENCE (soul) to do that without sweating about it.
Hurting/destroying someone’s soul would be the highest violence of all because you would be reaching for the “materialization” of their existence.
Black Priest Strange still had Spirit, and that’s why he still was a good person, that’s why he wanted to do the right things and save everyone, but his emotions, his essence, his passion, they were A LOT more absent than usual. He was feeling absolutely EMPTY, as if he was never going to be happy again. His existence wasn’t his anymore, it belonged to someone else.
What can someone achieve by having someone’s soul? Well, control their existence, use the soul to obtain energy or to rebuild the other parts of the being. This is why the Soul Stone has the power to bring people who died back to life.
When someone dies but you still have memories of them, following the Marvel Universe, that person STILL LIVES inside you because you knew their essence and that essence lives in you. If you had the power to craft anything, you would be able to bring the person back to life, even if they lost some memories, etc.
Think about the Ghost Rider. The body is Johnny Blaze’s. He also has a spirit. But he sold his soul, so the Spirit of Vengeance’s soul (the soul of an angel who was tortured and corrupted) was implanted inside him. When he transforms, the soul’s consciousness takes over, but Johnny (or the “host” in general) can STILL INFLUENCE THEIR CHOICES AND FEELINGS.
No one was able to control Doctor Strange when he was a Black Priest even if he had lost his soul because he was too damn powerful. Even without a soul he was one of the most powerful beings in the universe, but still, his body was an human body (he didn’t use magic to transform or improve it) so he was easily killed by Doctor Doom (he didn’t fight back in any way). Maybe he died so easily because the will to save everyone and protect the universe was the only thing keeping him alive. Without a soul he felt empty, sad, confused, with a lack of feeling, despite his emotions still being there. He lost the passion he had for his own life, but everything returned to normal when Reed “pushed the reset button” of that reality.
