Micro-Theory 1: Plainsong.

God, you’d think, was born in the minds of man. But something has made me think otherwise. You see, I’ve recently been using a sort of rubbish circular singing (a combination of mantra with cod-Gregorian chant) to help our baby get through his teething pain, and it occurred to me, as I sat there droning away, that our awareness of a spirit or soul may have been conceived out of such verbal play. Making noises like these feels strangely old, and we have surely been making them since we were living in caves. Imagine how different these noises sounded echoing within a cave to how they did on the plain or in the woods. Indeed, the cave is the antecedent of the church: a locus of power which attains to this power by its capacity to echo and reveal the inchoate, inarticulate realm of man’s spirit, his yearning and supplication. Of course, the mouth is a kind of cave too, and it is as a well of echoes that this transformation occurs; that a thought makes the metempsychotic journey from disembodied essence to embodied sound. Perhaps this is how our awareness of a soul evolved: by tracing the physical manifestation of the defining attribute of our humanity, our speech, to its origin.