Body and soul

I very much enjoyed the Philip Pullman Dark Materials books and the Harry Potters, particularly the first one which I devoured in two hours in a cafe on a sunny Saturday morning in San Francisco. Both authors discuss the idea of the representation of the soul outside the body in the form of an animal. James Frazer writes about this ancient and widespread idea in The Golden Bough. Many tribes believed that whilst a person's asleep, the soul wanders from the body and actually participates in what the body dreams of. One story is that a man fell asleep and was very thirsty so his soul left his body, took the form of a lizard and entered a pitcher of water to drink. Just then, the owner of the pitcher put a lid on it so the soul could not return to its body and the man died. When his friends were preparing to burn the body, somebody uncovered the pitcher to get some water. The lizard then jumped out, returned to the body and the man came back to life, saying that he'd been dreaming of being stuck down a well.