All those souls I can see ... was Maerwald right?

[Corylea]

Ever since the ritual with the tower in the very beginning of the game, the player character can "touch the soul" of several people in each area of town.  Maerwald claims that those folks are people I've been in past lives.  That doesn't make any sense to me.

 

If souls are reborn and simply forget their past lives, then how could it be that my soul is spread through all those different bodies?  Plus, there are a LOT of them, and most of them aren't from primitive caveman days, so it doesn't seem possible that I've lived to adulthood so many times during the same general period of time.

 

But if they aren't people I've been in past lives, how come I can "touch the soul" of some people and not others?  And what am I supposed to be learning from all of these?

 

I'm only in Defiance Bay, so I'm not all that far along yet.  Does this get clearer later?

 

I remember the slowly dawning realization in Planescape: Torment that I'd been a horrible person in past lives, which fueled my desire to make things right during my current incarnation.  There are so MANY souls I can touch in Pillars of Eternity, though, and they seem all over the map -- some good and some bad, some powerful and some powerless.  Is all of this going to coalesce into something?

 

Thanks in advance!

 

[draek]

I forget who says it - but some one mentions its only "strong souls" which remain the rest degrade over time.

Similar to peoples memories over time. 

[Katarack21]

I do not know the ending. I'm only in Defiance Bay, myself. But I've come to a theory. At one point it's mentioned that souls lose pieces of themselves every time they reincarnate--and sometimes gain back more than they lost, but usually diminish.

I think the gods are gestalt souls--people from an ancient empire who used a form of animancy to steal tiny little bits of other souls and add them to their own, en masse, and became gods when they did it. I think the MC is the reincarnation of the soul of Eothas after his death in the Saint's War, and the visions are of the time when all the "gods" did this.

Just my working theory.

[Corylea]

I do not know the ending. I'm only in Defiance Bay, myself. But I've come to a theory. At one point it's mentioned that souls lose pieces of themselves every time they reincarnate--and sometimes gain back more than they lost, but usually diminish.

 

I think the gods are gestalt souls--people from an ancient empire who used a form of animancy to steal tiny little bits of other souls and add them to their own, en masse, and became gods when they did it. I think the MC is the reincarnation of the soul of Eothas after his death in the Saint's War, and the visions are of the time when all the "gods" did this.

 

Just my working theory.

 

Wow, that's a really interesting theory!  I like it.  It fits with what I know of the game lore so far. 

 

I only just discovered this game a couple of days ago, so I haven't been thinking about this for very long; thanks for giving me the benefit of your greater amount of time pondering the game world.