M'aiq is not proof, nor canon.
M'aiq is Bethesda poking fun at us.

If anything, he may be an aspect of Herma Mora with a jester hat on.
When it comes to ancient thinking, the soul is the blood.
There is some evidence of a mind travelling with a soul inside a soul gem unto a new body (Mere-Glim in Lord of Souls)
But there is no evidence of a mind actually being a soul.
That would open up a whole can of philosophical worms.

No, not the in-game M'Aiq the liar, I mean the forum poster whose nick is "M'Aiq", who posted this a page ago in this thread:




Again, if you can be soul-trapped, that is, removed from your physical body (which is presumably dead at that point), including your physical brain (which presumably needs a beating heart to keep the thinky-bits running), and still have full access to your consciousness, your memories, your emotions, your personality, then that IS your mind, and as you are nothing but a soul, then that means the mind resides in the soul.

Interesting.
Thanks for reminding me

One wonders why Arkay went to special length to protect his believers.

In any case.
I theorise that a soul is not used up in an enchantment, it is used like a water unto a prayer wheel .
It is motive force, but unlike the wax in a candle, it is not actually spent.
It goes elsewhere.

The recycling aspect of the Dreamsleeve implies a finite 'oversoul' that just cycles around, a singlular loop in which there is no creation, mereley a different experience.
If things were to leak away, they would also have to come from somewhere, be generated.
Since technically we are diluted Aedra, that cannot be.

Although the recharge capabilities of Morrowind enchantments leave questionable doubt as whether a soul is continually strained for its energy, the contemporary model does seem to suggest the water wheel theory. There is no permanent entrapment. The soul is not annihilated. It's simply "milked" of its excess potential before being released into Aetherius.

The real question is the damage the process causes to black souls. There exist several afterlives(?) (the Thieves Guild in Skyrim even makes you pledge/damn your soul to Nocturnal), and I wonder if black soul gems are vilified because of their ability to bypass these realms. Instead of meeting the Aedra and one's ancestors in Aetherius/ Daedra in Oblivion, perhaps the process mangles the intellectual capacity of the soul, leaving it mindless, in agony, and without any temporary destination. It's simply shot back into the Dreamsleeve for immediate recycling, essentially denying the humanoid their rewards/praise/retrospect of life/future guidance of descendants. The destruction of long-term identity for short-term power.

With regards to the creation of black soul gems: Is Mannimarco now a satellite of the planet Arkay (Necromancer's Moon?), considering it eclipses it every eight days?

That was how I understood it.
Mannimarco achieved apotheosis, became a god, and as such a celestial body.
His sphere orbits that of Arkay like a moon and when he eclipses it there is the Shade of the Revenant.

The mining of black soul gems is clearly an oversight of the developers. Much like a citizen in Riften saying she visits the fishery on Fridays. (Not Fredas.)

It was probably just a mistake. There's a lot of lore behind black soul gems and the process by which they are made.

Personally I was a firm believer in the idea that the "soul" that gets trapped in a soul gem is different from the soul that makes people who they are. I'm pretty sure that the azura quest throws that theory out the window.

At this point now I have come to believe that souls are not necessarily harmed in the enchanting/recharging process. I think that the souls are just the source of the energy that powers an enchantment, and that once the soul is drained of energy it "dies". When you "kill" a soul by draining its energy into a enchantment its not really different from "killing" a ghost, you havent really killed it at all but simply banished it to whatever plane of oblivion its destined for. I think that whether or not a soul is harmed depends on the circumstances of its capture, for instance being trapped in a soul gem for a thousand years or being toyed with by who ever posses the gem would be rather damaging psychologically.

This may seem strange, but I'll mention it just in case it may shed light on soul gems.

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Wylandriah has an interesting dialogue tree, where you can advise her on her experiments on 'theoretical applied harmonics'. One of the random solutions you can offer her against 'complete dimensional collapse' is to 'swallow a soul gem', which she finds to be brilliant as it keeps the magical field stable.

I guess it's just another case of Bethesda trolling with incoherent magical ramblings (http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Oblivion:Ancotar), but who knows.

OK, so I have a new hypothesis, thanks to discussing how magic works in another thread...

Both souls and magic come from Aetherius. They are basically made of the same reality-potential/magic/soul stuff. Through some sort of process (which almost has to relate to the aedra and Lorkhan, at least for mortals, although Hell if I know how a god/aedra/daedra forms from that besides having Sithis get involved somehow), the unfocused potential magic/soul/physical reality building blocks of this Aetherian energy can be shaped from the more transient "magic" type of energy.

Souls inherently seem to svck magic into Nirn. That's how they have magicka that can be refilled. The thing is that a soul seems to have a limited capacity, and that a soul's magic will be transient unless the soul is somehow shaped into continuously supplying magicka even while recharging magicka.

To go back to my mortal/immortal soul hypothesis, the difference between a soul gem and a drain magicka spell is that drain magicka simply takes magicka away from a soul, but without a soul to hold that extra stuff... (I guess "solid" isn't quite the right word, but "contained" might be?) you can't control it or keep it in place. Thus, a soul gem has to go for the crude method of actually stealing and binding a soul, while enchantment will force that soul into a position where it is continuously still drawing magicka from Aetherius, and "casting" whatever spell the enchantment is supposed to do. The mortal soul would be a portion of the magicka and also portions which keep the body attached to mortal bodies, while the immortal soul would be the special part of the soul that can exist in Aetherius without completely dissolving so that some portion of a person can be re-incarnated.

Welkynd stones and Ayleid wells, apparently, were ways around this - they somehow tapped into Aetherius to absorb magicka without needing any souls to do so, using instead "meteoric iron" or "meteoric glass", which is created from a "shooting star" (potentially, made up of not-quite souls, itself), except when it's not because you could also find Welkynd stones forming naturally in a cave underground, so **** all if this lore isn't self-contradictory.

Dwemer, meanwhile, tap into geothermal vents in order to create portions of their magic... I think... And there is damn near nothing in the lore as far as I can tell that explains how they are capable of turning physical processes back into magical pre-creational energy with which they can power their automatons and machinery, other than "turning the profane unto the sacred" is just sort of what the Dwemer are all about. Of course, this is magic magma which may give off magic steam, and nobody really ever explains this stuff, so maybe all magma is actually magical strawberry jam made from Lorkhan's blood, anyway, so using it as substitute magic is fairly easy.