Spirit

The definition is built entirely from the framework's five elements and specifies which are present and which are missing. A spirit is an animus, an energy cluster, definitely decoupled from the body and usually from the conscious, possibly still attached to a self and possibly to an emotional will. Nothing supernatural is being added, since decoupling is the ordinary separation of the five elements that also constitutes death and occurs in the living. What the definition does is give a vocabulary for what remains. The word usually before conscious is the important qualification, since Marsh reports that the fully decoupled I always seems to remain tied to the conscious, which means a cluster still holding an emotional will and a self but lacking conscious is a specific and incomplete case rather than the general one. That is her account of earthbound spirits, attached to places, living persons, addictive substances and physical life in general, compulsively preoccupied with earth-life and lacking real care for others, which reads in her vocabulary as a description of an endoself. Ghosts are the related category, decoupled but undispersed animus held together by an imbalance, either a credit never returned or a debt never paid. She places the belief historically rather than defending it, noting that life force has been called qi, anima mundi and many other names, and that animism has hundreds of thousands of years of evidence for the belief that anima can be stored in objects.

Anthropology treats spirit beliefs as near universal and studies them functionally, and Tylor's animism was the founding concept of the discipline's approach to religion. Comparative religion catalogues the many terms Marsh lists, qi, prana, pneuma, anima mundi. Psychology accounts for apparitions through bereavement hallucinations and agency detection. Marsh's approach differs from all of these by treating the cross-cultural consistency as evidence about the phenomenon rather than about human cognition, and by supplying a definition composed of her own theoretical elements rather than borrowing any tradition's, which makes the term testable within her framework and unrecognizable outside it.