BoM/TWS Message Forum

Create a free golem (substantia), imbue it with imago and anima?

The issue would be essentia, though, as that would be the most difficult component to reassemble. The masks and mind bands contain the person's imago and the anima bands contain the anima, and those can be extracted with latter spells - the free golem would be the receptacle where they'd be. You'd need to contain some of their essentia, however, which can only be extracted as you mentioned (the organ below Cuthbert or the machine Fane develops from its study, contained as P2 IIRC). And that depends if it survives the extraction - if essentia becomes ruptured, it becomes liberated all at once.

One of the issues is that essentia is presented as what makes you "you". This would be the crux of the "Ship of Theseus" issue with reconstituting an individual from its metaphysical parts - will it be the same individual if it has the essentia of someone else, considering that their imago and anima correspond to the same individual and therefore they should be indistinct to the original? Will it be the same individual if only a portion of its essentia is added in and the rest is just remnants from someone else? (Remember that the whole purpose of burning the earth is to rid it of the remaining anima, but also of the remaining essentia; this, of course, applies only to graveyard soil which is expected to house human remains, though the same could apply to any soil as someone could've died there ages ago.)

It's an issue with the Stellae as their essentia is unique and more concentrated (so to speak). If you reconstruct Frank or Joe using the essentia of other people, it's almost a given that they'll lose their connection to the ousiarchs. Conversely, one could conceivably create a Stellae by infusing the essentia of an existing one in someone else's body, and therefore one could conceivably replace Stellae by replacing their imago and anima. But that's mostly them. When you think about it, the average individual would be otherwise identical to the target, because their sense of self doesn't reside in the essentia.

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Now, to properly answer the question. Could you reassemble the individual if you used the organ or the P-Machine? Both are supposed to not just extract, but also to infuse the metaphysical components. The organ probably wouldn't, since it mostly extracts substantia, essentia and anima but doesn't separate them - meanwhile, the imago is left in the skin. To use the organ properly, you'd need to somehow preserve the components and load them into the organ before reversing the effect, and you'd need the actual skin of the individual. The P-Machine is far more efficient, but it faces the same problem - it needs to have the components loaded in. Therefore, you could if you had the components at hand, in "liquid" form, but that implies having found those components in the first place. And then, the answer really comes to whether the individual would be considered the original only if it had at least a percentage of the original essentia.

I feel the better question would be how you'd find the divested essentia in the first place. And that, as far as I know, isn't something that has been explored. (That would be something that'd definitely lure Kali to the dark side, though.)