Similar ideas are found in ancient Assyrian and Babylonian religion. In the ancient Egyptian religion, an individual was believed to be made up of various elements, some physical and some spiritual. The souls of Pe and Nekhen towing the royal barge on a relief of Ramesses II's temple in Abydos. Some teach that even non-biological entities (such as rivers and mountains) possess souls. Thus if one sees a tiger then there is a self-conscious identity residing in it (the soul), and a physical representative (the whole body of the tiger, which is observable) in the world.
The actual self is the soul, while the body is only a mechanism to experience the karma of that life. Other religions (most notably Hinduism and Jainism) believe that all living things from the smallest bacterium to the largest of mammals are the souls themselves ( Atman, jiva) and have their physical representative (the body) in the world. For example, Thomas Aquinas, borrowing directly from Aristotle's On the Soul, attributed "soul" ( anima) to all organisms but argued that only human souls are immortal. In Judaism and in some Christian denominations, only human beings have immortal souls (although immortality is disputed within Judaism and the concept of immortality was most likely influenced by Plato). Present-day cognates include Dutch ziel and German Seele. The Old English word is cognate with other historical Germanic terms for the same idea, including Old Frisian sēle, sēl (which could also mean "salvation", or "solemn oath"), Gothic saiwala, Old High German sēula, sēla, Old Saxon sēola, and Old Norse sāla. In King Alfred's translation of De Consolatione Philosophiae, it is used to refer to the immaterial, spiritual, or thinking aspect of a person, as contrasted with the person's physical body in the Vespasian Psalter 77.50, it means "life" or "animate existence". The earliest attestations reported in the Oxford English Dictionary are from the 8th century. The Modern English noun soul is derived from Old English sāwol, sāwel. 2.16 Spirituality, New Age, and new religions.
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