Bakker has mentioned that some apes and whales as well as a the rare Sranc or Bashrag have souls.

The idea has been that only the rare animal ever 'awakens' enough to develop a soul in Earwa, but that's not something I've ever explored to date

Another thing that I found interesting, were the similarities and continuity between PON Chapter 17 and the whole chapter 14 of TGO, where the Survivor has his insights (the "Cuts and cuts and cuts" chapter): It's the chapter where you have both the whole showdown between the great names and the emperor, the unmasking of Skeaös, and Kellhus's intruction by the pragma. Ever since reading it, I've been of a mind that the TGO chapter was key for understanding some major elements of the book. But together with the PON chapter, I think it explains exactly what has been going through Kellhus's mind ever since he was hung from the tree in Caraskand (so in TWP). It's still heavy stuff; I'm still trying to decipher it and share what I get, but I'll get to that when I reach the passages during the reread of the series ^^.

The substantial Other in the case of Kierkegaard is more subtle. In many ways, Kierkegaard, despite his rabid opposition to Hegel, formulates a very Hegelian philosophy that identifies dialectical moments in the structure of belief. But Kierkegaard refuses Hegel’s interpretation of Christ’s death. For Kierkegaard, God remains utterly distinct from the world of finitude. The humiliation of Christ in the finite world does not manifest God’s descent or desubstantialization. This is an impossibility that would eliminate the infinite distance that separates the subject from God, but it becomes everyday theology in the Christendom that Kierkegaard excoriates. This infinite distance is correlative to the subject’s freedom. Kierkegaard poses it in opposition to Hegelian absolute knowing as the emblem of freedom.

The subject’s freedom, for Kierkegaard, depends on an absence of knowledge about God, who thus acquires a substantial status. Despite God’s appearance in the finite form of Christ, Kierkegaard’s God is not subjectivized. Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel focuses on how the latter fails to grasp his own inability, as a finite subject, to know God. We can have access to God, but this access is only indirect, which is why Christianity requires the leap of faith on the part of the subject. Unlike Hegel, Kierkegaard gives the subject a task—accomplish the leap and become an authentic Christian—but the cost of this task is prohibitive.

The fundamentals of the critique originate with Søren Kierkegaard, who mounts it soon after Hegel’s death. For Kierkegaard, the problem with the whole is double: it is always only an illusory totality, a conceptual whole that fails to capture the actuality of the particulars, but the very attempt to conceptualize the whole has the effect of violently altering the status of the particulars. For critics of Hegel like Kierkegaard, the conceptual inadequacy of the whole augments rather than mitigates its violence. The thought of all particulars in light of their relationship to the whole distorts their particularity by framing it in terms of an illusion—the totality—and does not do them justice. The whole can never become whole enough to include the variegations of multiplicity that constantly escape it.

The revelation was as breathtaking as it was heartbreaking. Once, when Cnaüir was a child, a whirlwind had roared through the Utemot encampment, its shoulders in the clouds, yaksh, cattle, and lives swirling like skirts about its feet. He had watched it from a distance, wailing, clutching his father’s rigid waist. Then it had vanished, like sand settling in water. He could remember his father running through the hail to assist his kinsmen. He could remember beginning to follow, then stumbling to a halt, transfixed by the vista before him as though the scale of the transformation had dwarfed his eyes’ ability to believe. The great rambling web of tracks, pens, and yaksh had been utterly rewritten, as though some mountain-tall child had drawn sweeping circles with a stick. Horror had replaced familiarity, but order had replaced order.

Like the whirlwind, his revelation regarding Moenghus had blasted a different, far more horrifying order from what he had known. Triumph became degradation. Pride became remorse.