I'm not sure if a pipe has a soul, but I've had a couple that have had a ghost.
Ruminations on the Soul of a Pipe
- Thread starter Briar Lee
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A young old man six years my senior just called me and it aggravates my beloved wife each time I revert to full Bug Tussle hillbilly talk with a fellow soul brother of the Sons of the Pioneer Farmers.
We were debating exactly when my father Bruce handed off the lease on the MacAnish place that was the LaRue place before that to Tommy’s father Cecil.
We swapped MacAnish Place stories until we had to both go see about our sick wives, and made a date for this Deer Season to go mount up and ride over there past Spout Spring Hollow and settle it,,,,maybe.
The sons of Bruce and Cecil have souls and I suspect so do old farmsteads, too.
There’s a siding from the Leaky Roof Railroad over there on the MacAnish place our fathers took us to many times.
I think Cecil took over from Bruce in 1971 when my Daddy died and Tommy and Cecil and Russell harvested all the crops and sold them and refused me and my Mama even the fuel money.
Tommy thinks it was a few years before that, but I know he’s mistaken.
Or at least I think I he might be.
We were debating exactly when my father Bruce handed off the lease on the MacAnish place that was the LaRue place before that to Tommy’s father Cecil.
We swapped MacAnish Place stories until we had to both go see about our sick wives, and made a date for this Deer Season to go mount up and ride over there past Spout Spring Hollow and settle it,,,,maybe.
The sons of Bruce and Cecil have souls and I suspect so do old farmsteads, too.
There’s a siding from the Leaky Roof Railroad over there on the MacAnish place our fathers took us to many times.
I think Cecil took over from Bruce in 1971 when my Daddy died and Tommy and Cecil and Russell harvested all the crops and sold them and refused me and my Mama even the fuel money.
Tommy thinks it was a few years before that, but I know he’s mistaken.
Or at least I think I he might be.
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That’s a dollar you would lose, counselor. Prime age for briar is between 35 and 65 years with Algerian stretching out, maybe, into the 100 mark, tops.
Barling knew a little bit about briar, seeing as how they did their own harvesting, curing, and milling, and in their 1926 booklet, The Romance Of The Barling Pipe, wherein they showed pictures of their Algerian briar operations, they specified that they preferred burls of about 60 years of age.
Your turn.
I wish I had kept some of the magical bracelets and amulets. It was a weird mix of folk religion and buddhism. The communist government and police were not very kind to them and treated them like they were idiots.
If such things as briar do have souls, isn't the soul released when the object it inhabits dies? If that is true then ... no a pipe, made of dead briar, wouldn't have a soul, the soul having gone wherever souls go. Perhaps, like the hermit crab, they find a new home to inhabit. And a "Brylon" pipe never had a soul. 
These first two sentences could (at a stretch) read in a manner that allows for the tsukumogami of a pipe.
As for the OP, I feel comfortable with the idea of pipes having a soul, even if it was only temporarily present while being breathed through - though I am not dying on this hill.
I also think you are correct when you observe the different souls in your two pipes.
However I think there can be some accidental confusions in Christian culture about the nature of soul, due to the same word being used to express different ideas
Treading carefully, here... some Christian culture seems unaware that in the original Biblical languages of Hebrew and Greek, there are two words for what has become, in English, the interchangeable synonyms 'soul' and 'spirit': and these are used distinctively according to context.
In Hebrew, there is Ruach and Nepesh, in Greek these translate respectively as Pneuma and Psyche. Ruach/Pneuma is what we should call, if we preserved the same distinction, 'spirit': that is what the gnostics called the Natural Soul, or the Life Essence, something that everything that we can reasonably call alive, has. Nepesh and Psyche, on the other hand, is the individualised soul that develops, for example, when an already Ruach/Pneuma-animated human foetus is born and develops into a person with unique selfhood (the Nepesh/Psyche, what the gnostics called the Rational Soul). At least, that's how I understand the distinction - others may disagree.
Now, whether Nepesh/Psyche is a uniquely human quality, is not a hill I would want to die on. From my very limited experience of non-human animals that have appeared to me to have survived physical death, I suspect it may not be so. Trees, I'm even less sure about: but briar root that's been cut out for decades and then boiled - surely it's only going to be conscious in the sense that one might claim that all matter - like the table I'm writing on at the moment - is conscious.
A craftsman might infuse some of his personal energy - his Nepesh - into a pipe as he makes it, and so might the smoker: but isn't that more of a ghost, in the traditional pipe-smoking sense of the word, than a 'soul'? That would be my understanding of 'tsukumogami'.
Lord, the things that get raised in these forums... there are few places like this.
If this is true then they're doing it wrong. Noon during the day of the new moon would be even more effective. Probably seen as less poetic though.
Why would I lie to you? Have you tried both methods, and made an empirical comparison?If this is true then they're doing it wrong. Noon during the day of the new moon would be even more effective. Probably seen as less poetic though.
No but I know how tidal forces work, and they're much more significant under the conditions I mentioned. Just reference your local tide tables, you'll see what I mean.
Noon under the new moon, when the sun and moon's gravitational pulls are aligned straight overhead, vs during a full moon when they're at odds.
The is some speculation that a photographer can capture and preserve a soul, but who am I to judge them?
Before these temples to justice, the citizens of Missouri had not the rule of law.
Think of all the dramas that unfolded inside that courthouse since 1890.
And inside are shrines to the boys who died on Okinawa and other such faraway places.
I have no clue how it all fits together, but I keep reverence about such images. I never defile them by showing them in bad light.
Before these temples to justice, the citizens of Missouri had not the rule of law.
Think of all the dramas that unfolded inside that courthouse since 1890.
And inside are shrines to the boys who died on Okinawa and other such faraway places.
I have no clue how it all fits together, but I keep reverence about such images. I never defile them by showing them in bad light.
Oh wow, that 60 year old stock dates to the mid sixties!
Let that sink in a minute, folks.
Every brand new Kaywoodie today is over a century old, or close to it,
Because to be useable in the sixties the briar had to all be at least fifty or sixty years old then.
Well if I am being honest, it seems like a lot of folks are willing to sell off their souls for depressingly small gains like power and authority. One way to look at the soul is it's a key thing that makes us human, it's the part of our humanity that tells us things like don't curbstomp that guy just for having a shitty opinion. That the babies are precious and should be treated that way. Yeah some people really find that voice that should be inborne in us all to be a real hindrance to their personal agendas.
So what you are now saying is that dowsers like me are not actually doing it wrong, but that there is a way of doing it better. I'll accept that, and thank you for the tip, which I will remember when I cut my next fork and see if it makes a significant difference.No but I know how tidal forces work, and they're much more significant under the conditions I mentioned. Just reference your local tide tables, you'll see what I mean.
Noon under the new moon, when the sun and moon's gravitational pulls are aligned straight overhead, vs during a full moon when they're at odds.
And the most betterest way is to cut them from kaywoodie pipes made from 400 year old briar and ghosted with cult blood red moon
Those forks would have to be tiny, though. I don't think you're taking this at all seriously.
By the way I’ve personally witnessed a dowser and Alva Hosterman had the gift from God.
He dowsed every new well in our neighborhood.
Tiny yes, but small enough to pass through the eye of a needle