Do primals have souls?

[PorxiesRCute]

This question just occurred to me. Do they?

[Lyth]

If primal summoning is derived from creation magic, then not ordinarily, because creation magic cannot create a soul. There are exceptions, like Shiva, however, but I think you need a pre-existing soul in that case.

There's also that related hemitheos concept, in which a soul becomes bound to an existing creation (i.e. Phoinix in Tales from the Shadows: Through His Eyes). I'm not sure if the theory applies directly to summoned primals, but it should in theory.

[Cleretic]

Yeah, my read on this is 'as a rule no, but the rule has exceptions'. Both in terms of a codified different thing like Shiva, and the fact that for all we know, random chance could kick in and just give one random Leviathan summon a soul.

However, there's also an element of intention that could make things factor weirdly. We know that primals can defy expected logic if the summoner just expects them to (case in point: Ramuh, Alexander and to a subtler degree Ifrit knowing more than their summoners, because their summoners just assumed they would be). Given that, we open up to some unanswerable edge cases:
1. If a summoner of a primal specifically believes that their god has a soul, does that then give their primal a soul, or is that a completely impossible thing to get by that approach? If it does have one, is that soul the same as a normal soul?
2. Inversely, if the summoner doesn't necessarily believe that their god has a soul, but essentially describes them as having characteristics in-keeping with having a soul, then does that resulting primal just break any quantifiable metrics of soul-having that we may or may not have by way of 'looks like a duck, quacks like a duck'?

[Anonymoose]

In THE ANCIENT LORE, a primal's crystal core contained the "essence" of a thing that once was - beckoned forth the Lifestream. So - in a sense - they all had souls...just pieces of them, borrowed and warped and plugged into an arcane entity that had no true soul of its own. One entity cannot authentically recreate another via summoning; they always "came back wrong". Even Tiamat's primal Bahamut was a twisted shade of the real thing. The essence of Garuda once belonged to an Allagan general. Ysayle's fantasy of Shiva incorporated motifs borrowed from Halone. The Lambs of Dalamud could even theoretically summon the lesser moon and without knowing it evoke a fragment of the essence of Bahamut.

These concepts partly tie into how the Ultima Weapon and Azys Lla worked. If you contained the part of the shattered soul/memory that responded to a particular summoning, it could not be resummoned. (Yes, if different summoners with a different idea of what they were summoning succeed in getting a shattered fragment you hadn't contained to respond, they might be able to pull it off, but the chances of that actually happening were slim.)

But also primal and soul lore evolved a lot over the years so maybe some of these details aren't quite the same today.

[Cleretic]

In THE ANCIENT LORE, a primal's crystal core contained the "essence" of a thing that once was - beckoned forth the Lifestream. So - in a sense - they all had souls...just pieces of them, borrowed and warped and plugged into an arcane entity that had no true soul of its own.

Everyone please be aware that 'THE ANCIENT LORE' is different from 'the Ancient lore', which in this case vary wildly in their conclusions.

Primals are one of the things that I'd love to hear the original 1.0 plan for. I know that's never going to happen and quite possibly can't (I don't know how many notes from that time even still exist), but it's definitely something they had a vastly different plan for. Possibly not even a big one, too, it's entirely possible they just planned primals to be sort of a low-key sideline thing that comes up every so often.