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Disembodied   /dɪsɪbˈɑdid/   Listen
Disembodied

adjective
1.
Not having a material body.  Synonyms: bodiless, discorporate, unbodied, unembodied.



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"Disembodied" Quotes from Famous Books



... causes of certain phenomena, whether of the human mind or of external nature. All of them imply, as I have said, a belief that the conscious human personality, call it the soul, the spirit, or what you please, can survive the body and continue to exist in a disembodied state with unabated or even greatly increased powers for good or evil. This faith in the survival of personality after death may for the sake of brevity be called a faith in immortality, though the term immortality is not strictly correct, since it seems to imply eternal duration, ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... disembodied spirit of Arondelle? Could the spirit of a living man appear in one place, while the body of the man was present in another? She had heard and read of such wonders, yet she could ...
— The Lost Lady of Lone • E.D.E.N. Southworth

... its mighty power, came all the great thought-waves of the world which had been thought by men of all times who thought and acted out the Dreams of Power. These clouds settled down upon Him like a heavy fog, and their vibrations were almost overpowering. And also came the hosts of the disembodied souls of those who while living had sought or gained power. And each strove to beat into His brain the Desire of Power. Never in the history of man have the Powers of Darkness so gathered together for attack upon the mind of a mortal man. Would it have been ...
— Mystic Christianity • Yogi Ramacharaka

... mystery and romance of the sea about it. It was reminiscent of the Ancient Mariner. It savoured of the books of Mr. CONRAD. It reminded me not a little of those strange visitations which come to quiet watering-places in the novels of Mr. H.G. WELLS. When I thought of those seven men—one, alas, disembodied—so strangely attired yet so careful of elementary hygiene, driven by that fierce typhoon, with that bird of portent in the skies, arriving suddenly with the salt of their Odyssey upon their brows at the beach of the genteel and respectable Sussex town, and visiting a perhaps slightly ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 7th, 1920 • Various

... half hour or more in the depot waiting-room, and for lack of anything else to do employ the time in watching the people who crowd through the swinging doors. Did you ever read the "Little Pilgrim?" Do you recall the chapter wherein the disembodied spirits are represented as lingering near the gates to watch the coming in of newly liberated souls? Sometimes while sitting in one of the big rocking chairs I imagine to myself that the constantly opening doors are the portals of death and I the lingering one who watches ...
— A String of Amber Beads • Martha Everts Holden

... him visions wild— The midnight wind came wild and dread, Swell'd with the voices of the dead; Far on the future battle-heath His eye beheld the ranks of death: Thus the lone seer, from mankind hurl'd, Shap'd forth a disembodied world." SCOTT. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various

... priest, disembodied in the gloom, had put off its ritualistic tone and was delivering ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... I had proved the balloon answer wrong, I was badly puzzled. The idea of a disembodied light was the hardest thing to swallow that ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe

... called water-thrush,—whose song is likewise a sudden burst, full and ringing, and with a tone of youthful joyousness in it, as if the bird had just had some unexpected good fortune. For nearly two years this strain of the pretty walker was little more than a disembodied voice to me, and I was puzzled by it as Thoreau by his mysterious night-warbler, which, by the way, I suspect was no new bird at all, but one he was otherwise familiar with. The little bird himself seems ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... indicate the approach of a new era in history at first seem to be mere disembodied, impersonal voices somewhere in the air; sweet and plaintive, half-sung and half-cried by some obscure and unknown poet. We know not whence they come, nor whither they tend. It is not a matter of sight or experience. They do not attach themselves to any person ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus

... feeble but frantic sound for some little time, as if wool-upped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah said, "Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... earl spoke, his whole face, withered and worn as it was, lighted up and glowed, Helen thought, almost like what one could imagine a disembodied soul. ...
— A Noble Life • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik

... about me as, with great difficulty, I groped my way back to the library, where I stood gazing at that strange counterpart of myself, till, under the growing horror of the situation, it seemed to my benumbed senses as though I were some disembodied spirit hovering above his own corpse. The horrible illusion was like a nightmare; I could not throw it off, and I would then and there have gone stark, staring mad, but that there came to me out of that awful chaos of fancies a suggestion which seemed like an inspiration. 'It is Hugh Mainwaring,' ...
— That Mainwaring Affair • Maynard Barbour

... fact, a house that would create ghosts. The atmosphere was alive with that strange sensation of disembodied spirits which some very old houses seem to possess. Narrow, slit-like windows in perfect keeping with the architecture and the needs of the period in which it was built—if not with modern ideas of hygiene and health—kept the rooms dark and musty. When Nigel first entered ...
— The Riddle of the Frozen Flame • Mary E. Hanshew

... he did nothing. He only stood and smiled—that awful smile which expressed more anguish than any rictus of pain. He stood just as he came into sight, on turning the corner of the house, with the many colors of the rose-bed at his left hand. It was exactly like this, she had always imagined, that disembodied spirits or astral forms made ...
— The Side Of The Angels - A Novel • Basil King

... is free, within the limits of the constitution which Nature has given him, to act and to think, each after his kind. The horse rejoices in the liberty of acting like a horse, and not like an ox; and man enjoys the privilege of acting the part of a man, and not of a disembodied spirit. If the limbs of the former are struck by an atrophy, we do not expect him to win the race. If the brain of the latter is blasted by disease or deterioration, we cannot expect the fruits of a sound and vigorous organism. When we say that a person with a brain vitiated ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various

... pain Chains of disembodied ones, Thou didst lead whom thou didst gather Upward in ascent again, With a great hymn to the Father, Upward ...
— The Hymns of Prudentius • Aurelius Clemens Prudentius

... sepulchres stood within the temples of the Superior Gods; yet though their remains might be entombed at Memphis or Abydus, their divinity was unimpeached, and they either shone as luminaries in the heavens, or in the unseen world presided over the futurity of the disembodied spirits whom death had brought ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... indifference. Porters, with hands and faces and uniforms toned down to the universal greyness of things, trundled their hand-lorries to the monotonous calling of "B' your leave, b' your leave"; and variegated specimens of humanity were looking around after their luggage as one might imagine disembodied souls looking for their bodies in the Valley of Jehoshaphat on the Last Day. There were not a few touches of cosmopolitanism suggestive of ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch

... the land of spectral ideas and disembodied aspirations, many brave minds have turned away at last from the vain and endless conflict to the one great historical fact of the land. They turned to autocracy for the peace of their patriotic conscience as a weary unbeliever, touched by grace, turns to the faith of his fathers for ...
— Under Western Eyes • Joseph Conrad

... yoga exercise for twenty years. His miraculous feats began to attract widespread attention. It seems that he was always accompanied by a disembodied spirit whom he called 'Hazrat.' This invisible entity was able to fulfill the FAKIR'S ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda

... For, like a disembodied soul By angels clad in silvery stole And shining sandals for its flight Along the upward paths ...
— Daisy Dare, and Baby Power - Poems • Rosa Vertner Jeffrey

... as if listening to something through it! As he gazed it grew plainer to him, and he saw a face, its eyes staring wide, which yet seemed not to see him. It was the face of the earl. Donal felt as if in the presence of the disembodied; he stood fascinated, nor made attempt to retire or conceal himself. The figure turned its face to the wall, put the palms of its hands against it, and moved them up and down, and this way and that; then looked at them, and began to rub ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... a new definiteness since the psychologists have explored the matter, it is really a disastrous thing to do. For to adapt ourselves to sex is one of the problems that cannot be escaped. In this world we cannot live the disembodied life. What we may do is to live a clean and happy bodily life, but only if we build our ...
— Men, Women, and God • A. Herbert Gray

... ... what woman? For have I not felt twenty times the desolate advantage of being insulated here and of not minding anybody when I made my poems?—of living a little like a disembodied spirit, and caring less for suppositious criticism than for the black fly buzzing in the pane?—That made me what dear Mr. Kenyon calls 'insolent,'—untimid, and unconventional in my degree; and not so much by strength, you see, as by separation. You touch your greater ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett

... all their deeds," may roll, Ere the cold clay, its cell forsaking, Shall join the disembodied soul, When the last ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 550, June 2, 1832 • Various

... each remember feeling a lazy wonder they should always be full, though I did nothing but empty them,—and at last solved the phenomenon by concluding I had become a kind of Danaid, whose punishment, not whose sentence, had been reversed: then suddenly I felt as if I were disembodied,—a distant spectator of my own performances, and of the feast at which my person remained seated. The voices of my host, of the "Rector, of the Chief Justice, became thin and low, as though they reached me through a whispering tube; ...
— Letters From High Latitudes • The Marquess of Dufferin (Lord Dufferin)

... or formal, or as it rested on his arm; and yet, as one walking through the dusk and stillness of a summer night feels a flower or falling leaf brush his check, and starts, shivering as from the touch of a disembodied soul, so this slight outward touch thrilled his inmost being; this hand, meeting his for ...
— What Answer? • Anna E. Dickinson

... does it helplessly watch its own instrument performing actions at which it shudders? If it can only work here through an organism, is its nature changed in its independent life, severed from all with which it was identified? Can it, in its 'disembodied state,' have anything ...
— Annie Besant - An Autobiography • Annie Besant

... with its three heads vomiting flames; Gorgons, Harpies, and other ghastly forms flitted about. At so fearful a sight. AEneas was seized with sudden fear; he drew his sword, and would have struck at the monsters, if the Sibyl had not restrained his hand and reminded him that they were but disembodied shadows. ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various

... mortals. Their worship involved propitiatory sacrifices and rites as well as thanksgiving offerings when favors were bestowed. But although they were immortal, they did not allow the immortal souls of human beings to join them in their elysium, but compelled the disembodied shades to wander unhappily among the tombs and about ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... great mystery, I thought of Helen Burns, recalled her dying words—her faith—her doctrine of the equality of disembodied souls. I was still listening in thought to her well-remembered tones—still picturing her pale and spiritual aspect, her wasted face and sublime gaze, as she lay on her placid deathbed, and whispered her longing to be restored to her divine Father's bosom—when a feeble voice murmured from the couch ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte

... field of wind-blown ears, Still nearer and nearer, and now touches the strand, and, lo, With the length of her bright hair backward flowing Round her head like an aureole, Like a candle flame in the wind's breath blowing, Stands she fair and still as a disembodied soul, With hands outstretched, and eyes that shine through tears And tremulous smiles When the trumpets, and the guns, and the great drums roll, And the long fiords and the forelands shake with the thunder Of the shout of welcome to the daughter ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean

... from all she had expected as a beginning. It was lowness and quiet accentuated: an emphasis of deep meanings, their form, at the same time, being scarcely expressed. Silence has sometimes a remarkable power of showing itself as the disembodied soul of feeling wandering without its carcase, and it is then more impressive than speech. In the same way, to say a little is often to tell more than to say a great deal. Boldwood told everything ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy

... thee in the sphere which keeps The disembodied spirits of the dead, When all of thee that time could wither sleeps And perishes ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant

... similar circumstances would not hesitate to affirm, "It is well"—well with the living—well with the dead—well with those who, notwithstanding all their bereavements, are under the care of Heaven and enjoy the smiles of God—well with those whose disembodied spirits, escaped from the imprisonment of time, have ascended to the unfettered freedom, the unbounded felicity, ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... authors who have written upon the apparitions of angels, demons, and disembodied souls is not unknown to me; and I do not presume sufficiently on my own capacity to believe that I shall succeed better in it than they have done, and that I shall enhance their knowledge and their discoveries. I am perfectly sensible that ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet

... time of the Exodus, it seems clear that, even among a people so far advanced as the Egyptians, all that lay beyond the mountains which bounded their land on the west was believed to belong not to living men, but to disembodied spirits. It was the terrible country through which the souls of the departed made their arduous way to the Hall of Judgment [Footnote: "The Nations Around," pp. 49, 50.] Accordingly, we find that the Egyptians made no attempt to extend the limits ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... above me. It was lighted by two strange moons. When the day broke, and showed around me a world of unimaginable splendour, I knew the meaning of the two moons and of my strange feeling of lightness. I was a disembodied spirit that ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... rolling billows heaving over the sinking and dying body, which, perhaps ere life should be extinct, might become the prey of voracious inhabitants of the deep;"—these things caused scarcely a thought, compared with the immediate prospect of the disembodied spirit being ushered into the presence of its Maker; the account to be rendered, and the awful and unalterable destiny that would await it there. "These momentous objects," he says, "absorbed all the powers of the mind, and produced an intensity of feeling, which, for a long time, rendered ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne

... powers of imagination. I have seen landscapes in dreams of a kind that I have never seen in real life; I have held long, intimate, and tender conversations with persons long since dead, which I might, if I were inclined, consider to be real contact with disembodied spirits, did I not also sometimes hold trivial, absurd, and even painful intercourse, of an entirely uncharacteristic kind, with the same people, intercourse which all sense of affection and reverence would lead me unhesitatingly to regard as purely imaginary. The strangest ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... made a last show of union and harmony. In nothing had their amity been more fatally broken than in this careful homage to its forms; and now, as they walked up and down in the moonlight, they were of the saddest kind of apparitions,—not mere disembodied spirits, which, however, are bad enough, but disanimated bodies, which are far worse, and of which people are not more afraid only because they go about in society so commonly. As on many and many another night of summers past, the moon came up and stood ...
— A Fearful Responsibility and Other Stories • William D. Howells

... when two love, are as body and soul, supremely human and transcendently divine. The look alone, when the lips cannot meet, is but the disembodied spirit, beautiful even in its sorrow, sad, despairing, saying "ever," and yet sighing "never," tasting and knowing all the bitterness of both. The kiss without the glance? The body without the soul? The mortal thing without ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford

... yellow parchment loosely clung; Exposure to the fever and the frost, When 'mongst the hollows of the hills I lurked From persecution of misguided folk, Accustoming my spirit to ignore The burden of the cross, while picturing The bliss of disembodied souls, the grace Of holiness, the lives of sainted men, And entertaining all exalted thoughts, That nowise touched the trouble of the hour, Until the grief and pain seemed far less real Than the creations of my brain inspired. The vision, the beatitude, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various

... of conveying waves of thought as the luminiferous ether conveys waves of light, is the theory advanced in explanation of these phenomena. Spiritualists had long before advanced a like theory in explanation of their phenomena, claiming that disembodied as well as living minds have the power of influencing and controlling other minds, through the agency of such a psychic atmosphere, and also of acting upon and moving physical substances through a like agency. As to the probability of all this, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... sought hers. He did not trust himself to look at her. She was his, all of her and forever. It was marvelous. The secret clasp of her hand was sufficient for the present. He was still doubtful of his fortune and unnerved by his temerity. He felt aloof and disembodied—an uninvolved spectator. And this was love, the journey's end—this smiling stillness, which was so different from anything ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson

... (the singular is very rare) is the Latin lemures, the disembodied spirits which haunted houses and caused ...
— La Legende des Siecles • Victor Hugo

... Mary: the thousand fibres that bind youth and womanhood to earthly love and life were all in her as still as the grave, and only the spiritual and divine part of her being was active. Her hopes, desires, and aspirations were all such as she could have had in greater perfection as a disembodied spirit than as a mortal woman. The small stake for self which she had invested in life was gone,—and henceforward all personal matters were to her so indifferent that she scarce was conscious of a wish in relation to her own individual happiness. Through the sudden crush of a great affliction, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... the touch of the lips, the clinging of the hands. Once she had idealized these things into love itself; now the very memory of them filled her with repulsion. She still wanted love, but a love so pure, so disembodied, so ethereal that it was liberated from the dominion of flesh. In the beginning, as a girl, she had accepted love as the supreme good, as the essential reality; now, utterly disillusioned, she asked herself: "What is there left in life? What is the thing that ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... mind of woman; one which will call into fullest exercise her blessed faculty of sympathy, that pure and tender heart of flesh, which teaches her always to find her highest interest in mankind, simply as mankind; to see the Divine most completely in the human; to prefer the incarnate to the disembodied, the personal to the abstract, the pathetic to the intellectual; to see, and truly, in the most common tale of village love or sorrow, a mystery deeper and more divine than lies in all the theories of politicians or the fixed ideas of ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... the minutest particular, yet arrayed in ideal beauty, which satisfied the spirit incomparably more than the actual scene. I am half convinced that the reflection is indeed the reality, the real thing which Nature imperfectly images to our grosser sense. At any rate, the disembodied shadow is nearest to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various

... eleven-forty-five the sailor coming on watch at the wheel calls him, and he "turns out." Nothing can equal the ghastly expression on the faces of men who have been torn from their sleep at an unnaturally premature hour. They move along the iron decks like ghosts, peering into one's face like disembodied spirits seeking their corporeal correlatives, and avoiding stanchions, chains, and other pitfalls in an uncanny fashion. In the meantime, the Second Officer drifts "aft" to his bunk for another four-hour sleep. And so on, ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... His soul is burdened and in labour until it has brought forth and expressed to its complete satisfaction the word conceived within it. Nor is it only within the mind that he so utters himself in secret self-communing; for he is not a disembodied intelligence, but one clothed with body and senses and imagination. His medium of expression is not merely the spiritual substance of the mind, but his whole complex being. Nor has he uttered his "word" to his full satisfaction till it has passed from his intellect into his imagination, ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... I look back at those young figures groping through cloud as at disembodied and blessed spirits. The man's intensest tenderness, restrained by his virginhood and his awe of the supple delicate shape at his side, was put forth only in her service. They walked against bushes. He broke a stick, and with it probed every ...
— Lazarre • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... business of the world (the individual soul in the state of release) is equal (to the highest Self) through light'; and the author of the Dramidabhashya says, 'Owing to its equality (sayujya) with the divinity the disembodied soul effects all things, like the divinity.' The following scriptural texts establish the same view, 'Those who depart from hence, after having known the Self and those true desires, for them there is freedom in all the worlds' (Ch. Up. VIII, 1, 6); ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... in touch rather than in sight amidst the darkness which the disembodied voices broke upon. "Enraghty's house? Then we've got ...
— The Leatherwood God • William Dean Howells

... ghosts that walk. Men, as powerless to retrieve the past as if they were already disembodied spirits, will haunt the scenes and sepulchres of their lost happiness even before they die. Though the world was all before them where to choose, I doubt not that the exiles from Paradise lingered long just without the sweep of ...
— Guy Livingstone; - or, 'Thorough' • George A. Lawrence

... Disembodied words are also sinners and the occasions of sin. Who has not broken the Commandments in consequence of the provocation of some miserable little monosyllabic eluding his grasp in the moment of his direst need, or of some impertinent interloper thrusting itself in to the utter demoralization ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... dead. It is no good getting the almanac to look up moonshine; and most literature in this sense is moonshine. Thus Wordsworth shrank back into Toryism, as it were, from a Shelleyan extreme of pantheism as yet disembodied. Thus Newman took down the iron sword of dogma to parry a blow not yet delivered, that was coming from the club of Darwin. For this reason no one can understand tradition, or even history, who has not some tenderness ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton

... and which inculcate the leaving open of a window at the moment of death, to allow the unrestrained flight of the passing soul, and reprobate the leaving of any open vessel of water in the vicinity of the death-chamber, in the fear that the disembodied spirit, yet weak and untried of wing, may ...
— Shoulder-Straps - A Novel of New York and the Army, 1862 • Henry Morford

... materials drawn from land, into such forms as fit them for the satisfaction of human wants and desires. Man's very body is drawn from the land. Children of the soil, we come from the land, and to the land we must return. Take away from man all that belongs to the land, and what have you but a disembodied spirit? Therefore, he who holds the land on which and from which another man must live is that man's master; and the man is his slave. The man who holds the land on which I must live, can command me to life or to death ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard

... conclude that association in thought must involve similar connection in reality. He thus attempted to discover, to foretell, and to cause events, by means of processes which we now see to have only an ideal significance."(1) Secondly, man endeavoured to make disembodied spirits of the dead, or any other spirits, obedient to his will. Savage philosophy presumes that the beliefs are correct, and that their practical application is successful. Examples of the first of the two chief magical ideas are as common in unscientific modern ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... personality persisted. Was this other person dead, and striving mutely for expression? No, surely not, for this other mind was on the same plane as hers, subject to the same conditions. Not disembodied entirely, but only relaxed, as she was, this other personality had wakened and found ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... swine, they desired anything unheard of before in the demon-world. I think they were not in the way of going into tame animals; but, as they must go out of the man, as they greatly dreaded the abyss of the disembodied, and as no ferocious animals fit to harbour them were near, they begged leave to go into such as were accessible, though unsuitable; whereupon the natural consequence followed: their presence made the poor swine miserable even to madness, and with the instinct of ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald

... among the disembodied spirits in space; and I became conscious that certain of those in my vicinity were eyeing me askance and whispering together in a menacing and most disturbing manner——" At this point the spectre broke ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 29, May 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... who neglects the baptism of the child, can have "the answer of a good conscience towards God." If we are satisfied to have our homes separate from the church; if we are satisfied with individualistic, disembodied, unassociated christianity,—a religion that owns no church, but which has its origin, root and maturity in the self-conscious activity of the individual, we may then neglect this duty. But in doing so, to be consistent, ...
— The Christian Home • Samuel Philips

... lightning struck the palace in Kyoto, and the three principal contrivers of Michizane's disgrace, Fujiwara Tokihira, Fujiwara Sugane, and Minamoto Hikaru, all expired within a few years' interval. At that epoch a wide-spread belief existed in the powers of disembodied spirits for evil or for good. Such a creed grew logically out of the cult of ancestor worship. It began to be whispered abroad that Michizane's spirit was taking vengeance upon his enemies. The Emperor was the first to act upon this superstition. He restored Michizane's titles, ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi

... united to a material and tangible body of flesh and blood, suited to our life here. The second stage begins at death, the name we give to the separation which then takes place between this material fabric of the body and the incorporeal part of us; and then the soul and spirit dwell disembodied for a time. There follows at the Resurrection the third period, when the soul and spirit are reunited with the body, but with the body now so spiritualized and refined as to suit the heavenly existence. The second of these two periods, coming between ...
— The Life of the Waiting Soul - in the Intermediate State • R. E. Sanderson

... music, and more than one collector of these lyrics has bemoaned the fact that in later times there has been such a divorce between the two arts. Who will say that Coleridge's "Christabel" and "Kubla Khan" are not disembodied music? Lamb said that Coleridge repeated the latter poem "so enchantingly that it irradiates and brings heaven and elysian bowers into any parlor when he says or sings it to me." Mr. Arthur Symons has recently said: "'Christabel' ...
— Sidney Lanier • Edwin Mims

... that although men knew that the bodies of the dead had been burned, yet they conceived such things to be done in the infernal regions as could not be executed or imagined without a body; for they could not conceive how disembodied souls could exist; and, therefore, they looked out for some shape or figure. This was the origin of all that account of the dead in Homer. This was the idea that caused my friend Appius to frame his Necromancy; and this is how there got about that ...
— The Academic Questions • M. T. Cicero

... as mind, have persisted in man. He is not, cannot be, disembodied spirit. And in his mental life reflex action and instinct, appetite and prudence, are still of great importance. But the higher and supreme development of these powers could never have resulted in man. They might alone have produced a superior animal, never ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... when Laura called, but he still lived: his eyes were wide open and he spoke again. But they were single, disconnected words, which belonged to the dreamland and the forms of the invisible world which his almost disembodied spirit now looked upon. ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach

... said she, smilingly putting up her finger to check my impatient reply: 'in six months you shall hear from Frederick precisely where I am; and if you still retain your wish to write to me, and think you can maintain a correspondence all thought, all spirit—such as disembodied souls or unimpassioned friends, at least, might hold,—write, and I will ...
— The Tenant of Wildfell Hall • Anne Bronte

... Dupin, who are thus individualized, humanized, and related to the real world. If they had not been accepted by the narrator as actual beings of flesh and blood, they might otherwise retain the thinness and the dryness of disembodied intelligences working ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews

... who gave it, and that after it is freed from the body, it is everywhere and pervades all nature, yet often lingers near the grave or "spirit bundle" for the consolation of friends, and is able to hear prayers. So much of reverence was due the disembodied spirit, that it was not customary with us even ...
— The Soul of the Indian - An Interpretation • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman

... poetic justification of a metaphysical vitalism; he asks us to believe that life is not a natural expression of material being, but an alien and ghostly madness descending into it—I say a ghostly madness, for why should disembodied life wish that the body should live? This vitalism is not a kind of biology more prudent and literal than the mechanical kind (as a scientific vitalism would be), but far less legitimately speculative. Nor is it a frank and thorough mythology, such as the total spectacle of the universe ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana

... crowning fascination of the sea, the consummation of such might in such infantine delicacy. You may notice it again in the summer, when our bay is thronged for miles on miles with inch-long jelly-fishes,—lovely creatures, in shape like disembodied gooseberries, and shot through and through in the sunlight with all manner of blue and golden glistenings, and bearing tiny rows of fringing oars that tremble like a baby's eyelids. There is less of gross substance in them than in any other created ...
— Oldport Days • Thomas Wentworth Higginson

... some of the curious phases of the transformation from a civility in which the people lived upon each other to one in which they lived for each other. There is a famous passage in the inaugural message of our first Altrurian president which compares the new civic consciousness with that of a disembodied spirit released to the life beyond this and freed from all the selfish cares and greeds of the flesh. But perhaps I shall give a sufficiently clear notion of the triumph of the change among us when I say that within half a decade after the fall of ...
— A Traveler from Altruria: Romance • W. D. Howells

... us, and I heard her last evening for the second time. She is master of the English language, and whether or not one can believe she sees and hears from the world of the disembodied what she feels she does, one can not but realize that she is a great woman and has a wonderful theory of how human souls return to earth. But I tell her that it seems to me repellent that we have to come back here through Dame Nature's processes, after a period ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper

... altogether! Nor am I in love with a future state in which there is so much dancing up and down lofty flights of stairs with terpsichorean energy, and manoeuvring in companies and circles with members of the softer sex. As a philosophical conception of disembodied existence, it is undeniably deficient in repose, though perhaps good enough for ordinary ...
— Baboo Jabberjee, B.A. • F. Anstey

... have seen the moon so large or so bright. Atomized silver poured like tides of light into the surrounding woods; and at the same time heavenly odors of flowers began to move hither and thither, to change places, to return, and pass, like disembodied spirits engaged in some tranquil and ...
— IT and Other Stories • Gouverneur Morris

... harmonious features that Aristotle was right when he discerned beauty in order and proportion; while another declared that he found there the evidence of Plato's doctrine of the identity of the good and the beautiful—for this face was so lovely because it was the mirror of a soul which had been disembodied in the plenitude of maiden purity and virtue, unjarred by any discord; and this gave rise to a vehement discussion as to the essential nature of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... lived. In his dramatic writings this language took on a kind of rhythm which had the effect of producing a certain remoteness of the highest possible artistic value. The people of his imagination appear a little disembodied. They talk with that straightforward and simple kind of innocency which makes strange and impressive the dialogue of Maeterlinck's earlier plays. Through it, as Mr. Yeats has said, he saw the subject-matter of his art "with wise, clear-seeing, unreflecting eyes—and he preserved the ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair

... devote more space to this subject at this time, and must content ourselves with the above statements and explanations. The principal point that we desire to impress upon your minds is the fact that the "heaven-world" is not a place or state of permanent rest and abode for the disembodied soul, but is merely a place or temporary sojourn between incarnations, and thus serves as a place of rest wherein the soul may gather together its forces, energies, desires and attractions preparatory ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka

... Mr. Jarves wrote to us full of gratitude and gratification on account of your kindness to him, for which we also should thank you. Whether he felt most overjoyed by the clasp of your hand or that of a disembodied spirit, which he swears was as real (under the mediumship of Hume, his compatriot), it was somewhat difficult to distinguish. But all else in England seemed dull and worthless in comparison with those two 'manifestations,' the ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume II • Elizabeth Barrett Browning

... a further interest as revealing the unique character of the Icelandic ghost or phantom. In other literatures the spirit returned from the dead is a thin, immaterial, disembodied essence, a faint shadow of its former self; in Icelandic legend the spirit returns in full possession of its body, but more evil-disposed to mankind than before death. It fights and wrestles, pummels its adversary black ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt

... anything of government. Robespierre will follow me; I drag down Robespierre. O, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with governing of men."—Camille's young beautiful Wife, who had made him rich not in money alone, hovers round the Luxembourg, like a disembodied spirit, day and night. Camille's stolen letters to her still exist; stained with the mark of his tears. (Apercus sur Camille Desmoulins in Vieux Cordelier, Paris, 1825, pp. 1-29.) "I carry my head like a Saint-Sacrament?" so Saint-Just was heard to mutter: "Perhaps he will ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... from the mirror, and looked at Daniel half unconscious of what she was doing. The blond of her eyelashes had turned almost grey, the red of her lips had been dotted with little spots from her smiling, and her neck was like something liquid and disembodied. ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann

... the above disembodied Corps will be held on Friday the 26th March, in the Common Room of the Law Society in Chancery Lane (by kind permission of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 3rd, 1920 • Various

... rival. These are acts suited to thy original nature, which gives forth sparks of something high and noble. They weigh in the scales of the Kings of Death: they turn the balance on that day when the disembodied soul stands shivering and dismayed between Tartarus and Elysium; they gladden the heart in life, better and longer than the reward of a momentary passion. Oh, Arbaces! ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... immaterialism[obs3]; spiritualism, spiritualist. V. disembody, spiritualize. Adj. immaterial, immateriate[obs3]; incorporeal, incorporal[obs3]; incorporate, unfleshly[obs3]; supersensible[obs3]; asomatous[obs3], unextended[obs3]; unembodied[obs3], disembodied; extramundane, unearthly; pneumatoscopic[obs3]; spiritual &c. (psychical) 450[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... the irrational explanation to try next. Maybe it will fit itself to the present state of your mind better than the other. We will say this time that you have really seen the ghost (or double) of a living person. Very good. If you can suppose a disembodied spirit to appear in earthly clothing—of silk or merino, as the case may be—it's no great stretch to suppose, next, that this same spirit is capable of holding a mortal pencil, and of writing mortal words in a mortal sketching-book. ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins

... [FN362] These disembodied "voices" speaking either naturally or through instruments are a recognized phenomenon of the so-called "Spiritualism," See p. 115 of "Supra-mundane Facts," &c., edited by T.J. Nichols, M.D., &c., London, Pitman, 1865. I venture to remark that the medical treatment by Mesmerism, ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton

... denizens of the world of Astralism. In any of these named worlds there is a material presence—which must be created, if only for a single or periodic purpose. It matters not whether a material presence already created can be receptive of a disembodied soul, or a soul unattached can have a body built up for it or around it; or, again, whether the body of a dead person can be made seeming quick through some diabolic influence manifested in the present, or an inheritance ...
— The Lady of the Shroud • Bram Stoker

... highest and hottest step of the whole stairway. A douse of cold water finally put an end to the ordeal and to my misery; and, groping my way out into the entry, I proceeded, with chattering teeth, to dress. In a moment I was joined by the Major, and we resumed our walk, feeling like disembodied spirits. ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... in solemn, starry beauty, As he, rejoicing, o'er the old paths came, Light was his heart from its accomplished duty, All was forgotten, even the latest shame— When these brief words some disembodied voice Spoke near him: "Oh, keep sacred, evermore, Word, pledge, and vow, so may you still rejoice, And live among the Just when ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier

... declared the elder. "However tragic the circumstances that might have befallen an unfortunate being in life at any particular place, it is, in my opinion, monstrous to suppose his disembodied spirit will hereafter be associated with the place. We must be reasonable, Felix. Shall the God Who gave us reason be ...
— The Grey Room • Eden Phillpotts

... small tablet fixed in the wall. He went up to it, and found it intimated that James Montgomery the poet had been born there. Was it not almost as if one of the poets or philosophers of a former time had lighted, on revisiting the earth as a disembodied spirit, on his own monument? Of scarce less interest is his anecdote of Monboddo. The parents of the poet had gone abroad, as we have said, and their little boy was left with the Brethren at Fulneck, a Moravian settlement in the sister kingdom. He was one of their younger scholars at a time ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... Pharaoh had no need to wait until he was mummified before he became a god; religious rites in his honour were established on his accession; and many of the individuals who made up his court attached themselves to his double long before his double had become disembodied. They served him faithfully during their life, to repose finally in his shadow in the little pyramids and mastabas which clustered around him. Of Dadufri, his immediate successor, we can probably say that he reigned eight years;* but Khephren, the next son ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Miss Carmichael, "and now I begin to feel like a disembodied spirit—a 'young-eyed cherubim.' I seem to belong already to a better planet. Should you not like to dwell here for ever, far away from the carking cares and troubles of ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... admitted to exist, are not, it may be supposed, indifferent to the affairs of mortality, perhaps not incapable of influencing them. It is true that, in a more advanced state of society, the philosopher may challenge the possibility of a separate appearance of a disembodied spirit, unless in the case of a direct miracle, to which, being a suspension of the laws of nature, directly wrought by the Maker of these laws, for some express purpose, no bound or restraint can possibly be assigned. But under this necessary ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... that the disembodied spirits of those whom we have loved and respected here are still, though invisible, watching over us with tender solicitude. Such a realization must be chastening in its influence, for who would do an unworthy deed, believing ...
— The Circassian Slave; or, The Sultan's Favorite - A Story of Constantinople and the Caucasus • Lieutenant Maturin Murray

... voice issuing out of the eternal darkness within; a voice steady and resonant, and sustained as though it had been speaking for some time. Out of the darkness it reached his ears as a thing disembodied, seeming scarcely of the earth or of human lips. In it was a thrill born of the pure joy of creation; prisoned, it yet was free with a freedom whose limits were the limits of earth and sky and thought, ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor

... already said That these things are, that they are quick with life,— Such life as disembodied spirits have,— That they are deathless? Thou need'st not inquire Of me whence they are come, for thou hast seen One of their number on its journey hither. The period may not be far remote When thine own planet, starting from its sphere, Shall fright the dwellers of the stars that skirt Its destined ...
— Mazelli, and Other Poems • George W. Sands

... to do other than admire the farsightedness of that great statesman, Charles Fox, with his blue coat and yellow waistcoat, in this manly, sensible, and telling address. Time has nearly brought round the state of things that he desired to see, and if disembodied spirits can take an interest in things earthly, it will be no small addition to his present state of bliss to discover almost the realization of suggestions made sixty years ago, before the Browns of this period were conceived, and while the ...
— The Rise of Canada, from Barbarism to Wealth and Civilisation - Volume 1 • Charles Roger

... doctrine of personal immortality; hence it is certainly a strange doctrine to have been propounded at that time, together with its companion, and scarcely less distinctive, doctrine of the vileness of the body. Why was it not said that the 'soul' alone should survive as a disembodied 'spirit'? Or if form were supposed necessary for man as distinguished from God, that he was to be an angel? But, be this as it may, the doctrine of the resurrection seems to have fully met beforehand the materialistic objection to a future life, ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes

... will at once tell you that disembodied spirits never become so undignified as to upset furniture or rap on tables. Neither do they write letters in pen and ink and put them under doors. Spiritual beings are purely spiritual; they cannot touch anything human, much less deal in such vulgar display as the throwing about of chairs, ...
— A Romance of Two Worlds • Marie Corelli

... he peered at her, seemed like a disembodied stare, for she could see only eyes behind a mask of lavender gray glass eyeholes, with its flapping ends ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... the Empress with solemnity "that death entered the Forbidden Precincts but last night. A disembodied spirit has returned to its place and doubtless exists in bliss." "Indeed?" returned the Yellow Emperor with indifference—"yet if the spirit is absorbed into the Source whence it came, and the bones have crumbled into nothingness, ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck

... peace'; not, 'Grant that I may flit for a while over my former home, and hear what is happening to my country and my family.' We may leave it to our misguided necromancers to describe the adventures of the disembodied ghost— ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... peasants have very confused ideas about the local habitation of the disembodied spirit, after its former tenement has been laid in the grave. They seem, from the language of their funeral songs, sometimes to regard the departed spirit as residing in the coffin which holds the body from which it has been severed, sometimes ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston

... camp fires, so now artificial illumination lacked. Each man was indicated by the alternately glowing and waning lozenge of his cigarette fire. Occasionally someone struck a match, revealing for a moment high-lights on bronzed countenances, and the silhouette of a shading hand. Voices spoke disembodied. As the conversation developed, we gradually recognised the membership of our own roomful. I had forgotten to state that the ranch house included four chambers. Outside, the rain roared with Arizona ferocity. Inside, men congratulated ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White

... harmonies, and with regular sibilation came to time, quavering out the chromatic moments of this nasal hour. High over all floated a faint whisper,—a song-cloud rising from the dream-mist of a peaceful breast,—a revelation timidly exhaled to the disembodied spirits of the air. Its hazy lullaby breathed down as from distant heights, and murmured of celestial rest. Its soul was like a ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 85, November, 1864 • Various

... own himself vanquished by difficulties before which a woman did not quail. Twice and thrice, however, they were both driven back again round some comparatively sheltered corner by the mere fury of the wind, which battled with them as stubbornly as though it were the disembodied spirits, of the ancient defenders of the place; and when, mechanically, and almost of necessity, Richard's arm sought the young girl's waist, whose garments made it more difficult for her to advance than for him, she did not reject its welcome aid. Then, just as his disengaged ...
— Bred in the Bone • James Payn

... each to death! The truest heart about thee is my own, And I'm a spy—death-vowed to be thy foe! I'll warn the empress!... No. Sealed to the cause. Dead I may guard her. Death alone may give Me to her service. There's no oath can bind The disembodied spirit. (Takes paper from his pocket) Here's set down All I have learned ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan

... regretted it; I have suggested the kind of reason which he would most likely have had for the regret; and, upon the whole, it is my opinion, that Wallace actually saw the visions, and that the legend originated in the fact. I do not mean to imply that Fawdon became present, embodied or disembodied, whatever may have been the case with his spectre. I only say that what the legend reports Wallace to have seen, was actually in the hero's eyes. The remainder of the question I leave to ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various

... irritation, "it's all so uncalled-for and unnatural! Nothing is as it used to be. Well, then, I'll talk about books and matters as impersonal as if we were disembodied spirits." ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... of their well-trained intellects, that my claim to an intercourse with the invisible world is an extravagant assumption, and has no foundation in truth. I cannot conscientiously deny that in the mysteries of my inner life I have been acted upon decidedly and directly by disembodied intelligences, and this sometimes by an inspiration characteristic of the individual, or by a psychological influence similar to that whereby mind acts upon mind in the body. Many of the poems were given by direct spirit influence before public audiences. For many of them I could not obtain ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol V. Issue III. March, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... more than was requisite of determination to conquer that alarm, and to conquer more, should more be created by what he should behold. He opened the door, but did not immediately enter the room: he paused where he stood, for he felt as if he was about to intrude into the retreat of a disembodied spirit, and that that spirit might reappear. He waited a minute, for the effort of opening the door had taken away his breath, and, as he recovered himself, he ...
— The Phantom Ship • Frederick Marryat

... feel us near In many a ghastly dream; With fancy's eye Our forms you spy, And hear our fatal scream. With clearer sight Ere falls the night, Just when to weal or woe Your disembodied souls take flight On trembling wing—each startled sprite Our ...
— Some Poems by Sir Walter Scott • Sir Walter Scott

... inanimate object such as a stone loosened from the hillside, a tree which fell upon the passer-by and crushed him. But often too the murderer was of the unseen world, and so was hidden, his presence being betrayed in his malignant attacks only. He was a god, an evil spirit, a disembodied soul who slily insinuated itself into the living man, or fell upon him with irresistible violence—illness being a struggle between the one possessed and the power which possessed him. As soon as the former succumbed he was carried away from his own people, and his place knew him no more. ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... her adorer stands there, one moment an exanimate statue, the next a disembodied spirit,—while the listening zephyrs murmur more softly in reverence. In a 'Reproach to Laura' she is taxed with being the ruin of her lover's ambition. Because of her the 'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has 'blown away the mountains', that he had 'rolled up' to the ...
— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... mine be left for him Save the poor curl he stole? Round which this wildly-loving me Will float unseen continually, A disembodied soul. ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various

... How dependent these disembodied voices are upon the sun is seen toward nightfall, when the shadows begin to grow long. Where these fall across the grasses there grow triangles of silence which travel fast. Oftentimes as the point of one of these ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... The disembodied soul comes to a wide, turbid river, whose angry waters rush on to an unknown destination, roaring and foaming. From high banks on either side of the stream is stretched a pole smooth and small, over which he is required to ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald



Words linked to "Disembodied" :   unbodied, incorporeal, bodiless, disembodied spirit, immaterial



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