There probably isn't any romanticized "path of the souls" evolution" - because there isn't any structural division between the way the body works and
the way the mind works.
If you believe in evolution, and are one of the lucky people whose minds are structured by a theory which pays most attention to empirical
cause-effect processes, then there is no basis for positing a "soul path" that is independent of the real life negotiations that human beings make
with the worlds they live through.
Thus, science, or the philosophy its based upon - objective pragmatism - is a "competing spirit" that is getting the upper hand over the longer trends
over traditional spiritual beliefs.
What people believe, or accept as a legitimate narrative for "what is happening", is largely a function of ethological realities, and so we can credit
Schopenhauer for bringing this notion to the forefront of our attention; but it is largely Darwin who placed ethology and the facts of 'striving to
survive" to the forefront of our awareness, to create some distance between our unanalyzed constructions of realities, and the analysis of reality
which forces us to regard the unanalyzed construction as an idealization - or, said differently, something we defensively construct to deal with our
existential embeddedment in the world - or what psychologists now term 'affect regulation'.
"Thoth", then, isnt an independently existing entity, but at most an emergent property of human self-awareness vis-a-vis this property of being "a
communication of the mystery." In dynamical terms, it is, like all "archetypes" (a term I don't like) a mediating property between self and other.
Between self and other lies the "shared intentionality" that allows them to communicate. But since we are always focused on a particular
subject-matter organized by a particular motivation, there is a dynamical 'convergence' between our bodies whenever we casually saunter into
conversation with one another - something we generally take for granted but which in reality is a very complicated, fractally generated biosemiotic
hologogram which presents a very evolved level of meaning.
Each brain-mind carries out this activity in microcosm, with our body state representing the other, and the process of thinking mirroring the process
of communication. Thus, every act of negotiation with the other brings out something brand new into the semiotic universe of human beings; it is,
furthermore, much more complex than the simplististic mysticism and other assumptions about reality which rush too far ahead, no realizing the
empirical-sensual world and its causal processes precedes us - ontogenetically (in development) and phylogenetically (in evolution), and hence need to
be thought about and understood deeply before we construct theories of how the different objects relate within our minds.
Contrary to mind being "in", matter, a much more coherent theory sees mind as that which binds different parts of matter together, even as it arises
as a "gestalt" of material dynamics within our brains.
edit on 1-1-2019 by Astrocyte because: (no reason given)