Is mako made from souls, or just the chi/spiritual energy that emits from souls?

[MagicalEnbySarah]

In East Asian religion, chi (aka vital force) is separate from the soul. Everyone has a set amount that determines how long they live, plus another source that can be built and used up. In FF7, magic, Shinra technology, martial arts, etc use spiritual energy, but not the souls themselves. Since the Lifestream is both the afterlife and the life force of the planet, souls won't be able to leave the mortal plane and be reborn if it's energy is used up.

 

[Ite]

Going only by the original game’s scripts (I’m working w the English and French translations) my takeaway is that the spiritual part of FF7’s story is meant to contribute to the thematic subject of the environment, the idea being that no part of us is separate from nature, and the cycle of living and dying is a natural process, within which our individual consciousness is but a small (and temporary) part.

Martial arts are not powered by Chi in the original game, the word Chi doesn’t appear. Spirit Energy, Mako, and Lifestream are all seemingly used interchangeably, distinguished only by whether or not you can percieve them, and humans interact with it either by burning it as a fossil fuel or through use of materia.

However, going by Bugenhagen’s orrery scene, the Lifestream seems to grow the more life there is on a planet. So there could be “Chi” (in a sense) flowing into the Lifestream from living souls. But that stuff would have to eventually be used to create new souls. So it’s not Chi in the traditional sense.

To that end, MP could be considered this kind of Chi, as in, a power that a living soul puts out into the world by exerting their will. One could easily headcanon that attuning to materia and expending MP generates Chi, which grows the Lifestream. I may just do that!

The Compilation entries (through to Rebirth) have expanded it so I can’t really keep track of what the official stance on this anymore. I don’t much care though, ahah, the question is more interesting than any answer.

 

[Makoeyes987]

In FF7, magic, Shinra technology, martial arts, etc use spiritual energy, but not the souls themselves. Since the Lifestream is both the afterlife and the life force of the planet, souls won't be able to leave the mortal plane and be reborn if it's energy is used up.

Mako energy and Lifestream are composed of the souls of the dead. The totality of your spirit energy, your soul, leaves your body and joins the swell.

If it gets sucked and turned into mako energy and then used as combustible fuel to create electricity then that soul is sadly gone and its consciousness and existence never returns to the Lifestream. No one knows what happens to that energy, other than it's used up and not returned to the planet.

So yes, that's the entire crux of the problem of using mako energy as a fuel source. You're burning the souls the dead for fuel, robbing the planet of its life energy to sustain its existence and hastening the death of the planet.

The use of "chi" is the life energy that comes from one's spirit energy and body that can be used to fight. That's separate and its not used to make fuel.

 

[Gym Leader Devil]

You know, I was actually pondering a related question a few days ago. It had to do with Remake/Rebirth mostly, with regards to Tifa's Chi and Yuffie's Ninjutsu. In my head I went back to Vincent talking about Geostigma back in AC/C, and how there's something like the Life stream inside each living thing. And decided that, unless proven otherwise, this is factually and literally true. There is, for all intents and purposes, a miniature Lifestream flowing inside each character we see. It surges up in time of need (allowing a seeming nobody like Cloud pre-Reunion treatment) to defeat enemies like the Ravens and more impressively Sephiroth. His Mako/Jenova treatments didn't exactly make him stronger, but made his strength more consistent. Chi and Ninjutsu are just different philosophical approaches for drawing out that inner spirit energy and controlling it without adjustments from outside. Aerith meanwhile, as a Central, has a mini-Lifestream that's still directly if minutely connected to the true Lifestream, facilitating planetary communication and some magic without Materia.

Sorry for that rant, which looking back seems more tangential to the topic than I thought when I started typing. Still posting it, if only cause it's a pain to type all that on a cell phone In answer to OP's question, afaict the soul, such as it is in this specific fictional settings, is the combination of a person's life/spirit energy and the sum total of their memories and feelings. As this is all part of the flow of the Lifestream, it seems safe to say that yes, Lifestream, Mako, and Souls are essentially synonymous to me.

 

[MagicalEnbySarah]

Okay so individual souls do not exist within the Lifestream after becoming part of the whole. It does contain the memories and knowledge of the dead though. Maybe those memories can be used to make "reincarnations" of people occasionally. Traditionally in Buddhism, rebirth works like the Lifestream, but a lot of people believe in a stream of consciousness that persists. And Reincarnation(not to be confused with the cycling of energy known as rebirth) seems to be a really common folk belief in Japan.

 

[MagicalEnbySarah]

Martial arts are not powered by Chi in the original game, the word Chi doesn’t appear. Spirit Energy, Mako, and Lifestream are all seemingly used interchangeably, distinguished only by whether or not you can percieve them, and humans interact with it either by burning it as a fossil fuel or through use of materia.

I would argue that martial arts always used (fantasy)chi. Even when it's not explicit, if you see energy, fire, light, or water appear during attacks that aren't magic, it's because of chi. Zelda uses chi in charged attacks like the spin attack, and the Tales series uses chi for a ton of non-magical artes. In the original FF7, limit breaks use chi. In remake, most attacks use it and ATB is arguably representative of character's building up their chi, which is supported by ATB-increasing moves mentioning "spirit".

 

[Ite]

I would argue that martial arts always used (fantasy)chi. Even when it's not explicit, if you see energy, fire, light, or water appear during attacks that aren't magic, it's because of chi. Zelda uses chi in charged attacks like the spin attack, and the Tales series uses chi for a ton of non-magical artes. In the original FF7, limit breaks use chi. In remake, most attacks use it and ATB is arguably representative of character's building up their chi, which is supported by ATB-increasing moves mentioning "spirit".

Fair point! Maybe I don’t pay much attention to it because FF battle scenes are always kind of “outside” of the story and I like the hard-boiled “you’re all scrubs without materia” conceit, but I can’t deny that the word “willpower” is used to justify things in the script, and that may as well be Chi.

 

[MagicalEnbySarah]

"She remained herself in the place where the consciousness of the dead flowed and swirled about, keeping the character she had when she was alive. She retained the consciousness of the Aerith Gainsborough she once was and she was now drifting with the Lifestream...

All around her she heard whispers of how if you didn't retain a strong ego, you would soon no longer know which consciousness belonged to you. "It makes sense. There's a meaning to all this. There must be some reason why I haven't merged with the Lifestream yet. Like, how I was the only one in the world who had the materia to call Holy... There might still be something left that I have to do." Just when the thought crossed her mind, she felt a little commotion from the planet. It wasn't from the individual consciousnesses but the planet as a whole as if to confirm what she was thinking. "
-The Maiden Who Travels the Planet

At least according to this novella, individual spirits exist but no longer retain their identity after a period of time. They also meld with other consciousnesses and can separate which is very confusing to think about.