Clay, breath and spark · the three natures

The Valentinians sorted humanity in three: hylic (ὑλικός, of matter — living entirely as body), psychic (ψυχικός, of soul — moral, religious, capable of faith but not of gnosis) and pneumatic (πνευματικός, of spirit — carrying the spark). Their opponents read this as spiritual apartheid, an aristocracy of the saved, and the charge stuck; some Valentinian sources are better than that and treat the three as conditions a person moves through rather than castes they are born into, which is a materially different claim. The Kabbalah maps the same three storeys and refuses the sorting outright: nefesh (the animal life), ruach (the moral breath), neshamah (the divine soul) — but every Jew has all three, most people simply have not woken the upper ones, and the whole apparatus of practice exists to wake them. Same anatomy; opposite politics. One says some people have it; the other says everyone has it and almost nobody is using it.