Headcanon question. Do mindflayers really have souls or not?

[magickmynd]

If you have gotten far enough into the game you get information from Withers that mindflayers do not have souls, and so the plot of the dead three to become the cult of the absolute shouldn't have any purpose, since their powers are fueled by souls.

And yet throughout the game it feels like the interactions with the emperor and omeleum the friendly mind flayer would suggest that they do have their own minds and personalities outside of elder brain influence.

So the question becomes, is withers just telling you that they don't have souls in order to try and persuade you not to become one or not to trust them, or is he actually saying straight up as having knowledge of the afterlife that they really don't have souls?

And can a creature without a soul have the personality and make the moral decisions that the rogue mindflayers in the game seem to be making?

For example, at the ending the emperor straight up told me to use the stones to destroy the elder brain, not to control it. Whereas before I could have sworn that his intention was to dominate it and then control it and become the REAL mind flayer emperor.

But that's not what happened.

If he was really so soulless and only wanted power for himself, would he have made that decision at the end?

I had also thought that maybe he was asking the mc to give him the stones and let him go against the elder brain as his final bid for the crown and power, but he easily hands them over to you and makes you an illithid if you want to take that route, he doesn't try to convince you after you make the choice or try to force you.

And then at the end of the game if you are an illithid, even though the elder brain is gone, the game tries to tell you that your sense of self and persoanlity are starting to disappear due to your hunger, but yet there are known rogue illithids who have their own sense of self without any special tadpoles, so it seems like writers error to have definite proof that mind flayers can be individuals without a colony and yet somehow you have to struggle to maintain yourself?

I'm calling bs.

My headcanon is that my illithid mc has a soul and has full control of their own mind and made the decisions they did because they were necessary.

Elder brain, dead. Dead 3 chosen, all slain.

The crown being searched for by gale to return to mystra.

All characters alive except karlach, who I think gets the worst ending no matter what you choose, which kind of makes me mad because she is, imo, the best romanceable character and there is a happy ending for pretty much everyone except her.

So to me, best and easiest path through the game is lean into the illithid powers and become a rogue mindflayer. Sure, you've got to deal with the hunger for brains, but can always eat criminals and murderers like the emperor did.

[Krakoziam]

Originally posted by zackerie:

mind flayers do not have souls. Some souls can remain in control of a mind flayer body however. depends on what is stronger, according to bg3 anyway. the parasite or the soul. illithids know about flayers that keep their souls and hunt them down.

In fact according to DnD lore, they do have a soul, it is explained in the book Volo Guide to monsters

[Lamp]

Originally posted by Krakoziam:

Originally posted by zackerie:

mind flayers do not have souls. Some souls can remain in control of a mind flayer body however. depends on what is stronger, according to bg3 anyway. the parasite or the soul. illithids know about flayers that keep their souls and hunt them down.

In fact according to DnD lore, they do have a soul, it is explained in the book Volo Guide to monsters

Ok, but can you really trust anything Volo writes?

[thegreyjester]

So, according to forgotten realms Lore, Mind Flayers themselves do not believe they possess souls-- at least, not souls that are governed by the gods. Instead, when a mind flayer dies their brain is returned to the elder brain, and their consciousness lives in that way. For a mind flayer to have a soul, it would have to exist outside the influence of an elder brain. In other words, these few rogue mind flayers have souls.. to a certain extent.

That said, it is not the soul of the person consumed. Mind flayers may have fleeting memories of their past lives because of the brain matter consumed in their creation, but make no mistake that a mind flayer is a distinct entity from the being which incubated them. The Emperor, as you may find out, is not what they pretend to be. They are very much a mind flayer, very much hungry for power, but also very much wanting to keep apart from the influence of an Elder Brain. As powerful as they are, they are ultimately powerless in the face of an Elder Brain, which will eventually subsume their will. They may not be seeking the grand design, but they do want baldur's gate for themselves.

Omeluum is a little different, in that they are not quite so power hungry. But I also wouldn't go so far as to say they're "good." They did, after all, have an arrangement with a lich that involved bringing the undead monster people so the lich could eat the souls, and they would eat the brain. Omeluum is a scholar, and while they're nice for a mind flayer, they're still again very much a mind flayer.

[Crom]

No. They havnt.

[magickmynd]

Originally posted by thegreyjester:

For a mind flayer to have a soul, it would have to exist outside the influence of an elder brain. In other words, these few rogue mind flayers have souls.. to a certain extent.

See, that's the thing though. Having a soul or not having one isn't something that just turns on and off just because the entity is being controlled by another entity or not.

If that was the case then anyone under a mind control spell would be considered soulless and that's not the case.

Either the species has a soul natively and are just under the mental domination of an elder brain or they are not, there isn't really an inbetween there.

And having a soul or not having one isn't really subject to personal belief.

Whether the mindflayers themselves believe they have a soul or not doesn't matter, since humans have souls in D&D lore and their souls have afterlives regardless of what faith they have in life.

SOMETHING, regardless of what that is, happens to their souls even if they think they don't have one.

The same could be the same for the illithids since they do technically have a "god", it's just not necessarily one they "worship", just respect for its power and ability.

Originally posted by thegreyjester:

That said, it is not the soul of the person consumed. Mind flayers may have fleeting memories of their past lives because of the brain matter consumed in their creation, but make no mistake that a mind flayer is a distinct entity from the being which incubated them. The Emperor, as you may find out, is not what they pretend to be. They are very much a mind flayer, very much hungry for power, but also very much wanting to keep apart from the influence of an Elder Brain. As powerful as they are, they are ultimately powerless in the face of an Elder Brain, which will eventually subsume their will. They may not be seeking the grand design, but they do want baldur's gate for themselves.

Omeluum is a little different, in that they are not quite so power hungry. But I also wouldn't go so far as to say they're "good." They did, after all, have an arrangement with a lich that involved bringing the undead monster people so the lich could eat the souls, and they would eat the brain. Omeluum is a scholar, and while they're nice for a mind flayer, they're still again very much a mind flayer.

As far as that goes, I was never really trying to say that any rogue mindflayer is morally "Good" as a default and that's the reason they must have souls.

Individuals with souls can be good or bad or anything in between, like the emperor. He could be pretending just to keep his own autonomy, that's a given. Doesn't mean he doesn't have a soul.

More along the lines of the point being that someone who underwent ceremorphosis and still retained their full personality and moral compass, whatever that moral alignment might be, might still have their original soul intact and just be physically transformed.

The question becomes, at that point, whether or not ceremorphosis actually kills the original host or just physically transforms them. Because if just the act of transforming somehow gives them a new soulless existence, then something like a polymorph spell that has become permanent would be seen as doing the same thing, creating a new being entirely, but we know that it does not, it's just a physical transformation of the original being but still has the same soul.

But, if ceremorphosis is special in some way in that it can, somehow, not really understood how, kill the original host and, what, resurrect the body somehow biologically into this new being therefore expelling the original soul from the body?

The only way I could see that happening is if it worked similar to the mushroom people spores were the spores infect the body and the body becomes the vessel for this new entity even if the body was originally dead, so in that way the tadpole eats the brain of the person inhabiting the current body, the body dies and the soul is released, and then the tadpole infects the corpse and transforms it into this new entity where the tadpole becomes the new brain/conciousness of the body.

So in that way I could agree that yes, the original person dies and the tadpole makes the new body a mind flayer and the tadpole just may or may not retain some of the memories and possibly phantom emotions of the person they killed if the personality of the person was exceptionally strong so they kind of just mimic who the person was.

But in that case the question becomes what if the person was only partially transformed?

Say your character went illithid hybrid during the course of the story but never went full illithid and then killed the elder brain and all the tadpoles, stopping your transformation part way.

Would that, then make you soulless? Or just a hybrid where you have your original soul but have some of the powers that illithid do from becoming partially psionic in nature?

[Kinori]

No they don't. The OG god of death says they don't in the game itself. I think I'd take his word over whatever list of things you can try to argue.

[Hezvolog]

Originally posted by Mizu:

Originally posted by Bread:

Mistra says mindflayers have no souls, Withers tells you that mindflayers have no souls, and Withers says it when he is alone in the last scene that the other gods were angry that the dead three were destroying souls by making them into mindflayers, so idk why yall try so hard to cope with your decisions. Becoming a mindflayer is a bad idea, trusting emperor is a bad idea, making karlach into one is a bad idea. Best outcome is to act as if u trust emperor until the end, free Orpheus, let him become al illithid, he helps destroy the brain, then he lets you kill him, karlach dies but her soul lives in the other planes

Karlach is debatable, I am pretty sure she admits to being faithless in one of her dialogue options and the afterlife given to people who refuse to pick a deity and worship them is not fun in this setting. It might be preferable to not have an afterlife at all in her case compared to being turned into a brick in a wall for eternity.

Or claimed by that nasty devil because of a hidden clause in her contract. Life in Hell is pretty terrible too. Dying to give birth to an Ilithid with your memories, who will then go destroy a city enslaving monster brain is a way better end than being enslaved in the hells for all eternity.

- I do think it would be sweet to allow a divine intervention to restore her tiefling heart if you've still got it during ending scenes.

[talemore]

Yes they have souls

[Lil Larrikin]

It is repeated ad naseum in the game, illithids do not have souls.
Even Withers (who is actually Jergal, the original god of death so he would know) calls them soulless, so I think that it is pretty much confirmed that mindflayers do not have "souls" (whatever that is)

To clear up an earlier misconception, the reason that the dead 3 employed the tadpoles wasn't to turn people into illithids (who have no souls and therefore can offer them no power) but to use the tadpoles to control everyone and force them to worship the Absolute, who is actually the Dead 3.
As long as they maintain control over the elder brain with the netherstones, their plan works quite well actually.

[talemore]

The illithid, commonly known as the mind flayer, is an aberrant humanoid best recognized by its tentacled mouth, which it uses to suck out and consume humanoid brains. It is highly intelligent

[Scrub]

Originally posted by zackerie:

mind flayers do not have souls. Some souls can remain in control of a mind flayer body however. depends on what is stronger, according to bg3 anyway. the parasite or the soul. illithids know about flayers that keep their souls and hunt them down.

Do you have a source for this?

[Black Magic]

No. They absolutely do not. If you're mislead by The Emperor, you can resist him and eventually he reveals he's using you - you're his puppet. He's the one responsible for placing the Tadpole in your head (quite literally his look is unique only to him and only one Mind Flayer wears his outfit throughout the game). If you find his journals in Baldur's Gate it reveals he literally cannot feel emotions, which is tied to the fact Illithids have no souls and is implicative of the function that the soul is tied to a person's "humanity" in D&D.

Mind Flayers can imitate who they were in a past life but as far as the "Soul" is concerned, which in D&D is a tangible resource that can be altered (see: Soul Coins), that person is dead. Gone. No coming back.

The Tadpole literally consumes the person's soul and body in order to evolve. The Emperor is merely imitating Balduran based on residual memories that the Tadpole consumed. He's pretty evil, as far as Mind Flayers go.

Numerous sources cite that it's very likely that all Mind Flayers - whether rebellious or not - all work toward the Grand Design. No matter how benign their pursuits may be; this includes Omeluum, operating toward the Grand Design in his very own way of seeming like a benign entity.

The Githyanki, despite how evil they are, are very much right when it comes to not trusting Mind Flayers.

Withers - who is actually Jergal - confirms that Mind Flayers do not have souls. Illithids simply don't, and I'd take the word of a retired God on it (and arguably the most ancient of entities besides Ao, the Over God).

The REASON that the Dead Three are using the Absolute Cult is to starve the other Gods of Souls—Souls happen to empower (along with worship) the pantheon of Gods in Faerun.

By eliminating souls, it ensures that the only Gods who benefit from the mass death, murder, and tyranny, are the Dead Three. Bane, Myrkul and Bhaal.

[ShadowDark3]

Aren't souls in the context of D&D essentially currency, as evidenced by souls being literally converted to coins? Some people hang on to theirs, some people spend them, and some people have them stolen.

[Black Magic]

Originally posted by ShadowDark3:

Aren't souls in the context of D&D essentially currency, as evidenced by souls being literally converted to coins? Some people hang on to theirs, some people spend them, and some people have them stolen.

Yep. They're (almost) tangible aspects that can be converted into forms of physical currency (like the Hells' Soul Coins).

D&D leaves little to the imagination of what a soul is in comparison to other fantasies.

[Scrub]

All this talk (what Withers/Jergal & Mystra say about the soullessness of Illithids) makes me really wonder how Illithiliches are a thing (NOT just normal Alhoons).
From Volo's Guide to Monsters:
- Illithilich
"The path to true lichdom is something only the most powerful mind flayer mages can pursue, since it requires the ability to craft a phylactery and cast the imprisonment spell."

So here, it seems that an Illithilich would need a soul, since they need to craft a phylactery for the ritual, which would presumably house the soul that would be made immortal via lichdom.