Ba

The ba is the aspect of the Egyptian soul closest to personality or individuality — depicted as a bird with a human head, able to fly free of the body. After death the ba could leave the tomb by day to move about among the living, returning at night to be reunited with the body.

Together with the ka (life-force) and the akh (the transfigured spirit), the ba forms part of the Egyptian analysis of the human being into several souls or principles — a subtlety the Greek philosophers, with their own divisions of the soul, would have recognized.