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Realized the one thread I revived wasn't on lore side of forum AND that I have lot more extensive questions about topic than I thought.
So long time ago I asked around why Animated Dreams didn't have spirit tag and was told it was because they were bodiless beings composed of mental essence(so incorporeal astral thoughtform probably wouldn't be spirit, but incorporeal ethereal being would be), but then secrets of magics lore writings told us animated dreams are composed of mental and spirit essences :'D So that created confusion of whether its just matter of "being is made of majority of spiritual stuff". Further confusing matter is that celestials, monitors and fiends have physical body composed of materialized spirit, but they aren't spirits, so what are spirits with physical bodies like kami composed of?
So that's why I made this thread: To theorize and hopefully figure out how variosu beings are composed based on secrets of magics descriptions. My current theory so far is that:
Mortals: Balance of four essences unless they are mindless.
Elementals: All four essences, but heavily leaning towards matter.
Celestials/Monitors/Fiends: Heavily spiritual essence with life and mental mixed in and quintessence replacing need for matter essence.
Kami/spirits with body: All four with heavily leaning towards spiritual essence.
Etherreals: Heavy mix of mental and spirit essences with some life and matter as well if they have physical body.
Shadow: All four, though spiritual essence might be weaker based on shadow creature(implication is that shadow powers are gained by sacrificing parts of your spirits hence why shadowcasters tend to have subdued emotions)
Astral: Presumably Mental and life essences if they are bodiless astral thoughform and Astral, life and matter if they are physical one? Though beings like ennosites might have all four essences with heavy lean towards mental essence I'd imagine.
Dream: This is confusing one. Secrets of magic implies that Animated dreams have mental and spirit essence but not life? I'd personally had guessed that dream beings have mental and life essences and matter if they have body as well and only spirit if they are just beings that have moved to live in dream world. But is actual case that they have all essences except life? Mortal constructs seem to have all four essences, so would dream beings being actual examples of construct like beings that are essentially fully alive?
Another option is that all beings expect spirits have all four essences or one essence replacing need for other essences :'D (like ectoplasm being weird example of spirit stretching matter and quintessence being spirit replacing matter) and only creatures lacking one of essences are mindless creatures?
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Wanted to say this topic interests me, but I haven't come up with any thoughts to add at this time. I was hoping somebody else would pick up the thread while I was busy.
It probably bears ruminating on the 4 essences treatise of SoM, particularly the places where the fictional author speculates about what beings who lack certain essences must be like.
Personally I imagine that no creature you can describe as a 'living' being can lack the vital essence (with undead being the inversion). Animate dreams probably ought to be considered having a vital essence unless they are specifically immune to healing or negative energy like most Constructs. A creature of Spirit and Mind without Vital essence would probably be something more like a spiritual equivalent of an AI, or an intelligent spiritual construct which nevertheless isn't actually a living creature.
This is just speculation though, I don't have Secrets of Magic open in front of me at the moment.
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To copy-paste some comments I made in another thread that are relevant to the topic:
I've always subscribed to the school of thought that the gods' physical manifestations aren't their true forms, but merely how mortals comprehend them. In the same way that Horus is not literally a man with a falcon's head, or Hathor is not literally a cow-headed woman, Ragathiel is not literally a five-winged angel, that's just how he manifests to our minds because we, and possibly reality itself, cannot understand his true higher-dimensional nature any other way. He could look human, he could look elven, he could look goblinoid to a goblin perceiver. But he can't heal the wing because it's a fundamental part of his essence and psyche that just looks like a missing wing to mortals, a representation of his extremely complicated connection to his father. The story that Dis Pater tore it off is just that, a story, that mortals tell to explain it, or may recount events that happened but represented a more fundamental act of violence that mortals saw as tearing a wing off. To quote Cicero's "On the Nature of the Gods":
We know, that of all living beings man is the best formed, and, as the gods belong to this number, they must have a human form. ... I do not mean to say that the gods have body and blood in them; but I say that they seem as if they had bodies with blood in them. . . , Epicurus, for whom hidden things were as tangible as if he had touched them with his finger, teaches us that gods are not generally visible, but that they are intelligible; that they are not bodies having a certain solidity . . . but that we can recognize them by their passing images; that as there are atoms enough in the infinite space to produce such images, these are produced before us . . . and make us realize what are these happy, immortal beings.
and
I would extend the mutable quality of divine form to all outsiders - we see an angel, but what we see is just the physical world rearranging to present something mortals can comprehend. Even native outsiders like aasimars, tieflings, and the plane-touched present some physical features that make very little physical sense, but are representations of a "higher" nature that they manifest as horns or living fire or fists made of earth, and so on. The scale is orders of magnitude in different, but the same underlying principal is at play.
And to add to these (sorry, I know I tend to ramble about my hyperfixations) as a DM for Mummy's Mask the Egyptian notion of the soul seems to apply as well: at the very least, the Ba, the Ka and the Ib. In egyptian thought, what we consider the "soul" was a multipartite entity not entirely separate from the body but existing independently from it. The Ba is the personality, its flight from the body thought to explain where dreams come from - they were what the Ba saw when it left the body. The Ka was the "spiritual double" that animated the body, like vital lifeforce or magic, "Heka." And the Ib was the heart, home of memories and knowledge. The Khet (body), was an important part, and necessary for continued existence in the afterlife which is why it was mummified, but when it stopped moving it only meant the other parts of the soul had moved to the Duat where the Ka and Ba were unified as an Akh in the afterlife. There were other parts, like the Ren or "True Name," and the Sheut or "Shadow," but those are the three important parts for the story which treats them as very real and important things.
And to the Egyptians, the Akh was exactly the stuff the gods were made of - mortals could themselves become gods, and did so with some consistency. The whole point of the pyramids was to allow the Ka and Ba of kings to rise to the heavens to become gods with mortuary temples to sustain their funerary cult, and even men of more humble origin, like Imhotep or Amenhoten-son-of-Hapu, were deified because their funerary cults endured. There isn't a lot of difference between a person's Akh and a god, just scale.
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I'm a bit ambivalent toward the suggestion that the physical description of all formerly-known-as-Outsiders is simply a case of "A Form You Are Comfortable With", but I confess that it does fall in line with some similar thoughts I've had toward spirit-based creatures. To a degree I'm on board with the notion, but I feel like there's a bit more to it than that--to put the proverbial "It's Complicated" status on the relationship between an Outsider's form and its identity.
Sadly, my need for sleep at this hour is probably just greater than my desire to unpack that just at this moment.
Regarding your other tangent, though, I recall some months ago when I was idly designing a prospective afterlife for a homebrew setting and came across a description of the Egyptian afterlife. It's striking, and knowing Mummy's Mask probably not altogether accidental, how much similarity there is in overview between certain elements which I thought were uniquely D&D/Pathfinder-isms about the nature of the afterlife and elements which show up in Egyptian mythology.
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As far as I know, the original D&D was heavily influenced by Gygax's interest in gnosticism, an interest that Paizo have continued to incorporate while grafting on some hermetic occultism. Mummy's Mask includes an article on the River of Souls, but avoids drawing a direct comparison to the real world belief in the Duat and Field of Reeds, though I understand Paizo's version predates the publication of MM. But certainly it's given me cause to try and reinterpret things a bit for my version of Osirion, where the River leads to Osiris rather than to Pharasma, because it was Pharasma who allowed Isis to resurrect him - whether it is power she stole from Pharasma (and which Pharasma allows for inscrutable reasons), or was a responsibility she traded in exchange for restoring his soul after it was judged, I leave my players to interpret.
And I'm not even sure myself how much I believe Cicero's Academic Sceptic view of the gods as applies to Pathfinder or D&D, at least as was intended, but to my mind it broadens the narrative potential of the in-universe gods and allows them to be interpreted in more ways than if their nature were fixed and concrete, and also lets them shrug off the fantasy trope of them simply being more powerful than mortals and that with sufficient power a mortal would be indistinguishable - it makes them feel More in a way that I can't quite define. I'm not a philosopher, just someone with an amateur interest in classical history and culture.
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I figure there has to be some mutability of form when it comes to the deities if for no other reason than not all sapient species in the multiverse follow a bipedal, or even bilateral, bodily schema. Some deities can get away with being described as humanoid because humanoids are their cultural touchstones, or they were once a humanoid themselves, but not all deities are that small. Pherasma and Asmodeus, for example, are pretty singular entities; they can't exactly share the spotlight with a deity who is the five-eyed centipoid equivalent to themselves and keep their titles as the prime judge of souls, and the uncontested master of Hell, respectively.
This is certainly true, and same goes for Desna and Sarenrae, at least if the Three Fears of Pharasma tale is held to be true. It is said that both goddess' original forms were in fact considerably more abstract--something like silver and golden light respectively, if I recall.
Furthermore, I seem to recall mention somewhere that Sarenrae at least takes on a human-like angellic form because of a personal fondness for humans, so unless she adopts a different form for other creatures (entirely possible) it's possible some people are just out of luck if they don't know what a human is.
On the other hand can we really say it's so strange. Perhaps out in the universe there is a crocodilian humanoid who finds it strange we depict Sobek as human with a crocodile's head when he's clearly an average member of their species. Or may it be that we only see the more human-looking angels because most of Golarion is dominated by human cultures. To say nothing of other much less human-like celestials.
Coming at it from another angle, perhaps the prevalence of humanoid celestials and even fiends could suggest that the universe at large is dominated by humanoid species, with many but smaller number sapient species having more clearly non-humanoid body plans. Our sample size may be small but we know humans specifically dominate no less than three planets, and humanoid creatures such as ysoki, ikeshti, and shobhad on Akiton, and the lashunta and elves of Castrovel.
At the same time, a five-eyed myriapod sounds likely to be an aberration, and those exist with their own unspeakable pantheon already. Who the Lord of Hell is and what he looks like may factor into their worldview as little as Azathoth or Imbrex does to us.
(The thing about Pharasma holds, though. Knowing how every soul-bearing creature in the multiverse passes through the River of Souls has more and more interesting ramifications the more you learn about what kinds of creatures this inherently includes flying alongside you to join the host of the dead awaiting judgment. The multiverse must be a very alien place indeed! I long for a book which explores some of this strangeness without going all the way past the other end and making it too bizarre that it stops feeling like a part of the mythology, for want of a better word.)
Forgive me. I, too, am a rambler.