Forking off from here... (DISCLAIMER: I've not spotted this being discussed before but sorry if it has and I missed it. Also I've not read Street Magic yet, which may clarify, but I don't know.)

Spirits of Man. Really the spirits of our dearly departed, or just astral entities that pretend to be or think they are?

Assuming that at least some people in the Sixth World believe the former then this must surely be an area of intense research by hermetic mages.

"Hmm. If I die, I could become a spirit and live forever. How can I ensure that happens?"

Yes, No, Maybe....

There's one way to find out....

What do you believe?

Well I don't believe in spirits or the afterlife in the real world, but there's room in my conception of the SR universe for it to be possible that metahuman minds might really linger in the astral as spirits. But even if so: are they really the dearly departed or are they copies? And in either case, since presumably this doesn't happen all the time, there must be some reason for it if/when it does.

Ancestor Spirits now are an aspect of Guidance Spirits.
Given the Earthdawn connection, there indeed could be a deep metaplane of the dead.

Do you expect a canon answer on this?

One thing is definite and that is that not all spirits of man are ancestor spirits. Spirits of man run the gamut of faustian demons to living incarnations of the city you live in. So certainly not all of them are ex-metahumans.

Of the ones that are or pretend to be, the Shinto and Wuxing traditions in Street Magic talk about raising ancestor spirits, but don't anywhere say that these spirits may not be what the tradition thinks they are. The only examples it gives of an ancestor spirits are a kindly old grandfather and some long dead indians. Not exactly the sort of spirit that can answer rigorous testing such as what did you give me for my fifth birthday? So proof is a little difficult.

SM does make reference to ghosts that appear to actually be ghosts. For example it makes reference to several crimes that have been solved by the restless ghosts of the victims. You could say that this is just some genius locii observing the murder (or whatever) and taking on the deceased form on whatever unknown spirity whim drives them, but the implication is that it's the deceased hanging around. So there is precedence for people becoming spirits.

It's a GM call, but my personal take is that it is such a massive can of worms, and that even the worms themselves are massive, that I prefer to just right it off and leave it unresolved at best. I'll do this by having any ancestor spirits be really ancestral - not mum or dad, so identification can never really be confirmed.

Someone around here did post about an interesting character who was a Japanese decker whose parents kept haunting her and trying to get her to settle down and dress "nice". That sounded hillarious, so if you have a particular reason for it, then knock up some ghosts. But ancestor spirits.... nah. Life after death really changes the dark materialistic tone of Shadowrun and is best left a mystery.

There won't be a definitive answer, but there is no reason it couldn't be however you want to play it.

It's up to you.

Note that by having it unexplained, it allows you to use it how you wish. It's a hard thing to do, but feel free to use your imagination and run free with it. You don't need an answer in the rules to have fun.

*shrug*
Not sure I much care either way. The idea came up, and I was wondering what people thought that canon material implied, and what they would prefer to be the truth. It seems like a 'big question' that would / should be argued over ad infinitum in the SR world.

And whether you can dikote her?

For role playing purposes, if you have a tradition that thinks it's spirits of man or guardian spirits are the particular dead known to the summoner there's no problem with giving it the face and basic memories that its summoner remembers - you can leave it open to whether it's real (what that tradition believes) or an impression of the summoner's own memories on an astral construct (what hermetics would say).

I noticed that the latest Missions download on the SR website called a hermetic spirit of man a "consciousness elemental."

But seriously,

Magic in Shadowrun is much like Shadowrun itself. The way you perceive it working is the way it works. As the game itself basically works based on your perception of the rules of the game, and if you and your group uniformly misinterpret the rules then it works for you that way. Magic is much the same. If you were to present a shaman with a mathimagical proof of why magic works different from what they believe, it does not mean that they will be able to incorporate that into their style, at least not efficiently. Consider the bit of fluff in SM where the hermetic is trying to teach the shaman a spell. The hermetic has a spell formula that he’s representing on a blackboard with equations and figures, and the shaman is trying to paint it onto canvas…

Magic is what you believe it is. But it is obviously not hermetic or shamanic, or any of the others, since IEs and Dragons who are far more adept think the traditions of humans are novel and interesting, but basically foolish. See the fluff in Harlequin’s Back about Frosty and her attempts to learn Harlequin’s style of magic within her mental construct of hermeticism and the difficulty it causes.

What is your spirit? It’s what you think it is. You want to ask your grandpa what you got for your fifth birthday? If you get an answer is that proof he’s your grandpa, or is it that he knows what you know because it’s a reflecting of your own psyche?

Well no, it's not proof.
What if the spirit tells you where he (Grandpa) hid his treasure, and you check it out and hit the jackpot? Proof that the spirit really is Grandpa's soul? Not exactly cast iron. It could just have been spying on Grandpa.

I get the impression that most hermetics will favour the view that Ancestral Spirits aren't really former human souls (although if you can cast spells, I struggle to see why you'd have issues with that). But I'll bet lots of them have been playing around with spirits trying to 'test' them, just to be sure. It is kind of a big issue, after all.

There's also a justification need for that - if you truly believe that the spirits you are ordering around are people, you might feel a bit guilty about it....

I've always tended toward treating/running Spirits of Man as real people (entities?). I've never given much thought to them being of an afterlife, but that's really interesing. I may give some thought to using that as a plot device at some point.

I've never concidered Spirits of Man as people from the afterlife, my impression was that they were Spirits of Urban domain from SR3, which weren't even people, they could manifest as any item or person from a city.

An example is the restaraunt The Rubber Suit (I don't know which SR3 book it's in sorry), which has what would be in SR4 a spirit of man, but its a mansized godzilla in form. I don't think we could say that it's the departed soul of godzilla, because godzilla never lived as a real creature.

Edit: To summarize, I think that spirits of man are a reflection of what humans have created, from other humans to trashcans and remote control cars.

There is a little bit of cannon evidence to suggest that ancestor spirits are the actual souls of the departed. I'm talking about cyberzombie Dunkelzhan. Of course, the average shadowrunner won't know about him so he is irrevelant to IC discussions.

Cyberzombie Dunkie (guarding the bridge of the enemy) is not a spirit of man (dragon?) possessing a corpse/cyberzombe, it's more like his astral form. At least that's the impression I've gotten.

The fluff specifically leaves ambiguous the distinction of if spirits are made of whole cloth, or brought forth from a metaplane. So if it's made on the spot of the essence of the astral then it cannot be a ancestor so to speak. However if it is called forth from a metaplane then its still not clear if it is the spirit of a real person, or there are just a suficent numbers and varieties that when you call a spirit forth it may resemble something sufficiently to fool you into thinking it's a real spirit...

Maybe talking about Spirits of Man is a bit misleading. Ancestor spirits, whatever they are currently classified as, is what we're talking about here.

The problem with making this distinction is - how do you decide any given entity is really who- or whatever it presents itself as? Or that it's not?

If a disembodied lump of conscious astral energy is floating around thinking it's your grandpa, it looks exactly like him when it manifests and it has some or all of his memories - does it matter all that much if it's exactly the same lump of conscious astral energy that used to be stuck in gramp's body? For all practical intents and purposes, it's the spirit of your dead grandfather.

It's a similar problem with AIs (or sprites or Ghosts in the Machine or even some SKs ). Are they really conscious electronic entities, or just very sophisticated computer programs that think they're people of some sort? And what difference does it make, one way or the other? Other than it's easier for the people around them to justify abusing/exploiting the AI if they convinced themselves that it isn't really a thinking being.

Of course, this is slightly easier in an instance where another entity has displaced the original consciousness and is merely pretending. A shedim possessing his corpse or a "good merge" insect spirit is most definitely not gramps. If for no other reason than because your real grampa wouldn't be trying to eat your face (well, mine wouldn't, anyhow - I can't really speak for the rest of you).

But until someone figures out a way to make some sort of soul-o-meter, the answer is one of those that can't be known. So it's usually just better to err on the side of caution. If that Guardian spirit you just called up says it's the ghost of ol' grampy, you should probably just roll with it. If it is grampy, you're treating him with the respect he probably deserves for winging his way over from the plane of the dead to help you - if it's not, well, you're still probably not-pissing-off a spirit than can rip your head off and shove it up your ass. Unless you don't care about that sort of thing, it's win-win.

Well... Ancestor spirits might be pretty cagey when 'tested' in this manner, any evidence they might provide might have alternate explanations (as in the Grandpa's Treasure example), and even if there was a wealth of indisputable evidence that they were not ex-human-souls, people can be very good at ignoring that stuff or conjuring up (pardon the pun) conspiracy theories with which to dismiss it (look at Creationism).

But I can't argue with your second sentence. It could matter a great deal, and I'm surprised these sort of arguments aren't more prominent in the magical and religious circles of the SR world, or even in everyday thinking.

There ought to be a lot more fanatics out there (compared to our world, which has enough of them as it is) who believe that they will survive their own 'glorious' death. And there ought to be a lot of hermetics and secret societies doing weird and possibly unwholesome things to spirits in the belief that they can turn themselves into spirits and essentially become immortal.

So yes, plenty of potential campaign material in this discussion, IMO.