Conjuring up the soul: Olga Tokarczukʼs playing around with multiple religions

In her fiction Olga Tokarczuk evokes a spectrum of belief systems rooted in diverse religious traditions and entrenched in their literary‑theological redoubts. This article is an attempt of presenting an overview of the belief systems and worldviews that can be found in all of Tokarczuk's novels. It also examines her view of religion, including her opinions and reactions that belong primarily to the narrower context of the Polish hic and nunc, and the religious entanglements of literature. The fact that Olga Tokarczuk, herself a graduate of psychology, has done of lot reading in neighbouring fields such as anthropology may explain her persistent preoccupation with the soul. It holds the key both to her religious imaginarium and to her fictions. The empathic soul represents the potential transgressiveness of existence. It is also, in her own words, "the most tender narrator", a story‑telling 'persona' endowed with the faculty of fostering engagement and a sense of responsibility for the state of the world. The article argues that Tokarczuk's aim is to conjure up and activate its 'persona', or soul, and while making it interact with the reader's soul, initiate a chain reaction that breaks barriers between human beings, and reaches out beyond the confines of the human world. That process begins with her playing around with multiple religious traditions to demonstrate that their borders and defences are anything but impregnable.