Plural Bodies, Plural Souls: Multiple Ensoulment as the Locus of Identity in Plural Systems

Emerging understandings of plurality pose challenges to the longstanding cross-cultural and interfaith assumption that an exclusive relationship exists between a given body and the soul understood to inhabit it. The acceptance that a multiplicity of individuated persons may inhabit a single body as a system requires a re-examination of the nature of the soul in relation to the body, and a consideration that—if the soul is held to exist—multiple personhood necessarily entails an analogous phenomenon of multiple ensoulment, allowing several souls to coöperatively partake in and express themselves through a given embodiment in a non-exclusive, many-to-one correspondence.