Do Souls Multiply?

The image here is one half of a painting from 2021, meant to illustrate a sound recording of the Shuar people from 1963, Ecuador. While painting the portrait the woman continued to bear a striking likeness to a friend of mine from back in the Netherlands. To this day, the painting contains the spirit of Marja, living far removed from the Shuar. Every twentieth or so portrait painting or drawing feels like a painting of someone other, someone known enters into consciousness. After deliberations of the stats of world populations and imprecise estimates of how many people one meets in a lifetime, some flaky use of statistics, and cruddy math, the conclusion was reached that there are about 400,000 different souls in the world. A novel explanation of the mystery of reincarnation. How is it possible so many more people are alive today than, say, one thousand years ago? In other words: Do souls multiply?

There are no answers here. Questions merely lead into other questions. None can be answered objectively, only intuited, felt, or speculated. Do souls multiply? Can one have multiple souls or none at all? Can one soul reside in multiple beings? Is a soul gender-specific, race-specific? A resounding no answer on the latter, if the above example can be taken seriously at all. Can souls travel across time and space? Are souls temporal? Are new souls being created? Souls exist outside bodies.

An actor, by empathy, aligns with the soul of the character, the author with their characters, the portrait painter with the model. A shaman is trained to travel the spirit world. Can an imagined character have a soul? a god, a mythological character? an avatar?


 

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