Hi, Siege. I am honored to be your soul-friend.
A very close, perhaps identical, concept is the old one of soulmate. As usually expressed, the ideas is that two souls, one male, one female, are always looking for one another and, when they find one another, that life becomes one of bliss and contentment.
The earliest expression of this may be seen in a Greek myth that reports that the gods first made Man as an odd ball-like creature with four legs and four arms and two heads, but that these creatures made such a clamor rolling around all over the Earth that the gods ultimately divided each man into two halves, with the idea that the halves would be so busy chasing after one another, trying to find their "missing half," that they would no longer bother the gods.
That also echoes a very old European goddess-worship tradition, by the way, that the Creator began as a genderless entity that divided into two halves, male and female, which subsequently mated as heaven and earth to produce all the rest of creation.
The idea also is expressed in studies of the Qabala, where the divine inspiration of Kether, the first and highest sephira, divides into Chokmah and Binah, representing male and female.
In my religious tradition, which includes a belief in reincarnation, there is also the concept of soul GROUPS. The idea is that groups of souls, numbering, oh, anywhere from a half dozen to a couple of dozen or so, tend to work together over many, many lifetimes. You were my sister in a past life, my husband in a life before that, my nemesis before that, the guy who gave me some good advice when I needed it before that . . . and so on and on. Hypnotic regression repeatedly brings out the idea that the subject's friends and relatives appeared in close but different roles in previous lifetimes.
If we accept the idea that our stay here on Earth is essentially a semester in a rather tough private school, it makes sense. Individuals within soul groups work together to help one another advance, to learn the lessons they need to learn in order to progress.
Personally, I don't accept the idea of soul MATES as popularly expressed, though that sort of thing may happen occasionally. I do believe in the soul GROUP hypothesis. Work I've done personally with autohypnotic regression suggests the people closest to me have been around me before. (My teacher in Wicca likes to say that when she first met me, her first thought--unspoken but VERY loud--was "Where the HELL have you been?" She'd been waiting for me to show up, you see. . . .
And I definitely accept the idea of soul FRIENDS . . . like Siege.
