Simultaneously present in numerous cultures at the dawn of recorded history, the Binary Soul Doctrine apparently predates all currently known civilizations. This peculiar afterlife tradition not only seems to have saturated the entire Old World at a very early date, appearing in some of the earliest writings of Egypt, Greece, Persia, India, and China, it somehow managed to jump the oceans as well, leaving yet more of its footprints in the cultural traditions of Australia, Hawaii, Alaska, the Dakotas, Mexico, Peru, and even Haiti.

Greece called these two souls the psuche and the thumos, Egypt called them the ba and ka, Israel called them the ruwach and nephesh, Christianity called them the soul and spirit, Persia called them the urvan and daena, Islam called them the ruh and nafs, India called them the atman and jiva, China called them the hun and po, Haiti called them the gros bon ange and ti bon ange, Hawaii called them the uhane and unihipili, and the Dakota Indians called them the nagi and niya. The list goes on and on.

The most extraordinary thing about this ancient belief, however, is not simply that it was so widespread, but that this lost model of the afterlife seems to be consistent with the latest findings in a number of areas of modern scientific research. For one thing, these cultures' descriptions of the two souls are strikingly similar to modern science's 'right brain/left brain' descriptions of the conscious and unconscious halves of the human psyche, distinguishing between one part of the self that is objective, independent, masculine, logical, verbal, dominant, active, and possessing independent free will, and another part that is subjective, dependent, feminine, fertile, emotional, nonverbal, recessive, passive, responsive, and in possession and control of the memory. Even more interestingly, the ancient Binary Soul Doctrine also seems to anticipate, even predict, many of the conditions being described in modern reports of near-death experiences, past life memories, past-life hypnotic regressions, ghosts, apparitions, poltergeists, and other afterlife phenomena. These unexpected correlations carry profound and disturbing implications.

Egypt's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

Egypt, it seems, was absolutely convinced that the afterdeath division of the two souls could be reversed. For more than 2,000 years the Egyptian people united together in that very mission, a whole people struggling as one against the greatest of enemies - death itself. They dedicated a huge percentage of their attention, wealth, and manpower to achieving a single goal - preventing and/or reversing the afterdeath soul-division of their leaders. Thanks to Egypt's unswerving faith in their ability to reverse this division and thereby guarantee eternal life in the next world, they left what is perhaps the most complete snapshot of this long-forgotten belief system.

Like many of the cultures that subscribed to the Binary Soul Doctrine, the mentality of ancient Egypt revolved around a dualistic perspective similar to China's Yin and Yang philosophy. Egypt's thoughts were dominated by the idea of united opposites; all reality, they thought, even including the human soul, was comprised of equal-but-opposite components that were dancing together in a delicate yet tense balance. Even their language reflected this underlying assumption; not only was everything always either male or female, Yin or Yang, but their language often used a special grammatical structure called 'the dual voice'. For instance, they called Egypt "The Two Lands", their universe was called "The Dual Realities" or "The Two Truths", they called their netherworld "The Great Double House", their gods dwelt in "The Lake of Double Fire", and their afterdeath judgment took place in "The Hall of Double Truth". This 'dual voice' did not simply refer to two things, or even two halves of one thing; it referred to an integrated binary unit, two which are one, simultaneously separate and united, each part distinct on its own, yet incomplete without its equal-but-opposite, complimentary partner.

Further reflecting this perspective, Egyptian mythology portrayed the universe beginning when a set of divine twins leapt from the womb of space. The people of ancient Egypt even thought of their gods as dualistic; every masculine god had a feminine counterpart (except for one of their gods - Mut - who was actually seen as bisexual, transcending duality altogether). The Egyptians even divided their gods into two groups, the "Lesser Paut" and the "Greater Paut". The highest god of Egypt was similarly differentiated into two divine elements or beings - Osiris and Ra, who were seen as actually just two different aspects of the same being :

"Then who is he? It is Osiris.

In other words : his name is Ra."

- Book of the Dead, Chapter 17

Horus, another high god, was also dualistic. The sun and moon were called the two eyes of Horus. Often called "Horus of the Two Horizons", he was the equal-but-opposite twin half of another god, Set, or Sutekh. Together, Horus and Set were often called simply "Those Two', or "The Rivals", or "The Two Companions". Constantly wrestling with one another, they were represented together as a single figure with two heads - the head of a man and the head of a jackal.

Just as Egypt perceived everything else as being composed of two parts, so too they distinguished two parts within the human soul as well. These two souls embraced together within the person's heart during life, but split apart from one another at death. Although Egypt named nine different aspects of the self in all,⁽¹⁾ only two of these, the ba and the ka, were thought to survive physical death and so could properly be called 'soul' as the term is understood today. If and when these two parts of the soul successfully reunited with each other on the other side of death's door, they were then called the person's akh. The akh does not seem to have been an additional, third soul that one also secretly possessed; rather, it was an entirely new kind of soul one could potentially become - the whole that was formed by the ka-ba union - a whole that was far greater than the mere sum of its parts. The akh doesn't seem to have existed at all prior to death, and after death, it merely had a chance of becoming fully functional, or "perfected", but only if all went well with the ka-ba union. The symbol for the akh was a stork, a bird often seen wading in the marshlands of the Nile, simultaneously at home in the air and on the land, a perfect symbol for the integration of diverse elements.

To the Egyptian way of thinking, it was natural, good, right, and true (Maat) for all things to be 'two which were one', and so, it was thought, all people should strive to follow this pattern - the double truth of nature (Maati). To be divided, on the other hand, to be 'two which were not one', seems to have been the Egyptian definition of 'sin'. Although duality was expected and differentiated binary systems were even appreciated, the two parts were ideally expected to work together smoothly, together forming a whole greater than the sum of their parts. Division, when the interaction and unity of the parts of the whole broke down, was seen as an abhorrent pathology in the natural system - duality taken to an unhealthy extreme. This attitude may explain why the cult of Osiris felt it was necessary to make a special point of forbidding the decapitation or dismemberment of any priests or worshipers of this god. Even the prayers during the annual festival of Osiris seem to reflect this condemnation of division:

"O grant unto me a path whereon I may journey in peace.

I am righteous. I have not utterly lies willfully.

I have not acted a double part (or, dealt doubly)." ⁽²⁾

The Legend of Osiris

The god Osiris, and his doctrine of eternal life, held center stage in Egyptian thought for more than 3,000 years, from pre-dynastic, literally pre-historic times right up until the Christian era. Egypt had many gods, each of whom needed to be revered and appeased when necessary. But no Egyptian god was ever worshiped like Osiris, who not only rose from the dead himself, but could make his followers rise from death as well. According to his legend, Osiris was killed by his brother Set, who cut him up into pieces and scattered them. But when those pieces were gathered back together and reassembled, Osiris not only found that he had been restored to divine and eternal life, but that he was then able to help others conquer death as well.

This model of death seems to be reflected in Egypt's doctrine of the division of the ba and ka souls after death, and the expectation that if these could be reunited, the person would then be fully reconstituted and perfected, transfigured into a divine being like Osiris himself. In fact, once the two souls of the deceased had reunited on 'the other side', the departed person was then called an "Osiris". Egypt's annual ceremony honoring Osiris reflected this same theme : priests would construct a figure of Osiris by placing a specially prepared paste into two halves of a mold, and tying these two symbolic halves of Osiris together when the molds were formed.

These were very old concepts, even to the Egyptians themselves. Many errors found in various copies of the Egyptian Book of the Dead reveal that the scribes who copied them were often uncertain just what those prayers were supposed to mean. This tells us that even as far back as 2000 BC, the actual culture that originally gave birth to these theological concepts and treatises was already but a dim and flimsy memory, as far removed from those scribes as the days of the Twelve Disciples are to modern Christians, and every bit as mysterious.

Nonetheless, those prayers reveal surprises about ancient Egypt - strongly suggesting that Nile culture, so very long ago, was aware of a subtle truth that our scientists have only rediscovered and verified in recent years - that the human mind is indeed differentiated into two distinct components - the conscious mind, which possesses the rational intellect and the autonomous free will, and the unconscious mind, which possesses the emotions and the memory .

The Ba as the Conscious Mind

Just like the conscious and unconscious of modern science, both the ba and ka were considered integral elements of the person's self during life. In fact, both these two carried, independently of one another, the meaning of 'the self'. The ba was the living conscious self. Just like the conscious mind of today's psychology, it was considered to possess autonomous free will, focused awareness, rational intelligence, and the ability to move and communicate. Like the conscious mind, the ba embodied the objective perspective, dispassionately viewing the rest of the world as objects separate and distinct from itself. Like the conscious mind, each ba was the sole master of its own decisions, the lone witness of its own inner domain; the ba was the infinitely private and isolated experience of being the only person in the universe who was peering out through its own particular set of eyes. And like the conscious mind, the ba seems to have been conceived of as the source of intellect: while the ka was credited with making the body talk, the ba was what caused its words to make sense.

But in sharp contrast to modern science's conception of the conscious mind, the ba was also credited with eternal life - it was thought to permanently possess both the spark of life and the power of motion and animation. The ba, Egypt thought, could never die, never cease to exist, never cease to be conscious and aware . No matter what happened, it would at the very least always still be alive and aware of its own existence. But its sense of continuity - the coherence of its sense of self - that was quite a different matter. That was not guaranteed, and all the funeral rituals and prayers and mummification efforts of ancient Egypt had but a single purpose - to maintain the coherency of the ba's self-experience while passing through the doors of death.

The Ka as the Unconscious Mind

The ka was not so lucky. It was very possible indeed for the ka to cease to exist. In the eyes of every Egyptian, his or her ka was at grave risk.

What was at risk? Egypt's terminology has confused scholars for centuries - the ka, a different element of the person altogether, was somehow also considered to be 'the self'. Actually, 'ka' is an Egyptian word for 'you';⁽³⁾ this pun-like choice of words seems to emphasize the ka's role in relationships. In many respects, the characteristics of the ka precisely match modern science's concept of the unconscious mind. Like the 'right-brain' unconscious, it was also associated with dream activity during sleep. Like the mysterious unconscious, it was also thought to be able to work in secret, without its owner's knowledge. A person's ka was even able to deceive or betray its owner, which sounds rather like Freudian slips, neuroses, and all the other ways the unconscious is still 'misbehaving' today. And just as modern therapists teach their clients how to get the unconscious to work for them instead of against them, so too Egypt also thought that the ka could either work for or against its owner. Like the subjective unconscious, the ka was also polarized towards a subjective or intersubjective orientation, providing one with the crucial ability to relate to and interact with others. Just as the unconscious is today, the ka was also thought to be the source of one's subjective sense of belonging, one's sense of having a living connection with others. Reminding us of the moral voice of the unconscious, the ka was also considered to be the source of the person's conscience. And like the unconscious, the ka was also considered to be moldable, programmable, changeable, and potentially unreliable. Even Egyptian art suggests identifying the ka with the unconscious - just as popular culture today thinks of the unconscious as the equal-but-opposite dark interior to the conscious mind's lighted exterior, so too the ka was often depicted in Egyptian art as a blackened reverse image of the person.

The ka was often called the person's 'double'; it seems to have been thought of as being, or embodying, the person's 'pattern' by molding itself into a perfect image or likeness of the individual and his character. In fact, the ancient Egyptian word 'ka' still lives on in our language, in words like 'character' and 'charisma'. Reminding us that memory is stored in the unconscious, the ka was also thought to contain a record or model of all one's personal experiences, and thus, one's sense of self-identity; it contained the shapes of one's memories (on which the continuity and coherence of one's sense of self-identity depends, as any amnesiac will testify). It also constituted, as it were, a complete database of a person's psychological disposition, containing the shape or pattern or reflection or memory of all one's needs, desires, fears, expectations, appetites, feelings, and emotions.

In short, the ka seems to have been the Yin to the ba's Yang, the 'form' that gave shape to the ba's 'substance'. The ka was closely associated with the concept of form and image - it was what allowed different shapes to be taken. Without the ka, the ba was unable to have any form at all - it would be unable to manifest at all without the ka. Without the ka, the ba would be substance without form, text without context, potential without manifestation, being without identity, existence without 'self' , rather like the Eastern religious concept of the impersonal, nonformed essence of one's being. Without the ka, the ba would be in just such a predicament. But unlike the Eastern religions of today, ancient Egypt saw this impersonal existence not as a desirable goal, but as the worst of all possible fates.

The Relationship of the Ba and Ka During Life

The ka had needs. It lacked something it could not do without - sustenance - an energy supply. The ka was not believed to inherently possess its own spark of eternal life force that could keep it perpetually energized and active and fulfilled, so it needed a source to supply this necessary nourishment. The ba was that outside source. The ba, which was thought to possess that eternally-living spark of life force, was thought to reside inside the ka during one's human life; the ka held its ba within it just as a cup holds water, embracing it. In fact, the symbol for the ka was a pair of upraised arms, which seem to be stretched apart in a welcoming embrace, yet also raised up in a way that reminds one of a cup ready to be filled. In the same way, the conscious mind can also be said to be 'contained', and therefore shaped, by the unconscious. By itself, the bare-bones conscious mind has no shape of its own, no unique personality, no subjective value system, except as it is 'in-formed' with same through the memory shape of the unconscious; without the unconscious with its memory and emotions, the conscious mind, although aware, would be as perfectly blank and featureless as a sheet of white paper. And just as the ba was believed to animate the ka, so too the conscious mind animates and activates the otherwise dormant unconscious. It seemed, then as now, a partnership made in heaven, each supplying what the other needed.

Like a set of Russian dolls, the ka dwelt within the heart (or ab), and the ba sat inside the ka; this cozy arrangement sometimes blurred scriptural distinctions between the heart and these other two components. Like two embracing lovers, this union between the ba and ka was intimate in life - they were two conjoined beings that could not be separated prior to death. Even though the ka was sometimes thought to travel away from the body in dreams while the person was alive, such journeys rarely endangered the connection between the two.

The Division of Ba and Ka at Death

But once the person died, the ba and ka, which until then had known only partnership, having functioned virtually as a single unit all during the person's life, now found themselves separated, alienated, ripped apart from one another. This abrupt and disorienting rupture seems to have been associated with the ba experiencing a loss of memory; multiple chapters in the Egyptian Book of the Dead⁽⁴⁾ pray for the deceased's memory to be returned to him after he has left the body. How was this memory to be restored? By re-connecting the ba back to its ka, which contained the full pattern and record of the person's life, including his memories and his subjective sense of self. Virtually all of Egypt's famous Pyramid Texts, as well as virtually the entire Book of the Dead, had but a single purpose - to cause the ba and ka to reunite back together again after they split off from one another at death. The Egyptians effected this reunion through the "Opening of the Mouth" ritual.⁽⁵⁾ This ritual, it was hoped, would permanently bind the ba and ka to one another in the next world, thus guaranteeing the eternal continuation of the person's self-awareness and sense of identity after the transition.

It was thought, however, that this reunification could only be achieved in a physical body; the body seems to have been considered a necessary catalyst for their fusion. Ideally, this supreme spiritual transformation was supposed to take place well before the person's physical death (as is the case with many other religions) and many of Egypt's other religious rituals were indeed devoted to doing just that. But the Egyptian people, for whatever reason, remained convinced for thousands of years that if the individual did not achieve this union prior to his death, it might still be possible to achieve it even after death, but only if the physical body still existed.

Reading the Book of the Dead over the deceased, it was hoped, would lead the ba and ka to return to the corpse, allowing them to finally consummate their union and achieve immortality. But Egypt seems to have worried about what might happen if their return was delayed. Since there was no way to be sure if or when the invisible ba and ka actually had returned and consummated their union, the remains of the deceased had to be preserved for as long as possible, so the opportunity for their reunion, at least, would always exist. And thus, it seems, the practices of mummification and pyramid building dawned in Egypt, not as the best and surest route to immortality their culture knew of, but merely as a last-ditch effort for the spiritually negligent.

The Transfiguration of the Akh

If this reunion was successfully accomplished, it was thought, the person would be transformed into an akh, something akin to a shining, glorified, immortal angel. Often called an Osiris (one whose parts have been reunited), the akh was thought of as the true, complete self in its fully awakened, perfected, and whole state after death. The word akh carried the sense of one who had been 'pulled back together', one who was now fully 'self-possessed', meanings which appropriately reflect the reunification of the ba and ka, and the reacquisition of one's past memories, personality, and sense of self-identity that would thereby occur.

The Second Death

But if this reunification did not occur, the ba wouldn't mind or even notice - it would just flit away carefree and unconcerned to heaven, where it would still enjoy unlimited freedom and happiness, doing whatever it wanted and going wherever it pleased, and conversing with other ba's in heaven. Meanwhile, the ghostly-appearing ka would be stuck behind, trapped in a feebleminded, cold, hungry, needy, and vulnerable state in the tomb. The ka was thought to have many very regular and pressing requirements after death, but, without the energy and animating mobility it received from its other half, its needs went unmet, and it would eventually disintegrate. If the reunification occurred, then all the ka's needs would be thereby instantly and eternally fulfilled. But failing that reunion, the ka would eventually perish in a "second death" which, to the Egyptian, was the worst disaster imaginable; the ka would be utterly disintegrated, made as if it had never come into existence.

Although the cult of Osiris forbade the dismemberment or decapitation of any of his followers, Egyptian legend warned that those unfaithful to Osiris would suffer that very fate; the headsmen of Osiris, the legends declare, were eternally busy. This would seem to yet be another representation of the idea that a soul- division occurs at death, but this particular detail of the Osiris legend suggests that soul-division was thought to be conditional : one would only lose his 'head', or self-aware consciousness, if one failed to live up to the ideals of the cult of Osiris. If one's soul divided apart at death, it seems, the ancient Egyptians would have claimed it was one's own fault, having spent one's life "acting a double part".

A Common Model of Death

This ancient tale of dividing souls, or something very similar to it, seems to turn up in early afterlife traditions around the world. The specific details were often quite different from one tradition to another, but the core message was always the same - that human beings possess two separate and distinct souls which can and often do divide apart at death, each going off into a different afterlife experience. Although these cultures were otherwise very different and often thousands of miles from one another, they consistently described their two souls in very similar ways, amazingly anticipating modern science's descriptions of the conscious and unconscious.

Often, these cultures came to value one soul more than the other. When this occurred, the characteristics of the lesser valued soul were seen as less real, more illusory or temporary. While the more valued soul was invariably seen as being completely immortal, the lesser valued soul is often thought to disappear after death, sometimes seeming to cease to exist very quickly after death, other times seeming to fade away very slowly. But these cultures disagreed on which soul was the more important and more immortal. Some cultures, such as Hinduism and Islam, held that the objective, dispassionate, conscious-mind-like soul was the 'true self', while the emotional, subjective unconscious-mind-like soul was held up as illusory. But other cultures, such as Christianity and the Australian aborigine, felt the just the opposite was true - that the innermost, subjective, personal, involved, emotional heart-and-soul of a person was their 'true self', and the objective, uninvolved, disconnected, analytical, masculine half represented all that was wrong and false with the world.

The strengths of the more valued soul invariably dominate the cultural attitude of the society, while the strengths of the lesser valued soul are granted less significance. Those cultures that valued the conscious-mind-like soul more than its partner tended to put a lesser premium on the subjective/personal/emotional experience of the individual in their society, while those cultures that valued the unconscious-mind-like soul put a lesser premium on logic, science, and reason.

Of all the other Binary Soul Doctrine cultures, the ancient Chinese were one of the few who seem to have recognized that both halves of the soul were of equal value.

China's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

Like the Egyptians, the Taoists of ancient China were also greatly concerned with insuring the survival of the individual after death. Taoist philosophy paralleled Egypt's in many respects; as early as the 'Warring States' period (475-221 BC), Taoists were teaching that all reality was comprised of and created by two equal-but-opposite interplaying primordial forces - Yin and Yang. But instead of leaving this concept in the abstract, they brought it down to a very personal level, maintaining that every person was an amalgamation of Yin and Yang souls.

At the moment of birth, they believed, these two components fuse together within the body, working together until they finally part company at death. Providing animation to the body and the mind, the hun, or Yang soul, was conscious, active, intelligent, masculine, strong, ambitious, and dominant. Like the 'left brain' half of the psyche, it was thought to be particularly aware of the boundaries and differences between self and others. And like the dispassionate, objective conscious mind, it also excelled in non-attachment. The po, or Yin soul, was thought to take shape over the course of an individual's lifetime; being very impressionable and sensitive, it was molded by the person's environment. The po provided one's personal sense of self identity, and was held to be what makes a person feel fully alive and real and present in the moment. It was thought of as earthy, only semi-conscious, feminine, reactive, and passive, and was deemed responsible for all one's sensations, reactions, emotions, and instinctive impulses. After departing the dead body, the Yang soul would return to heaven unchanged, sometimes returning to reincarnate later, while the Yin soul became imprisoned in a dreary underground netherworld in a feeble-minded state.

Like the ancient Egyptians, these Chinese Taoists also realized that an afterdeath soul-division would spell the disintegration of the known self, and were just as anxious to ensure its survival. But unlike Egypt, which optimistically believed that this afterdeath division could be reversed after the fact, China felt the only hope revolved around preventing the division from ever occurring in the first place. They designed techniques to construct a 'spirit body' by welding these two souls together while the person was still alive, so they could no longer disconnect at death. Sometimes referred to as an 'Immortal Fetus', this spirit body was believed to insure the continuation of the personality and sense of self-identity.

The ancient Taoists realized that although a human being was comprised of three distinct parts - body, hun, and po - there were only five different combinations these could be arranged in, since it was not possible for the animating hun to split apart from the body without leaving that body a lifeless corpse. The five possible combinations were (1) hun-spirit, po-soul, and body, (2) po-soul with no hun-spirit (and therefore no animated body either), (3) body with hun-spirit but no po-soul, (4) hun-spirit with no po-soul or body, (5) hun-spirit and po-soul with no body. The first, with body, po-soul, and hun-spirit, would be the living. The second would be those with po-souls, but no hun-spirit, no source of animation : ghosts. The third would be bodies with hun-spirits but no po-souls -- animated bodies without any sense of ppersonal identity (the traditional name for such creatures would seem to be zombies). The fourth would be animated disembodied spirits without any objectively visible form or subjective sense of personal identity (which would seem to correspond to poltergeists). The fifth would be animated disembodied spirits with a cohesive and uncorrupted sense of their own self identity and memories, which would seem to correspond to Taoism's Immortal Fetus, as well as Egypt's akh and Christianity's angels or saints.

The Inca and Toltec Versions of the Binary Soul Doctrine

The Columbian civilization of the Incas, which covered much of present-day Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, held a philosophy strikingly similar to those of Egypt and China. Like ancient Egypt, the Incas also built pyramidal religious monuments, and also mummified their dead. And like Egypt and China, the ancient Incas also subscribed to a dualistic philosophy that included the idea that people possess two souls which divide apart at death.

The religion, culture, and philosophy of the Incas all revolved around the central idea of trying to balance, harmonize, and reconcile the equal-but-opposite forces of reality. Their supreme being was Viracocha, an androgynous being whose symbol was a two-headed serpent. The binary structure of reality so dominated their thoughts that they even divided their villages and territories into two halves, calling one half hanan (which translates as "high, superior, right, masculine") and the other half hurin (which translates as 'low, inferior, left, feminine").

At death, one soul was thought to return to its place of origin in heaven, while the other soul remained with the corpse. The soul that remained behind was thought to have many needs, and it was thought necessary (just as it had been in Egypt), for the physical body to be preserved for those needs to be fulfilled.

The Inca's neighbors to the north, the ancient Toltec civilization of Mexico, also subscribed to a version of the Binary Soul Doctrine. Believing that the whole world was comprised of two equal-but-opposite forces, they called it Omeyocan, the place of duality. They also believed that each living human was comprised of two mental halves, which they called the tonal and the nagual, and thought that the purpose of human existence was to integrate these two sides together.⁽⁶⁾

Greece's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

When we peer back into the dimmest, most distant traces of the ancient civilization of the Greeks, we discover the Binary Soul Doctrine already in full flower. In Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Greece's oldest literary texts, two distinct types of souls are distinguished - the psuche and the thumos. To the Homeric Greeks, a person was only fully human when body, thumos and psuche were all functioning together as a cohesive, integrated whole. Thought to be free, unencumbered, and immortal, the psuche held the spark of life, and while it could not exit the body without causing the death of the individual, it was thought to be able to reincarnate. And while it was not thought to possess any feelings or emotions, it was thought to be the center of all abstract intellectual thought. The other soul, the thumos, possessed one's feelings, emotions, needs, and urges.

Death shattered this unity in two stages. First, the two souls first detached in unison from the body when its functions ceased, and shortly thereafter, they separated from one another as well, which was the event called the 'second death'. One soul disappeared into the air while the other soul, transformed into a shadowy replica of the living person, descended into Hades. There, these phantoms of the dead continued to exist, but it was a flavorless, unhappy, and dismal netherworld, and their thoughts were confused and oblivious. The souls of the dead are portrayed as being extremely weak and barely conscious in Hades, but able to gain enough strength and presence of mind to temporarily think, move, and speak if they were somehow able to acquire a little sustenance from the living. Homer's hero Odysseus, for example, makes a special offering in order to attract the souls of the dead. Any soul having access to the offering could then hold a rational conversation with Odysseus for a few moments, but without sustenance all the other wraiths of the dead remained without reason and understanding.

India's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

The Vedas are the oldest scriptures in all India. Dating back to around 1000 BC, these documents, the foundation of all Hinduism, provide us with the oldest available snapshot of Indian beliefs about the human soul. The story they tell, however, was already quite familiar to much of the rest of the world - that people possessed two nonphysical, psychological, potentially immortal soul-like elements - the asu and the manas. Like Egypt's ba, the asu was active, conscious, sentient, and immortal, carrying the spark of life. And like Egypt's ka, the manas was thought to hold one's internal feelings, emotions, and subjective perception, providing the ability to perceive and comprehend relationships with others. After death, the asu could simply reincarnate again, but the manas was vulnerable and could be greatly harmed by death; if it separated from the animating and cognizing asu after departing the body, it would become inert and lifeless.

Modern Hinduism still teaches that two very different entities co-exist in the human body - the atman and the jiva. Deepak Chopra, perhaps the most well-known apologist for Hinduism today, writes "many people might wonder why the soul has to be divided in this way ... the distinction between them is absolutely necessary." ⁽⁷⁾ During life these two are integrated deeply together, but after death they divide apart, after which the jiva, or "astral-emotional body", is thought to deteriorate. The atman, or inner witness, is the objective conscious self, the part of one's inner being that is eternally unchanging and observant. The jiva, on the other hand, is the more familiar, personal, subjective self which is always changing, but may or may not be eternal. Atman is to jiva as substance is to form. These two are intimate partners in life, and just as Egypt's ka was associated with form, so too the atman needs the jiva in order to take on form and definition, and thereby experience life on earth. The jiva gives the inner witness the sense or experience of having a subjective self with personal limitations and boundaries; it defines our sense of personal identity, telling us where we stop and the rest of the universe begins. Often thought of as a mirror that simply reflects the atman back to itself, the jiva is sometimes said to be an illusion, that all one is really seeing or experiencing is a partial, limited reflection of the atman itself.

Strongly associated in Hindu thought with subjective awareness, the jiva provides all personal psychological experiences such as feelings, desires, likes, dislikes, and memories, as well as all subjective impressions, perceptions, and interpretations. The atman, on the other hand, is closely associated with an objective perspective; even the empirical subject him- or her-self is perceived as an object from the point of view of the atman, which sees everything, even itself, through dispassionate, unattached, objective eyes. When viewed from the perspective of the atman, the jiva seems to be a fraud, nothing more than an impermanent, haphazardly-built structure of mental and emotional habits. Similarly, however, the detached, emotionless, disassociated perspective of the atman also seems to be a lie from the personal, subjective, deeply involved, connected-to-everything perspective of the jiva. Each seems false from the perspective of the other, yet each needs the other to experience anything at all.

Since the jiva is so closely associated with change and form, modern Hindu thought is conflicted over whether it is eternal, or whether, unlike the atman, it does eventually cease to exist. Opinions range all the way from the assertion that the jiva is ever-changing yet eternal, to the opposite idea that one's jiva disintegrates at the end of each lifetime and then another entirely new and different jiva is acquired at the start of the next incarnation. Those who feel the jiva is doomed usually regard it as false, an illusion, and insist that in the final analysis, the atman is the only true self that really exists. This ancient attitude towards the jiva rejects, denies, and ignores all personal, subjective experience as illusory and ultimately unreal. Recently, however, many social commentators have been suggesting that this traditional attitude is responsible for much of India's current poverty and disease. Leo Buscaglia, one of America's New Age gurus, would probably critique this teaching for a very different reason. He obviously wouldn't like to hear that people lose their personal emotional self at death, not after spending years teaching that this is the most important part of a person -- the part that makes us all truly and fully human.

Although the atman and jiva co-exist in the same body and may even reincarnate together, the relationship between them is not thought to be fixed and unchanging. On the contrary, it is believed that these two parts of the self can be brought into a closer, more intimate and permanent relationship than what nature alone provides. Over the centuries, Hinduism has developed a set of spiritual practices that are intended to do this, which are called ' yoga', which simply means 'union'. Typically, however, these efforts do not usually seek a balanced integration, treating these two as equal partners the way the Chinese did, but tend instead to magnify the perspective of the atman while ignoring or disregarding the experience and perspective of the jiva. The Hindu sage tries to avoid being possessed by his emotions, and seeks to walk through life attentively, unselfishly, and objectively, avoiding any and all subjective perspectives, behaviors, attitudes, and judgments. Non-attachment is favored over involvement, and a disconnected objectivity is preferred over any subjective sense of being personally involved with the rest of the universe.

Hawaii's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

"The kuhunas had a number of beliefs which they did not keep secret. For instance, they shared with the common people their knowledge of the fact hat man has two souls or spirits instead of one. The early missionaries thought this a most droll and idiotic concept, worthy only of heathen and savages. To them, man had but one soul, and their job was to save it if possible. As they arrived in Hawaii in 1820, and the subconscious was not discovered by Freud until over half a century later, they can hardly be blamed for laughing at the kahuna beliefs."

- Max Freedom Long⁽⁸⁾

Max Freedom Long, the first Westerner to study "Huna", the indigenous religion of Hawaii, was convinced it had somehow evolved from an early form of Hinduism. This traditional Polynesian religion was first introduced to the civilized world in the early 1900's when sensational news reports began to circulate saying that Hawaiian priests, known as Kahunas, were somehow able to kill people simply by "praying" them to death. Long discovered that the explanation these priests offered for these supposed abilities seemed to revolve around a binary model of the human psyche much like that of modern psychology.

Hawaii called their two souls the uhane, which was thought to be masculine, intelligent and possess free will, and the unihipili, which was thought to be feminine, emotional, and possess the memory. And like Egypt's akh, the Hawaiians also named a third, higher sort of soul, the aumakua, which was also created out of the two binary souls when united into a singular unit. The plural of Egypt's akh was aakhu, which even sounds a little like Hawaii's aumakua; and just as the ancient Egyptians called the company of their gods the Paut, so too the Hawaiians called the company of their gods the Poe Aumakua, the "Great Company of High Selves".⁽⁹⁾

These ancient Polynesians believed that their two souls might split apart from one another at death. If this happened, they said, the uhane would lose its memory and sense of self-identity, ending up as a ghost wandering in great confusion. The unihipili, meanwhile, would still recall its memories very well, but would become a different sort of ghost -- very feebleminded, and behaving in a very automatic and suggestible fashion. (It is interesting that today's two most commonly reported categories of ghosts seem to correspond quite well with these two Hawaiian spirits. Poltergeists commonly display their free will, moving and throwing things around, but they are almost never seen visually, nor do they act out any scenes from their past; similarly, the uhane would still have its own independent free will, but would have no memory of its past, nor any self-image or sense of personal identity. Haunting ghosts, on the other hand, usually don't display any independent free will, almost never moving or throwing things about, but they often display a self-image or other identifying characteristics, and they frequently seem to be reviewing or reenacting scenes of their own past memories, just as a unihipili might be expected to do.)

Kahuna sorcerers claimed to be able to trap, manipulate, and control these separated unihipili souls, using them like invisible slaves to perform magic, commanding them to do their bidding much as a hypnotist controls the thoughts and actions of his or her subject. They could only do this to the unihipili souls, however, and not uhanes, because uhane souls still possessed their own free will, and so were not as suggestible. But the separated unihipili souls had no objective intelligence of their own, nor any independent willpower to resist. This made them the perfect hypnotic subjects, completely vulnerable to the commands of the Kahuna. As many as three enslaved unihipilis would be used at a time, being ordered to attach themselves to the uhane soul of the intended living victim. This would cause the unihilipis to sap the strength of the victim's uhane like invisible parasites. Those victims who were 'prayed to death' in this way, it was said, reported a consistent symptomatology - a numbness would begin in their toes and move upwards, killing them as it reached their chest.

Persia's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

Zoroastrianism, the indigenous religion of Persia prior to the introduction of Islam, is yet another echo of mankind's early dualistic perspective. The Supreme Being, Ahura Mazda, was thought to have created two equal-but-opposite twin spirits who together ruled the world - Spenta Mainyu and Angra Mainyu. In much the same way, the soul of man was also thought to have been designed with this same binary nature; the two parts of the soul were called the urvan and the daena, and just like the two primordial offspring of the original Creator, these two souls were also thought of as a pair of twins.

Thought to exist before birth, the urvan survived death unharmed. It was conscious, active, and verbal, and was free to make its own independent choices and decisions. Meanwhile, the daena was, like Egypt's ka, also conceived of as the person's own 'image' or 'self'. And paralleling both the Egyptian ka and the Chinese po, Persia's daena was also thought to grow and develop over the course of one's life, being created or molded by the thoughts, words, and deeds of its urvan during life, becoming a mirror image of the person's earthly life. The daena contained the person's conscience, as well as a perfect memory of the person's life experience.

After wandering alone for three days after death, the urvan would again encounter its daena, in the form of a beautiful maiden,⁽¹⁰⁾ at a place called Chinvat peretu, 'the bridge of the separator' which led to the Zoroastrian heaven. But the urvan could only cross this bridge if its daena did not convict it of unrighteousness. This encounter between the urvan and daena was critical; the nature of the afterdeath "conversation" of these two halves of the soul, when the urvan would find itself confronted by the full memory record carried within the daena, would determine the entire afterlife experience of the individual. Immortality required the successful reconciliation of the urvan and daena after death; if the urvan had been good and honest in life, it would pass through this Judgment safely to live in heavenly bliss with its daena, but if not, it would fall into a grey, shadowy netherworld.

Israel's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

At the time the Old Testament was being written, there seem to have been two primary soul concepts in the Jewish language. Ancient Israel held that people are comprised of two spiritual elements - a ruah and a nefesh. In the Hebrew text of the Old Testament, the word nefesh appears 451 times, being translated each time as 'soul', and the word ruah appears 271 times, being translated each time as 'spirit' . The ruah was active, strong, conscious, intelligent, and communicated with words. It was immortal, pre-existing the person's birth and surviving his death unharmed, always "returning to god who gave it". But the nefesh, which embodied one's emotions, memories, and sense of self-identity, was vulnerable and could be greatly harmed by death, becoming trapped in a weak and feebleminded state in She'ol, a dark, underground, dreamlike netherworld.

A third concept also existed, but it was used far less often, and this rarely-used term overlapped both those two primary concepts. The neshamah, which appears only three times in the Old Testament, is translated both as 'soul' and 'spirit', suggesting that the ancient Hebrews may have seen this rarely-mentioned soul element as the union of nefesh and ruah, paralleling their close neighbor Egypt's concept of the akh being the union of the ba and ka souls. Besides these three terms, no other Old Testament word is usually translated as 'soul' or 'spirit'.

More recent Judaic thought has raised the number of soul-elements to five; today's Kabbalistic teachings hold that people possess no less than five distinct 'souls', adding new soul concepts named Hayyah and Yehidah. Even so, these modern teachings still hold that death brings a soul-division, with the nefesh splitting away from the ruah. Interestingly, although Christianity and Judaism both started out sharing this binary soul concept, they thereafter took opposite approaches. Judaism increased the number of their soul concepts from two to five, while Christianity reduced the number of their soul concepts from two to one, eventually thinking that soul and spirit were one and the same thing.

Christianity's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

By the time Christianity arrived on the scene, Greek ideas about a two-part soul comprised of psuche and thumos had saturated the Mediterranean area. Those Greek cultural ideas were the soil in which Christianity arose. And while most Christians today assume that the terms soul and spirit are synonyms, Christianity was originally in accord with Greek thought on this issue, distinguishing between these two parts of the self just as unequivocally as the rest of the Hellenized world. Further agreeing with the Greek model, one New Testament passage reveals that it was openly taught in the early days of the church that the soul and spirit were capable of dividing from each another:⁽¹¹⁾

The word of God is living and active

and more powerful than any two-edged sword,

and cuts so deeply it divides the soul from the spirit.

- Hebrews 4:12

We can be fairly sure that the early Christian church continued to more or less openly subscribe to some form of the Binary Soul Doctrine at least into the fourth century. While addressing the Apollinarius controversy during the 2^nd Ecumenical Council of 381 AD, the church again accepted and re-approved (albeit implicitly) the dogma that human beings are comprised of three parts: body, soul, and spirit.⁽¹²⁾ However, when the 4^th Ecumenical Council rolled around 500 years later, the church made an explicit about-face on this point, bluntly declaring:

Though the old and new Testament teach that a man or woman has one rational and intellectual soul, and all the fathers and doctors of the church, who are spokesmen of God, express the same opinion, some have descended to such a depth of irreligion, through paying attention to the speculations of evil people, that they shamelessly teach as a dogma that a human being has two souls, and keep trying to prove their heresy by irrational means using a wisdom that has been made foolishness. Therefore this holy and universal synod is hastening to uproot this wicked theory now growing like some loathsome form of weed.⁽¹³⁾

Perhaps without intending to, however, the above statement no less bluntly declared that the BSD managed to survive inside Christianity for eight full centuries, apparently finding the intellectual culture of the church a consistently warm and nurturing home in which to grow. Indeed, this doctrine was thriving in the church even as late as 869 AD, having become so popular and widely accepted by that time that it seemed to be "growing like a weed."

In addition, a number of modern archaeological discoveries have provided seemingly unimpeachable proof that the BSD played a more central role in early Christianity than it does in today's church. The 'Gnostic Gospels', a nearly 2000-year old cache of lost and forgotten Christian scriptures unearthed in Nag Hammadi Egypt in 1945, reveal that early church teachings⁽¹⁴⁾ once credited supreme relevance to the distinction and interaction between the soul and the spirit. These lost works return again and again to the issue of division, mysteriously insisting that Jesus somehow divided into two halves when He died on the cross (Gospel of Philip 68:26-29), that all people are in danger of such a division (Gospel of Thomas 11), that the division of the soul and spirit was the origin of death (Exegesis on the Soul 133:4-9), and that "making the two one" is the key to achieving eternal life (Gospel of Thomas 22). Yet another early Christian work, The Gospel of Mary, was unearthed in 1896 after also having been lost for nearly 2000 years. And again, just like the Nag Hammadi scriptures, The Gospel of Mary also seems to reflect the Binary Soul Doctrine:

Peter said to Mary : "Sister, we know that the Teacher loved you differently from other women. Tell us whatever you remember of any words he told you which we have not yet heard." Mary said to them: "I will now speak to you of that which has not been given to you to hear. I had a vision of the Teacher, and I said to him: 'Lord, I see you now in this vision.' And he answered: 'You are blessed, for the sight of me does not disturb you. There where is the nous, lies the treasure.' Then I said to him: 'Lord, when someone meets you in a moment of vision, is it through the soul that they see, or is it through the spirit?' The Teacher answered: 'It is neither through the soul nor the spirit, but the nous between the two which sees the vision.'"⁽¹⁵⁾

Nous, of course, is the ancient Greek term often translated as 'intellect' or 'mind'. Its use here clearly shows that at least one branch of early Christian anthropology included a BSD system of two primary souls with a third element in-between them. This inclusion within The Gospel of Mary is especially important, for, when considered alongside similar passages found within the Nag Hammadi scriptures, it shows that the BSD was not a minor, little-known, or insignificant stream of thought within early Christian theology. One of the most disturbing criticisms of the gnostic branch of the early church was that it had no clearly defined or agreed-upon theology, that its literature was just a hodgepodge of disconnected assertions, that anyone was free to make up anything they wished. But on the contrary, here we find that the same theme -- the BSD -- can be found in a number of different early gnostic scriptures. It seems in fact to be a common thread that may have connected the whole movement.

Many now-unfamiliar gospels and scriptures were widely read and accepted as authentic in the early church. Although only four gospels ultimately made it into the approved canon of the Bible, far more than that were written by the early fathers of the church :

Many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.

- Luke 1: 1-2

There were, in fact, two fairly distinct bodies of teachings circulating in early Christianity :

And when he was alone, those who were about him with the twelve asked him concerning the parables. And he said to them, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand.

- Mark 4:10-12

Gnostic scriptures such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Truth, the Gospel of Mary, and the Gospel of Philip were widely read, shared, circulated, approved, and honored by first century Christians, and also by second and even third century Christians. Only in the fourth century, only when all first-hand eyewitnesses to Jesus' ministry had been dead and gone for more than 150 years, did the authorities of the church conclude that they knew better than those who had personally seen Jesus in the flesh, and also better than the generation who had been taught by those eyewitnesses, and so, in the fourth century, the authorities of the church decided to condemn and destroy all gnostic literature.⁽¹⁶⁾

Other Christian Versions of the Binary Soul Doctrine

The Mandaean religion, a small but still-living relative of early Christianity, believes even today that living people possess both soul and spirit, and that these two elements of the self split apart after death. A small religious sect in Iran and Iraq, the Mandaeans are also known as The Christians of St. John, as Nasoraeans, and as Sabians. Their belief system resembles a mixture of Christian Gnosticism and Zoroastrianism, but the actual origin of the Mandaean faith is not fully known. It has been theorized that they came from a mountainous region north of Babylonia and Persia, but more recent scholarship places their origin in Palestine or Syria. Much like the ancient Egyptians once did, Mandaean priests still celebrate a ritual called the masiqta three days after burial, the aim of which is to reunite the person's soul and spirit in the afterlife, thus creating a new "Lightworld" body for the deceased that will allow him to live among the blessed dead.

Manichaeism, a once vigorous but now-dead offshoot of early Christianity, also believed there were two distinct components to the human soul. The largest known example of Gnosticism, Manichaeism spread out over most of the known world in the 1st millennium AD, from Spain to China. But it disappeared from the West in the 10^th century, and from China in the 14^th century, and today it is extinct. Dualism was central to Manichaean teaching, as also was reincarnation. Salvation was effected via an inner knowledge, or "gnosis", although one's actual liberation was only thought to take place when a person with gnosis dies.

The nous, according to Manichaeism, was the half of the self that was immortal and invulnerable, while the psuche was the personal part of the self, which was extremely vulnerable and in immanent danger of being destroyed during the death transition. It was thought that a special emotional catharsis during life would unite the psuche with the nous, thereby saving it from destruction at death.

During the 10th to 15th centuries, yet another incarnation of gnostic Christianity arose -- Catharism. Occasionally called "The PPure Ones", their message of love, tolerance, freedom, and equality between men and women was very deep, exacting and hard to follow. This new 'heresy' was, once again, based on a mixture of Christianity, reincarnation, and the BSD. Like the Egyptians, the Chinese, and so many others, the Cathars also believed both that the universe was comprised of two opposite primary forces, and also that people possessed two entirely different spiritual components within themselves as well. Besides a physical body and a soul, the Cathars taught, everyone also possesses a spirit, which, they held, is always near God. Salvation in the Cathar religion meant the unification of one's soul and spirit, which would free the person from the need for further reincarnations. Salvation consisted of liberating the soul from the body prison, leaving the material world to come back to the Kingdom. But death alone was not the answer; this salvation was only available through a special baptism, which the Cathars believed to be the very same "Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit" mentioned by John the Baptist in the Bible. For the Cathars there was thought to be no ultimate judgement where God would decide if one's soul should be sent for eternity to Paradise or Hell. On the contrary, they believed a soul could be saved only if it regained the knowledge (gnosis) of its divine nature; and only the baptism founded by Christ would allow man to reach this knowledge. The Cathars said they'd inherited their special baptism, and the knowledge it provided, directly from the Apostles, who in turn had received it from Christ Himself. It was directly transmitted person-to-person by the 'laying on of hands'. To witness such a baptism, the legends declare, was a remarkable and breathtaking event. This baptism, the Consolamentum, was believed to produce a permanent union between the soul imprisoned in the body with its spirit that remained in Heaven. Without that baptism, the soul would just end up passing back into another physical body after death.

Unfortunately, in 1179 Pope Alexander III pronounced the Cathars to be anathema (in other words, burnable). What followed became Europe's first instance of genocide. The Cathars had been centered in Gascony and Provence in France, but since this 'heresy' was first discovered by the Catholic church in the county of Albi, the church referred to all the Cathars simply as "Albigenses", and the subsequent campaign to wipe them out has come to be known as the Albigensian Crusade. Not a war but a massacre, it began at Minerve in 1210 with the burning alive of 140 Cathars at a huge stake, 140 people who never raised a single sword to defend themselves. The Catholic Church continued this war, on and off, for many years, continuing to burn Cathars until 1321. To the student of the BSD, this ancient atrocity is particularly distressing; with the death of the last Cathar, a primary path to achieving the union of soul and spirit might well have vanished from the earth altogether. Did that direct line transmission of Jesus' own "Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit" come to an end in 15^th century France, or has some remnant of it survived, still being handed down from one generation to the next?

Albeit without any "Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit", the Binary Soul Doctrine was reintroduced yet again to mainstream Christian theology in the 1750's, when Emanuel Swedenborg founded the "New Church". Swedenborg taught that each person's spirit is composed of two distinct components that split apart from each other at death. After this division, they maintain, the soul's "inward element" goes on to experience an eternally unchanging afterlife in heaven or hell, while the "outer element" falls into a permanently dormant state, never to be seen, felt, or heard from again.

About a century later, the Jehovah's Witnesses emerged as yet another Christian denomination that distinguishes between the soul and spirit, believing that at death, the spirit returns to God, while the soul, or "personal self", entirely ceases to exist until it is recreated at Judgment Day.

Islam's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

Ancient Islam called these two souls the ruh and the nafs (notice the linguistic similarity to Israel's ruwach and nephesh). Like modern Judaism and Christianity, most people in Islam today also assume that these are synonyms, just two different terms for the same thing - a singular, non-binary human soul. But the Binary Soul Doctrine also has its share of supporters in Islam, who maintain that these terms originally referred to two very distinct elements within the human constitution. Like Israel's ruwach, the ruh, or 'soul', carried the life force, the free will, the rational intellect, and the ability to communicate. The ruh was thought to be essential for life; when it departed the body, the body became a corpse. And like Israel's nephesh, the nafs, the 'self' or 'ego', was associated with one's feelings, needs, desires, instincts, personality, and sense of identity. People, it was thought, are born without a nafs, which was thought to grow and develop as life progressed, in response to one's personal subjective experiences and choices in life. The nafs is often compared to a blank canvas given at the start of life, upon which one paints a picture of one's life, beautiful or ugly, depending on one's choices and environment. The nafs, then, seems to contain, or be molded into, a record of one's experiences in life, a record of one's memories. The nafs also contains one's moral sense; it distinguishes between right and wrong, it can be pleased or displeased with it owner, it can be self-accusing, and it can act as a watchdog over the person's behavior in life.

Thought of as an intertwined pair of opposites, the ruh and the nafs are said to naturally be engaged in a battle for the possession and control of their common child, the heart. Mohammed felt that the nafs is a person's greatest enemy. Islam teaches that one should surrender one's sense of personal self, or nafs, and that an objective, non-attached approach to life is needed to accomplish this. It is taught that the nafs is unruly, emotional, desirous, and animalistic, and must be conquered like an enemy by the ruh. These two are thought to be in a constant war in life; an equal balance between them is not thought to be possible. Either the ruh will control and dominate the nafs, or vice versa. Those who fight their own nafs, trying to control its egotism and passions, are said to be fighting the 'greater Jihad', or Holy War.

The ruh is believed to be an immortal soul that never dies, but at least some nafs, the scriptures declare, will taste death. Thus, it seems, these two elements may be able to divide apart from one another after death. When death of the nafs comes, the body returns to Earth and the ruh returns to Allah. But the nafs of those who sacrifice themselves for Allah, it is said, will never die.

Voodoo's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

Although the Caribbean religion known as Voodoo blends Christianity with traditional African religions, it still seems to display the ideas of early Egypt. Voodoo pictures the soul as being comprised of two distinct parts, the gros bon ange, or "big good angel, and the ti bon ange, or "little good angel". The ti bon ange is one's individual soul and contains all one's personal characteristics, personal experience, and personality. The gros bon ange, thought to enter the human body during conception, carries the spark of life, vitality, intelligence, and animating drive of the person. If it leaves the body, the body ceases functioning and dies, but if the ti bon ange leaves the body during life, the gros bon ange just becomes sluggish, and the person is now a living body without a subjective personality, a zombi, one of the walking dead.

When a person dies, both the gros bon ange and the ti bon ange continue to exist and function, but they divide apart from one another. A ritual known as "dessounin" is performed by the Voodoo priest to separate the gros bon ange from the body while keeping the ti bon ange with the corpse in the grave. Otherwise, it is thought, the ti bon ange might become a ghost that could roam and cause harm to the living. For a period of time after death, the ti bon ange is thought to be extremely vulnerable, but the gros bon ange is never vulnerable.

Other Tribal Versions of the Binary Soul Doctrine

The belief in a dividing binary-soul is also found in many primitive cultures across Eurasia.. The two souls of Inner Asia's Tunguz tribe is a typical example, in which the beye soul is free and independent after death, returning to heaven to wait until it reincarnates again, while the hanan, or shadow soul, becomes eternally imprisoned in an dark netherworld. The Khanty and Mansi of Siberia also believe in a binary soul system. One soul, the 'lili', is associated with the breath, the head, and the handling of raw intellectual data, while the 'is', or shadow soul, is related to a person's emotions, and is particularly active during sleep. Like the Egyptian ba, the symbol for the breath soul is a bird, while the shadow soul is usually depicted as having the form of a human, just as did the Egyptian ka. The lili soul is thought to be reincarnated in one's own kin after death, while the is soul would either depart for a realm of the dead, or remain behind on earth as a shadowy ghost. This binary conception of the self is apparently just part of a wider dualistic philosophy, since the social organization of the Khanty and Mansi is also based on a dual moiety system - half the society is designated mos, the other half, por. And the Saami, a subpolar people whose descendants now live in Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia, also subscribed to a Binary Soul Doctrine prior to their introduction to Christianity. Besides the Corporeal Soul, which could not leave the body without causing the person's death, everyone also had a Free Soul, which could manifest outside the body and was thought of as the person's double. It was thought possible for malicious beings to capture a person's free soul, which would cause sickness and death. If caught in time, however, the tribe's shaman could undertake a spiritual journey into the realm of the dead to negotiate for the release of the afflicted persons' Free Soul.

Many Australian aboriginal tribes still believe that people possess two souls which divide apart at death. The true self, which pre-exists the person's birth, comes from a timeless, primordial, heavenly realm called alcheringa, or "The Dreaming", and returns there after death.

"Australian aborigines distinguish between our everyday experience and what they call the dreaming. The dreaming is another level of experience, in which they participate in the life of their ancestors, and indeed the creation of the world, in I suppose we might call it a trancelike state, but that doesn't quite do it, because even in the midst of their ordinary life, half of their mind, you might say, is still on or in this dreaming state. [...] I was in Australia, basically giving a series of lectures at all the universities there, but using my spare time to come in touch with the aborigines, and so I sought out at every university the anthropologists who introduced me and put me in touch with them. And I did not in that entire swing meet an anthropologist who was not convinced that the aborigines had telepathic powers. They simply told me story after story, when they would be with them, and suddenly one of the persons would say, "I must go back to the tribe; so and so has died." - Huston Smith, Ph.D.⁽¹⁷⁾

The other soul, meanwhile, separates from that self after death, remaining behind on earth to take up residence in another human body. Mirroring this belief in double souls, the practice of double funerals are very common in Australia, just as they once were all throughout the ancient Middle East.. Most religious efforts of the Australian aborigines revolve around trying to re-establish contact with and re-enter the sacred "Dream Time".

Situated in Australia's Northern Territory, the Walbiri (or Warlpiri) tribe held to a textbook example of the Binary Soul Doctrine :

"Although Walbiri notions of the transmigration of Dreaming or spirit essences implied a kind of reincarnation after death, the process was wholly impersonal. People did not believe that the human person survived the destruction of the body unchanged. Rather, they took death to mark the end of the previously coherent personality of the individual, which then disintegrated into its spiritual components. The Dreaming elements returned to their spirit homes, and the matrispirit [the second soul] dissipated completely. In consequence, the Walbiri did not regard with equanimity the inevitability of their own or their relatives' deaths. There was instead an elaborate complex of mortuary behavior...."⁽¹⁸⁾

The belief in a binary soul is also a common feature of African religion. Their two souls often consist of one part which lives forever, and a 'shadow' which only lives for an uncertain length of time after death, hovering around the mortal remains. The ancient culture known as Kush, located in what is now the land of Ethiopia, also believed in the ba and ka souls of Egypt, and also preserved the bodies of their leaders in pyramidal tombs, believing this necessary to insure the survival of the ka. Africa's present-day Mossi tribe also believe that human beings have one masculine and one feminine soul, and that death divides these two apart. Similarly, Africa's Samo tribe call their two souls the ri and the mere; the ri soul contains the person's thought and life force, reincarnating after death, while the mere soul, thought of as a perfect double of the person, becomes permanently trapped in a netherworld when it experiences a second death sometime after leaving the body. And Africa's Ba-Huana tribe also credits human beings with two souls -- bun and doshi. The bun is the soul or self, and survives death unharmed, while the doshi is a shadowy second self, or 'double', that tends to linger around on earth after death, haunting its enemies and persecuting its own relations if a proper burial is not made.

The Binary Soul Doctrine also used to be very widespread in the Americas; tribes from South America to Alaska believed in a Corporeal Soul which gave life, consciousness, and the faculty of movement, and a Free Soul that would find itself trapped in some realm of the dead after death. The Corporal Soul provided the life force, and could not exit the body without resulting in the death of the individual. The Free Soul, on the other hand, often left the body during life, such as during dreams, trances, and mystical experiences. The Inuit (Eskimo) of Canada and Greenland believed in two souls; the inua held the life force and reincarnated into a new body after death, while the tarnneg, or double of the person, became a permanent occupant of the realm of the dead . North America's Dakota Tribe called their two surviving souls the nagi and the niya. The nagi soul held the power of movement and independent free will, and after death, it could either join the world of the spirits, or be forced to wander aimlessly. The niya soul, thought to contain one's conscience and memory, helped the person to relate to and interact with others. After death, the niya was thought to testify against the other soul in a great Judgment after death, much like Persia's daena and Egypt's ka. And deep in the rainforests of the northwest Amazon, the Maku tribe still subscribes to the Binary Soul Doctrine. They believe that the whole world is composed of two equal-but-opposite fundamental forces -- the hot force and the cold force -- which, like the Chinese Yin and Yang, must always be kept balanced, or else health and prosperity will suffer. These hot and cool forces are also the basic components of human beings; we all possess one hot soul, or baktup, the Maku declare, and one cold soul, or bowugn. When we die, these two divide apart; the bakup soul becomes something akin to a ghost, hanging around and frightening people, while the bowugn soul shrivels up into a little ball and flies away to heaven.

Buddhism's Version of the Binary Soul Doctrine

Known today as the 'Pli cult', the pre-Buddhist religion of Southeast Asia also recognized the existence of multiple souls, believing that they could and often did separate apart from one another, a tragedy which resulted in sickness or death. This belief system emphasized the need to maintain the unity of those souls, thereby preserving the integrity of the person they comprised. This belief system paved the way for Southeast Asia's acceptance of Buddhism, which also assumed that the personal self was comprised of a number of distinct elements. But in sharp contrast to Thailand's early Pli religion, Buddhism insisted that the eventual disunion of these elements was inevitable and could not be prevented forever.

Buddhism teaches reincarnation, but denies the existence of the soul, leaving one wondering what is being reborn. "Is it me or isn't it?", its students ask. "Is death total nonexistence, or do I survive in some sense? Most importantly - do I survive as 'me'?" Buddhism maintains that the thing being reborn from one life to the next is "not the same, not different", which is precisely what the ancient Binary Soul Doctrine maintained; if a person survives death in a divided state, all his nonphysical components would still exist, but the 'self' their union had formed would no longer exist, at least not in any functional sense. What would remain after death would indeed be "not the same, not different".

It is often stated that Buddhism denies the existence of any permanent soul, but the truth of the matter is that Buddhism's conception of the self is not all that different from the Binary Soul Doctrine. In the Dhammapada, Buddha plainly speaks of the existence of two selves within each human being, one which makes the transition from one life to the next, while the other does not. Buddhist teachers often liken rebirth to a pure and unqualified consciousness being passed from one life to the next like a flame being passed from one candle to another, which is is precisely what the Binary Soul Doctrine suggests - that the conscious spirit, stripped of the unconscious with all its memories and feelings, is what reincarnates, nothing but an eternally open, conscious, living eye stripped of everything but awareness itself. This spark of consciousness is considered permanent and unending in Buddhism; the Dalai Lama said " Even in Nirvana, the continuum of consciousness goes on". The Mahayana school of Buddhism also teaches that another component exists as well, a subtle mind (alayavijnana) which receives and stores one's impressions of the past (memory and reactions to the past), from which proceeds one's subjective experience of existence. This element is virtually identical to the unconscious soul of the Binary Soul Doctrine.

Traditional Buddhism recognizes five distinct constituents, or skandhas, which together make up a person - form, feelings, perceptions, volition, and consciousness. None of those pieces, by itself, is anything we can recognize as the 'self', which leads Buddhists to conclude that there isn't any self at all, only all these little pieces. But these five skandhas, as it turns out, match up perfectly with the ancient world's three-part model of a human being; Buddhism's form, feelings, and perception are all functions of the unconscious soul, while volition and consciousness are functions of the conscious spirit. When they are all united together, these five components give the illusion of the existence of a self, but that's all it is, Buddhist thought insists, just an illusion. The ancient Binary Soul Doctrine agrees that the self, or ego, is the product of the interplay of conscious spirit and unconscious soul, and when separated, they have no fruit. Separated, there is no sense of self, no functional self at all. But the cultures of the ancient world who subscribed to the Binary Soul Doctrine did not see this as a denial of the reality of the self; they realized that the forest and the trees both exist. Just because a whole was made up of parts did not refute the reality and existence of that whole.

Buddhism teaches, just as the Binary Soul Doctrine once did, that the multiple components of the self divide apart from each other at death. The major difference between the two views is that Buddhism insists that these components can never recombine again to reconstitute that self.

Consciousness alone, but no self, is transmitted from life to life, Buddhism teaches. Of course, Buddhism does acknowledge that, in addition to consciousness, memories of past lives are obviously also transmitted, since Buddha Himself was reported to have recalled his own past lives. Such memories, however, would indicate that there is "something more" than pure unqualified consciousness being transmitted - memory is also making the jump. And with the transfer of memory, all sorts of subjective personal material - feelings, emotions, likes and dislikes - is making the jump as well. Both consciousness and memory, it seems, are transferred from one body to another during rebirth, but do so in a divided state that apparently shatters, or at least temporarily dismantles, the self-aware ego between one life and the next. Yet so long as all the original pieces still exist, that self from an earlier lifetime could conceivably be reassembled, made to exist again, simply by re-combining its pieces back together. Buddhist doctrine insists that no ego ever survives death, but ancient Egypt would have argued that the self does survive, albeit in a temporarily disassembled state. If the pieces that made up the self were never reconnected after death, then Buddhist doctrine would be right - there would indeed be no permanent self, no eternal soul.

But if it remains possible for them to reunite...?

Reincarnation and the Binary Soul Doctrine

Many of the cultures around the world that subscribed to the Binary Soul Doctrine were convinced that the conscious or objective half of the soul would reincarnate again after death. Reincarnation also played a part in Egypt's belief system. Pythagorus, who is credited with introducing the concept of reincarnation into Greek thought, did so after studying it in Egypt, according to the Greek historian Herodotus (5th century BC). The 'ka-names' of three Egyptian Pharaohs also reflect a belief in rebirth : the ka-name of Amonemhat I was "He who repeats births," the ka-name of Senusert I meant "He whose births live," and the ka-name of Setekhy I was "Repeater of births." Pharaohs sometimes claimed to have more than one ka, claiming, in effect, to possess multiple selves, identities, personalities, and so on; this suggests that these ancient Pharaohs claimed, just as 'holy men' of the East do today, that they remembered their past lives and identities.

In what some believe to be the oldest Egyptian scripture dealing with the afterdeath realm, The Book of The Two Ways, the deceased comes to a fork in the road that presents two different paths. Both paths, the text declares, ultimately lead to the same destination - the abode of the gods - but each takes a different route and involves different experiences along the way. The longer path that passed over land, "The Cyclic Route of Osiris", took far more time, involving many cycles, or incarnations, while the shorter path called 'The Route of Horus' required one to pass through fire,⁽¹⁹⁾

but was a far more direct passage to 'life with the gods'.

Some elements of the "Opening of the Mouth" funerary prayer in the Egyptian Book of the Dead are, curiously, also suggestive of reincarnation. The priest performing the ritual plays the role of Horus, while the deceased is given the role of Osiris, Horus' father and predecessor. In this ritual, the priest addresses the deceased, saying "I have come to embrace thee, I am thy son Horus", and thereupon 'opens' the mouth and eyes of the deceased. After opening the mouth and eyes of the deceased, the priest playing Horus says "I have established for you your two jaw-bones in your face which was divided into two parts."⁽²⁰⁾

Now, this entire scene would make a lot more sense if it were a person trying to reawaken his own past-life self. One's past-life 'face', or subjective self identity, would indeed have been "divided into two parts" when the ba and ka split off from one another. If Osiris represented one's previous generation or incarnation, and Horus represented the person's current incarnation, the father/son relationship between Osiris and Horus in this ritual would be meaningful, especially if the current incarnation, Horus, was trying to reawaken, or bring back to life, his own previous life self, 'opening the eyes and mouth' of his own dead predecessor-self.

In the original legend of the death and resurrection of Osiris, after the divided parts of his being had been gathered back together and reconstructed, one more task still needed to be accomplished before Osiris was able to return to conscious life - Osiris' son Horus had to pluck an eye from his own face and give it to Osiris to eat. The return of Osiris to life, then, is twice associated with his son Horus - in the original legend, Horus aids his father by giving him his own eye to consume, and in the funerary rituals, Horus is specifically the one who personally 'opens the eyes and mouth' of his father, and he accomplishes this by 'embracing' Osiris in some fashion. If Horus originally represented the reincarnated 'next generation' of the same person, then the idea of Horus giving one of his eyes to his father Osiris to eat would be a simple and elegant metaphor for the reincarnated present self giving part of his conscious awareness to his past-life self, thus allowing his present-life self to share consciousness with, or 'embrace' his past-life self, integrating the two together just as the mind integrates the vision of the two eyes in the head into a single visual image.

But if this ritual was originally meant to be used to reawaken one's past life memories, how did it end up being used as a funerary prayer? Just how old is this ritual? No one knows. When this ritual first appears in the archaeological record, it was, even then, an extremely ancient artifact from a much earlier period.

In this first chapter, we have seen that dozens of cultures all over the globe, including virtually all the great civilizations of the ancient world, once believed in the Binary Soul Doctrine. However, as amazing and unexpected as such a discovery might seem, it would remain little more than a curious coincidence if not for the fact that modern science seems to be arriving at many of those same conclusions all over again. Over the last century, science has not only reconfirmed mankind's ancient intuition that our mental beings come ready made with a fundamental binary structure, but is even describing the mind's two components the same way the ancients did, with identical functions and characteristics. What's more, the ancient teachings about these two souls dividing apart after death also finds some support from modern science. While our bodies are alive and healthy, the two communicate so intimately with one another they seem to form an indivisible singularity, but if the tiny piece of flesh uniting them, the corpus callosum, is severed or taken away, these two minds then function completely independently of one another -- just as the ancients insisted they did at death, when the flesh is taken away altogether. As we explore this modern re-emergence of the BSD in the next chapter, we will see how today's scientific findings substantiate, clarify, and expand upon the mysterious reports of the ancients, even reconciling reports long thought to be mutually exclusive. Modern science, as it turns out, is the very lens needed to bring those reports into sharp focus, showing their message to be just as modern, relevant, and urgent today as it was thousands of years ago.

1. Four of these, the sekhem, or 'image', the khaibit, or 'shadow', the ren, or 'name', and the ab, or 'heart' were all closely related to the ka, and seem to have perhaps simply been aspects, characteristics, or features of the ka.

2.

3. Intriguingly, the exact same word, 'ka', is also the ancient Hindu name for the highest of all gods. This Hindu word 'ka' translates as 'who', another word which, like the Egyptian ka, also revolves around the question of personal identity.

4. The actual Egyptian title of this work is Per Em Hru, which, according to Ramona Louise Wheeler, author of Walk Like an Egyptian, is more properly translated Instructions On How To Emerge Awake.

5. In ancient Mexico, where the world's other great pyramids were built, their funerary ceremonies also included a ritual called the "Opening of the Mouth", which is thought to have also been intended to insure a positive afterlife for the deceased.

6. For more on the Toltec version of the BSD, see Chapter 14

7. Chopra, Deepak, 1999. How To Know God, p. 276.

8. Max Freedom Long, The Secret Science Behind Miracles, p. 81.

9. Max Freedom Long, Growing Into Light, p. 40.

10. Mystical Judaism also holds that the soul also has an all-important meeting with a female figure shortly after death -- the Shekhinah.

11. For two in-depth discussions on the presence of the Binary Soul Doctrine in the original theology of the Christian church, see my 1997 book The Division of Consciousness; see also Eugene Poliakov's Whereunto Shall I Liken This Generation? (1995)

12. Henry R. Percival, ed., The Seven Ecumenical Councils of the Undivided Church, Vol XIV of Nicene and Post Nicene Fathers, snd series, edd. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, (repr. Edinburgh: T&T Clark; Grand Rapids MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1988.

13. 11^th Canon, 4^th Ecumenical Council

14. Some of these lost gospels may date all the way back to the first century. Indeed, scholarly opinion has it that the Gospel of Thomas may even be older than some of the Biblical gospels; the Jesus Seminar, for example, dated it to 50 - 60 AD. All we know for sure, though, is that it was written sometime between the mid 1^st and 2^nd centuries.

15. Jean-Yves Leloup, The Gospel of Mary Magdalene, p. 31.

16. This occurred only a few brief years after the church found itself operating under the 'benevolent' supervision of the state. When the Roman Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, he began giving the church orders, which, being grateful simply for no longer being the official enemy of the state, it followed without too much resistence. Constantine's involvement with the church came just after he consolidated his power within the Roman Empire. And in much the same way that he overcame his political opposition to emerge as the single authority of an undivided Empire, so too he then wished to overcome the apparent divisions within the church. But the result of his meddling, critics have maintained, was the complete jettisoning of an authentic wing of Jesus' teachings, which had existed from the very earliest days the gospel was preached..

17. In an interview with Jeffrey Mishlove on the TV show Thinking Allowed.

18. M. J. Meggitt, "Walbiri Religion", The Encyclopedia of Religion.

19. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain.", Jung, "The Development of Personality", Collected Works, paragraph 331.

20. Budge, The Egyptian Book of the Dead, pp. 266- 269.