The Templars & the Binary Soul Doctrine

D I V I S I O N T H E O R Y
THE TEMPLARS & THE BSD

Although the Orthodox Church succeeded in stifling the public activities of the Gnostic Church, it was never able to completely shut it down or totally eliminate its teachings about humanity's binary soul. By receding into the shadowy fringes of Western culture, the BSD was able to survive the world's transition into Christianity. In much the same way that the Mesopotamians believed in two souls (the napistu and the zaqiqu) two thousand years before Christ, and the Canaanites believed in two souls (the nps and the th) one thousand years before Christ, so too the Jews, Manichaeans, Mandaeans, Muslims, Cathars, and Templars continued to do so long after Christ as well.

Within the West, however, the BSD had a much harder time surviving. Being outlawed by the Orthodox Church, it had to rely on secrecy to make sure its teachings continued to be passed down from generation to generation. Certain idiosyncracies of the legendary Christian order of the Knights Templar (1118 -1314 AD) suggest they were intimately involved in that mission. The seal of the Templars, for example, depicted two knights riding

together on a single horse. Like the enigmatic Templars themselves, this odd symbol has remained an inscrutable mystery for hundreds of years, and dozens of different theories about its meaning have been advanced. The orthodox explanation was that it symbolized the Templars' poverty, but since their order was one of the richest and most influential institutions in Europe, this assertion would appear a little preposterous. The binary soul doctrine, on the other hand, seems to suggest a far more reasonable explanation. The Templars, of course, were Christians, and would have looked to their religion's rich heritage for inspiration in designing all their symbols and logos. Their unique seal, as it turns out, seems powerfully reminiscent of a key passage in one of Christianity's earliest gospels:

Jesus said, "It is impossible for a man to mount two horses or to stretch two bows.
And it is impossible for a servant to serve two masters."
- The Gospel of Thomas 47

The Templar's seal almost seems to have been designed as a specific response to this passage in Thomas. If the BSD's problem can be symbolized by one man's inability to ride two horses, its solution can be symbolized by two mens' ability to ride one horse. The Templar seal is yet another elegant symbol of the soul and spirit uniting together within a person . When the two halves of our being are at odds with one another, each straining in different directions like two separate horses, the person trying to ride them is unable to get anywhere. But if both halves of a person's being are united, one becomes incredibly powerful and successful, no longer wasting his energies fighting against himself. The Templars, of course, were known for just that -- becoming extraordinarily powerful and successful in a very short period of time.

But did they know of the Gospel of Thomas? History certainly suggests that the Templars discovered something extraordinary while fighting the Crusades in Jerusalem, something which led them to adopt unorthodox religious practices and teachings that eventually attracted charges of heresy against them. While the recovery of the Gospel of Thomas in 1945 was hailed as an historic discovery of a scripture that had been lost for ages, it would not have been outside the realm of possibility for the Templars to have fallen across a copy during their seventy-year occupation of ancient Judea. When the Roman authorities originally outlawed the Gospel of Thomas in the 4th century, they held strict control over the Holy Land, but with the rise of Islam a mere two centuries later, that control quickly vanished. By the time the Crusaders retook Jerusalem, those censorship policies had long remained uninforced in Palestine, and bootleg copies of Thomas' forbidden gospel may well have been available. In any event, the similarity between the Templars' Christian logo depicting two men riding a single horse and the Gnostic Christian injunction that one man should not try to ride two horses seems unlikely to be a complete coincidence.

In much the same way, the Templar's mysterious battle flag, known as the Beauseant, also seems related to the binary soul doctrine. Consisting of two equal but opposite vertical blocks, a black one atop a white one, this flag also suggests that the Templars' secret teachings revolved around the integration or unification of two

equal-but-opposite elements. It seems odd, however, for a Christian order to adopt a flag which raises black above white. Black is usually equated with evil and white with good, just as an upper position represents preference or dominance while the lower suggests inferiority and subservience. And as if that wasn't strange enough, these black and white fields are of equal shape and volume, suggesting that the flag designer viewed them as equal opposites. This all seems inconsistent with the views of Orthodox Christianity, which holds good to be superior to evil. But if these black and white fields instead represent the two halves of the human psyche, the Templars' flag makes perfect sense. According to the binary soul doctrine, while the two halves of our being are equal opposites, the unconscious, or "black" half must be "raised up" within each of us for our spiritual salvation to begin.

The Templars were also famous for their veneration of the Virgin Mary, but curiously depicted her with black images, seeming to prefer black over the more traditional white in that case as well. Hundreds of these Templar-era Black Madonnas still exist in Europe, mostly in France. While the majority are found in churches and sanctuaries, a few Black Virgins have been moved to museums. Most were sculpted out of wood, while a few are paintings and several others are frescoes. These black images cannot help but remind the BSD student of similar religious images of the Egyptian ka, which were also often rendered in black, almost as if they were negatives or reverse images.

Why would the Templars redesign religious imagery in black that had previously been consistently portrayed in white? Probably for the same reason they raised black above white in their battle flag. Two chief symbols of the unconscious soul, of course, are femininity and the color black. Taken together, the symbolism of their seal, their flag, and their penchant for Black Madonnas suggest a strong connection to the BSD. Like the Gnostics, the Templars seem to have also understood that achieving the Christian salvation required worshiping (that is, recognizing and embracing) the dark or �invisible' contents of the feminine unconscious. While both our halves must be united and balanced, the way to accomplish this is to place the black above the white. Since humanity's whole spiritual problem has always been one of repressing, denying, and rejecting the unconscious, balance can only be restored by compensating for our present imbalance. Just as the ancient Egyptians believed that Osiris, as great as he was held to be, could only be saved in his time of need by his female counterpart Isis, so too did these Templars apparently believe that the female side of our beings was the half that possessed the power to restore our equilibrium and wholeness, healing our inner divisions and "making the two one." As if to confirm this, the Templars' chosen name for their flag, the French term Beaus�ant, translates directly into English as "beautiful bottom" or "beautiful buttocks". While this translation has been odd enough to keep most would-be interpreters busy searching for alternate translations, it makes perfect sense to the student of the binary soul doctrine, which insists that the path to spiritual success begins via deep soul-searching, exploring one's own backside, searching the darkest, bottommost levels of our own psyches. And just like the ancient Gnostics, the Templars seem to have believed that what awaits us in that dark hemisphere possesses surpassing beauty.

The Freemasons, another mysterious group rumored to have descended from the Templars, tellingly uses the compass and square for their own logo. Since a compass draws circles, a female symbol, and a square draws squares, a male symbol, this choice of emblem again seems to reflect a symbolic union of equal-but-opposite masculine and feminine forces, suggesting that it too descends from the ancient world's binary soul doctrine.

Masonic symbolism also places a similarly dualistic emphasis on the two large cast-bronze pillars that once stood on either side of the entrance to the Temple in Jerusalem, obscurely teaching that when these two pillars are conjoined, they would create a desirable state of stability and endurance. They are mysteriously said to be the two pillars of the universe, which, when united together, support and sustain it. Tradition reports that in Solomon's original Temple, one of these pillars was black and the other was white; and together they somehow explained all the mysteries of the universe. Even though they were identical in every other respect, they were not only given different coloring, but were actually given separate names as well, obviously to distinguish between them and emphasize their �separate-but-equal' status.