Official Flag and Seal of the AGCA Vicariate

original AGCA symbol

revised AGCA symbol designed by Brother Brian James

Above is an enlarged image of the flag and seal of the AGCA's Vicar, Br. Matthew, used in official activities and correspondence on behalf of the AGCA Vicariate. This page will provide you with a brief explanation of the symbolism at work in the design. Questions or comments may be directed to the AGCA Central Office. We would like to thank Sister Maria for our original flag design and Brother Brian James for our revised version.

The flag is composed of two main visual elements against a white field. The first is a modified version of the Templar cross. The Knights Templar were a religious-chivalric order that became extremely influential in France until their eventual suppression under the leadership of the French monarchy, with the cooperation of the Christian ecclesiastical establishment, at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Various excuses were invented for the violent destruction of the Templars, and while the genuine reasons for the suppression may never be fully known, it is likely that it was due in part to the French monarchy's desire to gain access to the Templar's vast financial and land resources throughout Europe and the near east. However, the Templars are known to have had close associations with the Cathari, the quasi-Gnostic religious group of Central Europe and southern France that had been suppressed in the bloody "Albigensian Crusade" of the thirteenth century (the Cathari Martyrs are venerated as the chief patrons of the AGCA). Thus, our use of the Templar cross pays homage to those people throughout history who have sought liberation from the imprisonment of ecclesiastical domination of all sorts.

Surrounding the Templar cross is a black and white serpent forming a circle by consuming its own tail. In Gnosticism, this emblem is a central sacred symbol known as the Ouroboros (literally "tail-devourer" or "one that consumes its own tail"). The eternal life that the Ouroboros ("tail-devourer") gains by constantly consuming its own tail is a kind of bittersweet meditation on human life, reflecting hope in the immortal existence of the spirit while simultaneously referring to the cycles of birth, death, pain, and loss that form the crux of the physical life in which the spirit finds itself. The black and white of the serpent represent the wholeness of spiritual experienc or gnosis: light and dark, male and female, Christ and Sophia, subsuming all dualities into itself and then transcending them. This image is an inverted or reverse Ouroboros, meaning that its head faces the right and implies a clockwise motion, rather than the more common implied-counterclockwise Ouroboros such as you see on our front welcome page. We chose an inverted or reverse Ouroboros to represent symbolically once more the importance of both the right and left hand paths of spirituality, and the complementary relationship between Christ and Sophia in our Gnostic faith.

The placement of the Ouroboros and Templar cross in the flag also forms a flower shape from the white background field. The flower represents the blossoming of the human spirit through gnosis and spiritual liberation. The juxtaposition of red and white colors has been a traditional symbol of the juxtaposition of human and divine or material or spiritual, both within Christ and within each of us, as we move through our lives as both material and spiritual entities.

Placed over the center of the flag are the initials of our Church family.

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