SOA not at top of zone

[Christine.Tran at east.sun.com]

Recently Mark Andrews said:

                  SOA stands for Start Of Authority.  All RRs at or below the
                  SOA belong to the zone, until a new SOA is reached.  This
                  includes NS records.

Does this mean I can have more than one SOA per zone file? That part about "until a new SOA is reached" confuses me a little because he also said:

                  All zones contain
                  a SOA record and a NS RRset at the top of a zone.

Well, I made some fake subdomains, each with one A record, and I threw it all in one zone file.  For each I wrote an SOA and NS RR set, and I used FQDN dotted instead of $ORIGIN.  My named.conf defines each zone, but uses the same file.  Now my named complains that SOA is not at zone top, data outside of zone are being ignored.  Everything resolves, but debug output is messy.  Is this not kosher??
QCT