Manichaeism

Manichaean teaching is organised with unusual clarity, and Mani intended it to be. He held that earlier revelations had failed because their founders wrote nothing down, so he composed his own scriptures, in his own hand, and had them illustrated.

The framework is two principles and three moments. The two principles are Light and Darkness, co-eternal and utterly distinct, neither derived from the other. This is a full dualism, not the qualified kind in which evil is a privation or a permitted test; matter is not neutral and darkness is not the absence of anything.

The three moments are past, present and future. In the past, the two realms are separate, Light in the north and Darkness in the south, each complete in itself. Darkness, becoming aware of the Light, attacks it. In the present, the Father of Greatness responds through a series of emanations, and in the course of the war particles of Light are swallowed by Darkness and mixed into it. The material cosmos is then constructed, by the Living Spirit, out of the defeated powers of Darkness, as a machine for extracting the trapped Light: the sun and moon are vessels, the waxing and waning of the moon is the light being ferried upward, and the Milky Way is part of the route. Human beings were produced by the powers of Darkness precisely in order to keep Light imprisoned in bodies and to propagate that imprisonment through reproduction. In the future, the extraction completes, the cosmos burns, Darkness is sealed away permanently, and the separation of the beginning is restored.

Salvation in this scheme is metallurgical rather than judicial. Nothing is forgiven; something is refined out. The saving knowledge is the recognition by the individual of which part of himself is Light.

Mani presented himself as the seal of a sequence of messengers that included the Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus, each sent to a particular region and each of whose teaching had subsequently been corrupted. This was a deliberate design for a universal religion, and it is why the same system could be presented in Christian terms in the Roman Empire, in Zoroastrian terms in Iran and in Buddhist terms in China without the core being changed.

The extraction of Light imposed an extremely demanding discipline, and Manichaeism solved the problem by dividing its membership in two.

The Elect kept the full rule. They took the three seals (of the mouth, governing speech and diet; of the hands, governing action; and of the breast, governing sexual desire), and the effect was near-total renunciation. They ate no meat, drank no wine, owned almost nothing, did not marry or reproduce, and did not farm or harvest, because cutting a plant injured the Light within it. They travelled, taught, and copied books. Their central function was ritual: eating a vegetarian meal, prepared for them by others, in which the digestive process of a purified body released the Light bound in the food and returned it upward. The Elect were, in a precise sense, the apparatus of salvation.

The Hearers supported them. They worked, married, held property and ate ordinary food, and they were bound by a much lighter rule, including regular fasting, almsgiving, prayer and honesty. Their principal religious act was providing food to the Elect, which transferred merit and placed them in line for rebirth as one of the Elect in a future life. Manichaeism accepted transmigration, which supplied the mechanism by which the Hearer's slower path could eventually converge with the faster one.

Augustine was a Hearer for around nine years before his conversion to Catholic Christianity, and his later anti-Manichaean writings are among the fullest accounts of the religion by anyone who had been inside it. They are also polemical, and they were long the main source available, which distorted the picture until the primary texts began to be recovered.

The liturgical year centred on the Bema, a spring festival commemorating Mani's death, at which an empty raised seat represented his continuing presence as teacher, and which included communal confession. Confession was frequent and formalised, on the reasoning that unavoidable daily harm to the Light required regular acknowledgement.

The system had an internal difficulty its opponents pressed hard. If reproduction imprisons Light, a religion of the Elect alone cannot continue, and Manichaeism depended structurally on a laity doing what its own theology described as harmful. Augustine made much of this, and it is a genuine tension rather than a slander.

Mani was born about 216 CE near the Sasanian capital in Mesopotamia, into a Jewish-Christian baptising community from which he separated after visions he attributed to a heavenly twin. He preached in Iran and travelled to India, and for a time enjoyed the protection of the Sasanian king Shapur I. Under a later king the Zoroastrian priesthood turned against him, and he died in prison around 274 to 277.

The religion then spread with remarkable speed in both directions. Westward it reached Egypt, North Africa, Italy and Spain, and Roman authorities from Diocletian onward legislated against it as a Persian import; Christian emperors continued the suppression, and in the Latin West it was effectively gone by the sixth century. Eastward it travelled the Silk Road into Central Asia, where it found its one moment of state establishment: the Uyghur Khaganate adopted it as the official religion after the conversion of its ruler in 762, and it remained so until the khaganate fell in 840.

In China it arrived in the seventh century and was tolerated, then proscribed in the ninth-century suppression of foreign religions, after which it survived in the south by assimilation. Communities persisted in Fujian, where Mani was assimilated to a Buddha of Light, and the shrine at Cao'an, with a stone image dated to the fourteenth century, is the only Manichaean building still standing. Whether an unbroken community survived there into modern times is debated; what is not in doubt is that Manichaean texts, images and vocabulary persisted in the region long after the religion was supposed to have disappeared, and Chinese scholars continue to identify material there.

For centuries the religion was known almost entirely through its enemies: Augustine in Latin, Ephrem in Syriac, Muslim and Zoroastrian polemicists in the east. That changed with three discoveries. Manuscript fragments in Iranian and Turkic languages were excavated at Turfan in Chinese Central Asia from 1902. Coptic Manichaean codices, including the Kephalaia, the Psalm-Book and Mani's own letters, were bought at Medinet Madi in Egypt in 1929, though part of that collection was lost in Berlin during the Second World War. Greek fragments of a Cologne Mani Codex, a miniature parchment book describing Mani's early life, were identified in the 1960s. Between them these recovered the religion in its own words, and the modern account of Manichaeism is substantially a twentieth-century reconstruction.

No adherents remain.