Manichaeism

Manichaeism. Religion founded by Mani in 3rd-cent. Iran and later very widely established.

Mani was born in 216 near Seleucia-Ktesiphon, the Iranian capital. At the age of 12 he had his first vision of his heavenly twin (identified later with the Paraclete), who instructed him. Thereafter he disputed with the community, and after a second vision, calling him to be an ‘apostle’, he separated from them, with his father and two disciples, sometime after the age of 25. Mani's later life is not well known. After preaching in India he returned to Iran c.242 where his patron was the new Sassanid ruler Shapur I. His religion prospered until the accession of Bahram I (274–7), who at the instigation of Kartir imprisoned and executed him in 276.

Although suppressed in Persia, Manichaeism spread west and east. In central Asia it had more lasting success, even being made the state religion of the Turkish Uigur Empire in 762. It also reached China in 694 where, known as the ‘religion of light’, it seems to have persisted, in spite of official opposition at various periods, almost down to modern times.

Mani's teaching was fundamentally gnostic and dualistic, positing an opposition between God and matter. There was an elaborate cosmological myth: this included the defeat of a primal man by the powers of darkness, who devoured and thus imprisoned particles of light. The cosmic process of salvation goes on as the light is delivered back to its original state. Saving knowledge of this process comes through ‘apostles of light’, among whom Mani, a self-conscious syncretist, included various biblical figures, Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. He himself was the final one.

The Manichaean ‘church’ was divided into the ‘elect’ (or ‘righteous’) and ‘auditors’ (‘hearers’). The burden of Manichaean ethics, to do nothing to impede the reassembly of particles of light, was on the elect. Obviously the elect, not even able to harvest their own vegetables, could only survive with the support of the auditors. These could apparently lead quite unrestricted lives. The calendar contained one major festival, the Bema feast on the anniversary of Mani's ‘passion’. Fasting was enjoined on two days each week, plus a whole month before the Bema feast.