Manichaeism

Mani was born in 216 in Babylonia, in the heart of what is now Iraq, then still part of the Parthian Empire. His father joined a baptist community known to scholars as the Elchasaites, Jewish-Christian ascetics who practised frequent ritual washing, and Mani grew up among them. According to the Cologne Mani Codex, a tiny Greek parchment book of his life, he received revelations from a heavenly being he called his Twin at the age of twelve and again at twenty-four. In 240 he broke with the baptists and began to preach.

Mani travelled to north-western India and returned to the new Sasanian Persian Empire, where King Shapur I received him and allowed him to teach. For Shapur he wrote the Shabuhragan, a summary of his doctrine in Middle Persian. Mani sent missionaries east and west and wrote a set of scriptures himself, including a Living Gospel and a Picture Book that illustrated his teaching, because he believed earlier religions had decayed when their founders left no writings.

Mani understood himself as the final messenger in a series sent by God: the Buddha in India, Zoroaster in Persia, Jesus in the West, and now himself, the Paraclete or Helper promised by Jesus, for the whole world. His good fortune ended under King Bahram I. Opposed by the powerful Zoroastrian priest Kerdir, Mani was condemned and died in prison at Gundeshapur in 274 or 277; the date is debated. His followers remembered his death as a crucifixion, a passion like that of Jesus.

At the centre of Mani’s teaching were “the two principles and the three times”. In the beginning, Light and Darkness existed separately, two eternal realms. Light was ruled by the Father of Greatness, Darkness by the Prince of Darkness. In the middle time, the present, Darkness attacked Light and swallowed part of it. In the final time, Light will be fully freed and the two separated again, never to mix.

Mani told this story in a vivid mythology. The Father called forth divine beings to resist the attack. The Primal Man went out to fight and was defeated, and his armour of light was devoured by the demons. The Living Spirit then rescued him and built the visible universe from the bodies of the defeated powers, so that the captured light could be gradually refined. Sun and moon became ships carrying freed light back to its home. Humans, in this account, were made by the powers of Darkness to imprison the light, yet each person carries a spark of it, the Living Soul.

Salvation therefore meant knowledge: understanding where one came from and what one truly is. A divine Jesus, called Jesus the Splendour, awakened Adam to this knowledge, and later messengers renewed it. Manichaeans honoured Jesus deeply, though they did not believe that the divine could truly take on a material body.

The Manichaean church was organised as a hierarchy, headed by a leader in Babylon and below him teachers, bishops and presbyters. The great division, however, was between the Elect and the Hearers. The Elect, both men and women, lived under strict vows: no sex, no property, no meat or wine, no harm to plants or animals, and no lies. They wandered, preached, sang and copied books. Because even picking fruit or breaking bread was thought to wound the light in it, the Elect did not prepare their own food, and some texts record a ritual apology spoken over the meal. Their pale faces from constant fasting became a mark by which outsiders recognised them.

The Hearers were ordinary believers who married, worked and owned property. Their chief religious duty was to support the Elect, above all by bringing them food. In the daily sacred meal, the Elect ate fruit and vegetables believed to be rich in light, and their holy eating was thought to set that light free. Hearers kept their own commandments and fasts and hoped to be reborn in a better state, perhaps eventually as Elect.

Manichaeans prayed several times a day towards the sun or moon, kept a weekly fast and celebrated a yearly festival, the Bema, in memory of Mani’s death, before an empty raised throne. Their beautifully written and painted books impressed even their enemies. Augustine, who joined as a Hearer in Carthage as a young man and remained one for about nine years, was attracted by its rational explanation of evil before he turned to Christianity and became its fiercest critic.

Manichaeism spread quickly and was persecuted almost everywhere. Roman emperors banned it, beginning with an edict of Diocletian, Christian emperors and the Church pursued it, and in the West it had largely vanished by the sixth century. In Persia and later under the Abbasid caliphs, Manichaeans were repeatedly persecuted, and the community in Mesopotamia faded by the tenth and eleventh centuries.

In the East it found a remarkable refuge. In 762 Bögü Qaghan, ruler of the Turkic Uyghur Khaganate in Mongolia, adopted the religion, and Manichaeism flourished among the Uyghurs, including at Qocho near Turfan, for several centuries. In China, where Manichaean missionaries arrived in the Tang period, the faith was banned in 843, but it survived in the south-east as the Religion of Light, blending with Buddhist and Daoist forms. At Cao’an, near Quanzhou in Fujian, a small temple still holds a stone statue of Mani as the Buddha of Light, carved in the Yuan period. Historians think the last Manichaean communities in China died out by around the sixteenth or seventeenth century.

One reason for this reach was the faith’s readiness to speak the language of each culture it entered. In the Roman West, Manichaean texts used Christian terms and presented Mani as an apostle of Jesus Christ. In Persia they drew on Zoroastrian names for divine beings, and in Central Asia and China Mani appeared as a Buddha, the Buddha of Light, with teachings set out in the form of Buddhist sutras. Opponents saw this as disguise; Manichaeans saw it as the same truth announced to every people, as Mani had intended. Historians regard it as a deliberate missionary method that also made the faith vulnerable to absorption by its neighbours.

For centuries Manichaeism was known mainly through its opponents. Since the early twentieth century, discoveries at Turfan and Dunhuang, the Coptic books from Medinet Madi in Egypt, the Cologne Mani Codex and texts from Kellis in the Egyptian desert have let the Manichaeans speak in their own words again. What emerges is a religion that, for over a thousand years, stretched further across Eurasia than almost any other faith of its time.