Chapter XIII · MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS

It is generally said that the religion of Mithras ended and was absorbed in Manichaeism, which may thus be supposed to have inherited some, at least, of its doctrines^[988]. This is one of those statements which are copied by one author from another until they acquire by mere repetition the force of an axiom; but its truth is not obvious, nor does it appear to rest upon any sound foundation. Except in the fact that both Mithraism and Manichaeism came in the first instance from Persia, there is little likeness between the two faiths, which are in all essential respects diametrically opposed to each other. A strict dualism, or the eternal antagonism of two equal principles, is the distinguishing feature of the religion of Manes, while the worship of Mithras rested, as has been said in the last chapter, on an equally uncompromising monotheism, which made the Supreme Being, whether known as Jupiter or Ormuzd, at once the creator and the governor of the universe. In this respect, it drew near to Judaism, which it may have aimed at incorporating with itself, and was not ashamed to place on its monuments scenes which can be referred to the Old Testament^[989]. 278Manichaeism, on the other hand, looked on Judaism with horror, rejected the Old Testament entirely, and was not improbably born in an outbreak of anti-Semitic fury^[990]. But the discrepancy of doctrine is as nothing compared to the wide difference in those external matters which in a new religion most strike the imagination of the crowd, and have therefore much to do with its success or failure. The Mithraist was accustomed, as we have seen, to an allegorical and symbolical ritual in which the material image of his god was for ever before him; but the Manichaean, as we shall see later, forbade the use of images and his worship consisted merely of prayers and hymns. The Mithraists made frequent use in their ceremonies of the sacrifice of animals; but the Manichaeans looked with displeasure on the taking of the life even of plants. The worshipper of Mithras not only gloried in the outward profession of his religion, but by his avoidance of the wearing of garlands forced the notice of it on those of his fellows who were not of the faith. The follower of Manes, on the contrary, concealed his religion as carefully as Basilides wished his followers to conceal theirs, and even went to the length of outwardly adopting a creed different from his own. It is not therefore to be wondered at that the rulers of the Roman Empire, whose acquaintance with the worship of Mithras was a thousand times more profound than our own, should have favoured Mithraism and have made every effort to suppress Manichaeism. The very emperors who placed their reformed State under the protection of Mithras imposed the penalty of death upon those of their subjects who should venture to teach the religion of Manes^[991].

279Not less different were the sanctions with which Mithraism and Manichaeism appeared in the West. The worship of Mithras came into the Roman world unobtrusively and without any claim to an exclusive revelation or special means of propaganda. But Manichaeism had at its back the personality of one of those wonderful men who appear at rare intervals in the world’s history, to leave behind them a memorial of their empire over the minds of their fellows in the shape of a new creed. Manes was indeed, as the discoveries of the last decade have taught us, an innovator in religion entirely worthy to rank with Zoroaster, Buddha, and Muhammad, and when the difficulties in the way of his missionary activity are considered, his influence upon the religious ideas of those who came after him was at least as marked as that of any of them. Manes or Mânî—the first being the Greek form of the name—was born, according to his own deliberate statement, about the year 216 A.D., in a village of Babylonia called Mardînû situate on the Kutha canal to the south of Ctesiphon^[992]. According to Christian tradition, his real name was Corbicius or Kubrik and he was a slave of unknown birth^[993]; according to the Mahommedan writers his father was one Patecius or Fatak, while his mother is sometimes described as the “Lady Mary,” sometimes as a Parthian princess, and is sometimes named Karossa^[994]. Such legends grow up naturally round the birth of all founders of religions, and we should believe them the less in this case that they have been handed down to us by the professors of religions bitterly opposed to that of Manes. Yet the story about the Parthian princess seems confirmed by the free access that he seems to have always possessed to the court of the Persian monarchs of his time. Manes himself says, according 280to Al-Bîrûnî, that illumination came to him in his thirteenth year^[995]; but this is contradicted by the Fihrist, which puts the age at which he received revelation as twenty-four^[996]. The Acta Archelai, a Christian source obviously suspect in the state it has come down to us, would make him a priest of Mithras^[997], a tradition which may have originated at a date when the Catholic Church recognized the danger to itself involved in the spread of the Mithraic religion. Another story would make him a Magus or one of the priestly caste entrusted by Ardeshîr with the propagation of the reformed religion of Zoroaster^[998], which is discredited by the fact that it was the Magi who were from the outset his bitterest enemies^[999]. A late Oriental writer says that he was a Christian priest having a cure of souls at Ahvâz^[1000], the capital city of the province of Huzitis, which again is negatived by the fact that he seems from his writings to have had little more than a hearsay knowledge of Catholic Christianity, although they show some acquaintance with the heresies of Bardesanes and Marcion^[1001]. He is said to have acquired great 281skill in painting which he used to illustrate his teaching^[1002], and to have been a learned mathematician and astronomer. This is likely enough; but the only events of his life which seem well attested, are that he began at an early age to propagate his doctrine and that he succeeded in converting to it Peroz or Fîrûz the son of Ardeshîr, through whose means he obtained a formal hearing from Sapor or Shâpûr, the conqueror of Valerian and Ardeshîr’s successor, shortly after this king’s accession to the throne^[1003]. Sapor seems to have listened to Manes with respect and, according to an Oriental writer, to have even favoured his propaganda, until the Magi, to whom the revival of the Zoroastrian religion had been committed, convinced him of his error^[1004]. On this, Manes was exiled from Persia and retired, says Al-Bîrûnî, to India, China, and Thibet preaching his gospel^[1005]. On Sapor’s death, he returned to Persia under Hormisdas or Ormuz, and again, it is said, succeeded in converting to his tenets the reigning monarch^[1006]. On Varanes’ or Bahram’s accession to the throne the following year, however, he was seized and put to death as a heretic after a disputation with the Chief of the Magi, in which he failed to support the test of an ordeal by molten metal proposed to him^[1007]. The most likely account of his death narrates that he was decapitated, and that his skin stuffed with straw was suspended at the gate of the town where the execution took place^[1008]. This was followed 282by a great persecution of the Manichaeans throughout Persia, and it is fairly evident that this, like his own fate, was due to the hostility he had aroused in the Magi^[1009]. The date of his death is fixed with some accuracy at 275 A.D., so that he would then have reached the age of sixty years^[1010].

The causes underlying this sudden appearance of a new religion are doubtless to be looked for in the political and religious history of Persia at the time. Ardeshîr, as has been said above, gave new life to the feeling of Persian nationality which the Parthian Kings had kept alive during Greek supremacy in Asia, and succeeded in again founding a Persian Empire. Like Alexander, Antiochus Epiphanes, and again, Diocletian, he seems to have been thoroughly alive to the great effect that a faith common to the whole empire would have in uniting the peoples under his sway.

“Never forget,” he says in the supposed testament that he is said to have left for the guidance of his son Sapor, “that as a king you are at once the protector of religion and of your country. Consider the altar and the throne as inseparable and that they must always sustain each other. A sovereign without religion is a tyrant, and a people which have no religion may be deemed the most monstrous of all societies. Religion may exist without a State, but a State cannot exist without religion; and it is by holy laws that a political association can alone be bound^[1011].”

Yet in spite of these sentiments, more pithily expressed perhaps in the “No bishop, no king” of our own James I, the task of founding a common religion for the whole of the new Persian empire must have presented some uncommon difficulties. Apart from the strong Semitic element dominant in their Babylonian province, the Parthians had always been eclectic in matters of faith, and Vonones, one of the last kings of Parthia, had shown himself to be a Philhellene of a type which must have been peculiarly offensive to a sovereign who was 283trying to revive the old Persian nationality^[1012]. The worship of Mithras, the god most favoured by the legions with whom Ardeshîr was soon to be at death-grips, must have been equally out of the question; and the knowledge of this is probably to be seen in the low place in the celestial hierarchy assigned to the old Vedic god in the Avesta of Ardeshîr’s day^[1013]. The Jewish religion in Central Asia had lately given signs of proselytizing fervour, and it was the going-over of a Parthian kinglet against the will of his people to the Jewish faith which first, according to one account, gave the excuse for the intervention of Vologeses or Valkhash and the subsequent reformation or revival of the Zoroastrian religion^[1014]. At the same time, Christianity had already begun to share with Mithraism the devotion of the legions stationed on the Roman frontier, and in the Gnostic form favoured by the teaching of Marcion and Bardesanes was pushing into Persia from Armenia and Edessa^[1015]. Nor can we doubt that Buddhism, already perhaps struck with decay in its native country of India^[1016], but flourishing exceedingly further East, was trying to obtain a foothold in that very Bactria which was afterwards said to have been the historic scene of Zoroaster’s activity. Other small, but, as the event was to show, highly vitalized faiths, were current in Western Asia, and the power of the Magi when Ardeshîr overthrew the Parthian power had declined so greatly that the statues of the Parthian kings were placed in the temples of the gods and adored equally with those of the divinities^[1017]. The Persians of Herodotus’ time, who did not believe in deities who had the same nature as men, would have blushed at such a profanation.

284From this unpromising welter of creeds and cults, Ardeshîr delivered the State by restoring the worship of Ahura Mazda as the State religion. One of his first cares was to collect the fragments of the books which we now know as the Zend Avesta, in which the revelations of the national prophet Zoroaster were set down in a language not then understanded of the people. It was afterwards said that the MSS. of these books had purposely been destroyed or scattered by Alexander; but the fact seems to be that they had fallen into discredit through the turning-away of the Persians towards Hellenic and Semitic gods; and that a previous attempt to restore their authority by Valkhash or Vologeses I, the Parthian king who reigned from 50 to 75 A.D., had met with little encouragement from his subjects^[1018]. Most modern scholars are now agreed that the Avesta and the literature that grew up round it contain many doctrines not to be found in the Persian religion current in Achaemenian times, and evidently brought into it from foreign sources under the Hellenistic and Parthian kings. Such as it is, however, the Avesta formed the Sacred Book of Ardeshîr’s reformation; while, in the order of the Magi, by him restored to more than their former power, the reformed Zoroastrian faith possessed an active, established, and persecuting Church, which reigned in Persia without a serious rival until the Mahommedan invasion.

Yet the first struggles of the reformation must have been sharp, and Darmesteter was doubtless justified when he saw in Manichaeism the first and possibly the strongest expression of the revulsion of Ardeshîr’s subjects against the rigid orthodoxy which he sought to impose upon them^[1019]. That such a feeling persisted for some time is plain from the fact that Manes’ “heresy” is said by Al-Bîrûnî to have been followed by that of Mazdak, who seems to have preached, like the Antinomian sects of Cromwell’s time, a kind of Socialism including the community of women and of property^[1020]. There arose also about the same time or a little later the sect of Zervanists 285referred to in the chapter on Mithras, who taught that Boundless Time was the origin of all things and was superior to Ormuzd and Ahriman, to both of whom he was said to have given birth. They seemed to have gained great power in the reign of Yezdegerd II; and, if we may trust the Armenian authors, a proclamation commanding adherence to their doctrines was put forth by Yezdegerd’s general Mihr Nerses on his invasion of Armenia in 450 A.D.^[1021] But the earliest and most enduring of these heresies or rebellions against the purified and restored religion of Ahura Mazda appears to have been that of Manes.

Were now the doctrines that Manes preached to his own undoing his invention, or did he draw them from some pre-existent source? It is said, in a Christian account which has come down to us, that they were the work of one Scythianus^[1022], a native, as his name implies, of “Scythia” (which here probably means Turkestan) and a contemporary of the Apostles, who married an Egyptian slave and learned from her all the wisdom of the Egyptians^[1023]. With the help of this and the tincture of dualism which he extracted from “the works of Pythagoras,” the story goes on to say, Scythianus constructed a system which he taught to a disciple named Terebinthus, otherwise called Buddas or Buddha, before his own death in Judaea^[1024]. This 286Terebinthus gave out that he was born of a virgin and had been nursed by an angel on a mountain; and he also wrote four books in which the doctrines of Scythianus were set down^[1025]. These books he entrusted to an aged widow with whom he lived, and he was afterwards struck dead while performing a magical ceremony. On his death, she bought a boy of seven years old named Corbicius, whom she enfranchised, and to whom she left her property and Terebinthus’ books some five years later. Thus equipped, Corbicius took the name of Manes, which may signify “Cup” or “Vessel^[1026],” and began to preach. This history has evidently been much corrupted and by no means agrees with the account before quoted from Oriental sources which bears greater marks of authenticity; but it is thought by some to be, like the 14th chapter of Genesis, a sort of allegory in which the names of peoples and systems are given as those of individual men^[1027]. If this be so, we should perhaps see in Scythianus the representative of those non-Aryan tribes of Medes of whom the Magi formed part, while in the name of Buddha we might find that of one of those Judaean communities holding a mixture of Magian and Buddhist tenets who according to one tradition were for long encamped near the Dead Sea^[1028]. Yet there is nothing specifically Buddhist or Egyptian about the doctrines of Manes as we know them^[1029], and if there were any likeness between the 287mythology and observances of the cult and those of its predecessors, it was probably introduced by Manes’ followers rather than by himself^[1030]. As to the doctrines of the Magi, Manes certainly had no occasion to go to Judaea to find them; for in the Persia of Ardeshîr and Sapor he must have heard quite as much of them as he wished.

Probably, therefore, the Christian account of Manes’ sources is untrue, or rather, as M. Rochat suggests, it was composed at a time and place in which Manichaeism had become a heresy or alternative creed attached, so to speak, not to Zoroastrianism but to Christianity, and had picked up from this and other faiths many accretions^[1031]. The doctrine of Manes which has come down to us from other sources is extremely simple, and seems to accord better with the Puritanical simplicity of life and ritual afterwards practised by his followers. Both the Christian and the Mahommedan traditions agree that he believed that there were two gods, uncreated and eternal, and everlastingly opposed to each other^[1032]. One of these is the God of Light and the other the God of Darkness; but he does not seem to have given any specific or proper name to either^[1033]. It is possible that this last-named being may have been identified 288by him with Matter^[1034], although this would seem to be a remnant of the Platonic philosophy of which there is no other trace in his teaching. But it is certain that he regarded the God of Darkness as entirely evil, that is to say, malevolent, and as a power to propitiate whom man should make no attempt. “I have considered it needful to despatch this letter to you” says an epistle which there is much reason to consider expresses the opinions, if not the actual words, of Manes himself^[1035]:

“first for the salvation of your soul and then to secure you against dubious opinions, and especially against notions such as those teach who lead astray the more simple (ἁπλούστεροι), alleging that both good and evil come from the same Power, and introducing but one principle, and neither distinguishing nor separating the darkness from the light, and the good from the bad and the evil (φαῦλον), and that which is without man from that which is within him, as we have said formerly, so that they cease not to confuse and mingle one thing with another. But do not thou, O my son, like most men, unreasonably and foolishly join the two together nor ascribe them both to the God of Goodness. For these teachers attribute to God the beginning and the end, and make him the father of these ills the end of which is near a curse^[1036].”

Although this epistle bears evident marks of having been worked over and amplified by some writer of a later age than that of the founder of Manichaeism, there cannot be much doubt that it contains his teaching on the Two Principles of all things. In the Christian account of Manes’ doctrine which 289M. Rochat thinks earlier than the epistle quoted above, Manes’ quondam follower Turbo says after recantation that his master reverences two gods “unbegotten, self-existing (αὐτοφυεῖς), eternal and set over against each other,” and that “he represents one as good, the other as wicked, giving to the one the name of Light and to the other that of Darkness^[1037].” So, too, the Mahommedan writers who give what seems to be an independent account of Manes’ opinions are agreed that he deduced the origin of the world from “two Original Principles, one of which is Light and the other Darkness, and which are separated one from the other^[1038].” The absolute opposition from the outset of good and evil therefore formed the pivot of Manes’ whole system, and was opposed quite as much to the Christian and Jewish creeds as to the Mithraic and other modifications of Persian religious ideas then or later in vogue, which held that evil like good was the creation of the Supreme Being, and that Ahriman or Pluto was a god having subordinate authority to, but of the same nature as, Ormuzd or Zeus. This uncompromisingly dualistic theory gives an origin to evil independent of that of good, and can only lead logically to the assertion of its eternity. Whether Manes gave utterance to it for the first time, or derived it from a theology then current in Persia, there is little evidence to show^[1039]. The Zend Avesta itself in its Sassanian recension does not seem to pronounce clearly on this point, and has been thought by some high authorities to teach 290the subordinate origin and ultimate extinction of evil^[1040], and by others exactly the reverse. It does, however, seem to be clear that unless Manes invented de novo the doctrine above quoted, it must have been from Persia that he obtained it. No other country with which he can have become acquainted has yet been shown to possess it^[1041].

Exclusively Oriental, too, in its origin must be the history of the conflict between these two Principles which follows. Each of them apparently dwelt in his own domain for countless ages untroubled by the existence of the other. The Light is the uppermost and is, according to the Mahommedan version of Manes’ doctrine, without bounds in height and on each side. The Darkness lies below it, and is in like manner boundless in depth and in lateral extent^[1042]. Hence there is a long frontier at which they touch, and this spot was filled from the beginning by the celestial air and the celestial earth. If we may read into the tradition something which is not expressed there, but which seems to follow logically from it, this atmosphere and this earth were the heavier parts of the Divine substance, which sinking down formed a kind of sediment or deposit^[1043]. Each of these Two Principles has five “members” or components, 291and this partition into five seems in the Manichaean teaching to run through all things. Thus, the Mahommedan tradition tells us that the “members” of the God of Light are Gentleness, Knowledge, Intelligence, Discretion, and Discernment, those of the Air the same five, of the (celestial) earth, the Breeze or Ether, Wind, Light, Water, and Fire, and of the Darkness Smoke, Flame, Hot Wind, Poison or Pestilence, and Gloom or Fog^[1044]. In this, and especially in its deification of abstract principles, we may see a reflection of Gnostic teaching which may easily have reached Manes from Valentinus by way of Bardesanes and the Oriental or Edessan School. On the other hand, the borrowing may have been the other way, and Simon Magus may have obtained these notions from the Persian Magi and have handed them on to Valentinus and his successors. This does not seem so likely as the other, but the point can hardly be settled until we know more than we do at present of the state of the Persian religion from the time of the Achaemenian kings to the Sassanian reform.

However that may be, both the Christian and Mahommedan traditions are agreed that the aggressor in the struggle between the good God and the bad was the Evil One. The Mahommedan source, here fuller than the Christian, tells us that the Darkness remained in an unorganized condition for ages, although consisting of the five members enumerated above. These parts, however, seem to have sunk down and produced another Earth called the Darker Earth, from which in course of time came forth Satan. Satan was not, like the King of the Paradise of Light, without beginning, but came into being from the union of these five members of Darkness, having the head of a lion, the body of a serpent, the wings of a bird, the tail of a fish, and four feet like those of crawling animals^[1045], in which figure we may see a kind of reflection of the Mithraic Ahriman^[1046]. 292Satan, on his emergence on the Darker Earth, perceived the rays of light from the upper world, piercing as we may suppose through the gloomy atmosphere of his own world, and conceived a hatred for them. Seeing, too, that these rays gained much in strength by their combination and mutual support, he withdrew within himself so as to unite himself more closely with his members^[1047]. Then again springing upwards, he invaded the realms of Light with the intention of there spreading calamity and destruction. The aeon—or world as the Fihrist calls it—of Discernment was the first to be aware of this invasion^[1048], and reported it to the aeon Knowledge, from whom it passed to the others in turn until it at last reached the ear of the Good God, here, as elsewhere in the Fihrist, called the King of the Paradise of Light. With the aid of the Spirit of his Right Hand, of his five worlds or members before mentioned, and of his twelve elements, of which we have before heard nothing^[1049], he made the First Man, clothing him by way of armour with the five “species” or powers of the celestial earth, 293the Breeze, Wind, Light, Water and Fire as before enumerated^[1050]. With these He despatched him to fight Satan, who in his turn did on his armour in the shape of his five “species,” Smoke, Flame, Poison, Hot Wind, and Gloom^[1051]. The fight lasted 294long, but in the end Satan triumphed, and dragged the First Man down into the Realm of Darkness, where he took from him his light^[1052]. During the fight, too, the elements had become mingled, so that the Ether henceforth was mixed with the Smoke, the Fire with the Flame, the Light with the Darkness, the Wind with the Hot Wind, and the Cloud with the Water. This it is which brings about the confusion or mixture seen in the present world, wherein everything which is beautiful, pure, or useful, such as gold and silver, comes from the armour of the First Man, and everything foul, impure, and gross, from that of his infernal opponent^[1053]. After the fight, the King of the Paradise of Light descended with another Power called the Friend of the Lights, who overthrew Satan, and the Spirit of the Right Hand or Mother of Life recalled, either by her voice or by another power called the Living Spirit, the First Man from his prison in the lowest Darkness. The First Man, on his deliverance, in this account mounts again to the Realms of Light, but before doing so “cuts the roots” of the Five Infernal 295Elements so that they can no more increase^[1054]. Then the King of the Paradise of Light orders an angel to draw the Confusion or Mixture of the Elements to that part of the Realm of Darkness which touches the Realm of Light, and to create out of it the present world, so as to deliver the imprisoned elements of Light from the Darkness with which they are contaminated. This is done, and a Universe having six heavens and eight earths is formed, each heaven having twelve gates, together with terraces, corridors, and places in such profusion as to point to some confusion in the translation into the Syriac which has come down to us. The only thing that concerns us in this, perhaps, is that the visible world, presumably the lowest of the eight, has a ditch dug round it in which is thrown the Matter of Darkness as it is separated from the Light, and outside this a wall so that it cannot escape. This is in view of the End of the World^[1055].

296So far there is no great difference—at all events, no irreconcilable difference—between the Christian and the Mahommedan accounts of Manes’ doctrines. The machinery set up for the process of the redemption of the light, however, differs somewhat conspicuously in the two traditions. The Mahommedan writers declare that in Manes’ teaching the Sun and Moon were created for the purification of the Light, the Sun drawing to itself those light-elements which had become contaminated by the demons of heat and flame and the Moon exercising a like attraction on those which had suffered from the embrace of Satan’s other powers. Both luminaries bear these elements into the Column of Praises or Glory which is perpetually mounting from the Sun to the World of Light, bearing with it the praises of men, their hymns of gratitude, and their pure words and good works^[1056]. This will continue until 297none but a feeble fragment of the Light remains in this world, when the angels charged with its maintenance will abandon their task, and return to the World of Light. A fire will then break out, which will burn for 1468 years and will set free the remainder of the Light imprisoned in matter by consuming its envelope. Satan or Hummâma, the Spirit of Darkness, will then acknowledge his defeat, and will be driven into the tomb prepared for him, the entrance to which will be closed with a stone the size of the world^[1057]. In the Christian tradition these matters are more complicated, and Manes is said to have taught that there exists a great wheel bearing twelve vases or buckets after the fashion of an Egyptian sakiyeh, which raise the redeemed portions of Light to the Sun, who gives them to the Moon, who in her turn delivers them to the Aeons of the Light, who place them in the Column of Glory here called the Perfect Air^[1058]. The Christian account is also more detailed with regard to the functions of the angels charged with the conduct of the world, making out that one of them supports this earth on his shoulders and is therefore called Omophorus, great earthquakes and commotions taking place when from weariness he shifts his burthen from one shoulder to the other, while another, called 298Splenditenens, holds the heavens by their backs^[1059]. The stars are also in the Christian tradition fashioned out of the purer part of the Light which was not captured by the Satanic powers, whereas the Mahommedan tradition says nothing about their origin^[1060]. The Christian writers also make the Manichaeans tell a story about the appearance of a beautiful virgin who appears to the male and female devils who were crucified or fixed in this world on the deliverance of the First Man. She appears to the male fiends as a beautiful woman and to the female as a desirable young man; and when they covet and pursue her, she flies from them and disappears. The anger of the Great Archon or Satan on this causes the appearance of clouds in 299this world and thereby obscures the Sun’s light, whilst his sweat becomes rain^[1061].

On the origin of terrestrial man, there is also considerable discrepancy between the two streams of tradition. The Mahommedan tells us that Adam was born from the conjunction of one of “these Archons” or Princes, and a star. Nothing is said to tell us what is meant by “these” princes, but as the phrase is used in other passages by the same writer to denote the Satanic hierarchy one can but suppose that it is one of the rulers of darkness who is here indicated^[1062]. The same writer goes on to say that the conjunction was “beheld” [or aided?] by a pair of Archons, one male and the other female, and that a second similar conjunction resulted in the birth of Eve. There is evidently a reference here to some legend of which we have lost the trace^[1063], and the Christian tradition assigns to Adam an entirely different origin and declares that he was made by all the “princes” or archons on the advice of one of their number, who persuaded the others to give up some of the light they had received which they knew would otherwise be taken from them and to make from it man in their own image and after the form of the “First Man” against whom they had fought with temporary success^[1064]. This story is clearly the same as that which we have already seen current among the Ophites, and it now seems most probable that it here appears not—as was once 300thought—as an interpolation foisted into the teaching of Manes by the Christian writer, but because both Ophite and Manichaean derived the story independently of each other from legends current in Western Asia^[1065].

The Mahommedan writer then plunges into a long and elaborate account of how the “Five Angels,” meaning thereby apparently the “members” Gentleness, Knowledge, Intelligence, Discretion and Discernment, on beholding Adam and Eve, prayed to certain powers which seem to be those which descended with the King of the Paradise of Light after the defeat of the First Man properly so called. These Powers include the First Man himself and the Mother of Life^[1066], and the 302Living Spirit^[1067], and were besought by the Five to send to earth a Saviour who should give Adam and Eve Knowledge and 303Goodness and deliver them from the devils. Their prayer was heard, and Jesus was sent upon earth “accompanied by a god,” with whose aid the Archons were again overthrown and imprisoned, while Adam and Eve were set free^[1068]. Jesus then addressed Adam and revealed to him the whole secret of the cosmogony, enlightening him upon the origin and functions of the different heavenly worlds or paradises, of the gods, of hell, of the devils, of the earth and sky, and of the sun and moon. He then showed him, continues the Mahommedan tradition, the seductive power of Eve, put him on his guard against it, and breathed into him the fear of yielding to it. Adam, it is said, listened to these commands obediently.

The result of this abstinence on Adam’s part—we are still pursuing the Mahommedan account of the Manichaean teaching—was seen in the sequel. The Archon or Demon who was practically the father of the present race of mankind became enamoured of Eve, and engendering with her begot a son “ugly and of a reddish colour,” who was named Cain. Cain in turn had relations with his mother Eve, and from this incest was born a son of white colour who was named Abel. From the further intercourse of Cain and Eve were born two daughters, one called “the Wisdom of the World,” and the other “the Daughter of Pleasure.” Cain took the last-named to wife and gave the other in marriage to Abel; but he did not know that 304the Wisdom of the World was filled with Light and divine wisdom, while the Daughter of Pleasure possessed nothing of the kind. In the sequel, one of the Angels had relations with the Wisdom of the World and begot two daughters, called Help (Farjâd) and Bringer of Help (Barfarjâd). Abel accused Cain of being the father of these girls, whereupon Cain killed him and took the “Wisdom of the World” as his own second wife. The Rulers of Darkness were annoyed at this, and the “Great Devil,” here called Sindîd, taught Eve magical formulas by the aid of which she again enticed Adam to intercourse. The result was a son “beautiful and of an agreeable countenance,” whom Eve wished to kill as having nothing of the Archons in him. Adam arranged to have the child fed exclusively on milk and fruits, and drew three magic circles round him bearing the names of the King of the Paradise of Light, the First Man, and the Spirit of Life respectively, to protect him against the devils. He then went to a high place and entreated God for him, whereupon one of the Three Powers last named appeared and gave him a Crown of Glory, at the sight of which Sindîd and the Archons fled away. Then a tree appeared to Adam called the Lotus, from which he drew milk with which to nourish his son whom he called first after the tree, and then Seth (Schâthîl). Eve, on the instigation of Sindîd, again persuaded Adam to intercourse, which so disgusted Seth that he took with him the Wisdom of the World, her two daughters Help and Bringer of Help, and “Siddikût,” which seems to be the community of the elect or Perfect Manichaeans, and journeyed to the East in search of the Divine Light and Wisdom. At their death all these entered into Paradise, while Eve, Cain, and the daughters of Desire went to hell^[1069].

305The story about the protoplasts of the Book of Genesis has been given in more detail than it perhaps deserves because of its manifest connection with the doctrines of the extant sect of Mandaites, Hemerobaptists, or Disciples of St John still to be found in certain villages near the Shât-el-Arab and even in considerable towns like Bussora. These sectaries declare themselves to have inherited the faith of John the Baptist, and have a sacred book called the Sidra Rabba, which has been known to Europeans since the XVIIth century, and contains, among other things, many stories like those given above. The Mandaites are a violently anti-Christian sect, and say that the historical Jesus was a fiend who obtained baptism from St John the Baptist by means of a trick, and they display a similar hatred of the religions of both the Jews and the Mahommedans. Nevertheless, most modern writers consider them related to, and perhaps the modern representatives of, the Mughtasilah or “Washers^[1070].” This last sect is certainly very ancient, and its history can in fact be traced as far back as the beginning of the reign of Trajan^[1071], while the Mahommedan author, from whom the traditional account of Manes’ doctrines has been quoted above, says that Manes was in his youth one of the Mughtasilah. From this Prof. Kessler, who perhaps devoted more attention to the Manichaean religion than any living scholar, built up the theory that the doctrines of the Mughtasilah were one of the principal sources from which Manes formed his system. He even says that the Fatak or Patecius whom tradition gives as a father to Manes must be identified with that Scythianus or Terebinthus whom the Christian tradition makes Fatak’s predecessor, was one of the Mughtasilah, and helped Manes both in the construction of his system and in its propagation^[1072]. This may be so, but very little evidence is available in support of the theory; and the points which the Mandaites and the Manichaeans undoubtedly possess in common do not seem to 306be more than can be explained by the contact which must necessarily have taken place between two neighbouring sects both persecuted successively by Persian Shahs, Christian Emperors, and Mahommedan Caliphs. The Christian tradition of Manes’ teaching concerning the protoplasts says merely that “he who said ‘Let us make man in our own image’” was the same Prince of Darkness who thereby counselled the other Archons to give up their light in order to make man in the likeness

“of the form that we have seen, that is to say, of the First Man. And in that manner,” it continues, “he created the man. They created Eve also after the like fashion, imparting to her of their own lust, with a view to the deceiving of Adam. And by these means the construction of the world proceeded from the operations of the Prince^[1073].”

The teaching of Manes with regard to Jesus is not very clear in the Christian tradition, no doubt because the writers who recorded it were careful to remove from it as much as possible everything which in their view savoured of blasphemy. Yet the Christian author before quoted makes Manes say that the God of Light whom he calls “the Good Father” sent his well-beloved son upon earth for the salvation of man’s soul and “because of Omophorus” or the world-sustaining angel. This son, by whom he can hardly mean any other than the historical Jesus, “came and transformed himself into the semblance of a man and showed himself to men as a man, although he was not a man, and men imagined that he had been begotten^[1074].” It is also to Him that is attributed the construction of the wonderful wheel before alluded to as equipped with twelve vases which the sphere causes to revolve, and which thus scoops up, as it were, the souls of the dying^[1075]. The Christian account also narrates that in

“the Paradise which is called the Cosmos [Qy the ‘heavenly’ earth or the Sun?], there are trees such as Desire and other deceits, 307whereby the minds of those men [those who reach it?] are corrupted. But the tree in Paradise, whereby they know the good, is Jesus and the knowledge of Him which is in the Cosmos. And whoso receives it, distinguishes between good and evil. Yet the Cosmos itself is not of God, but it was made from portions of matter, and therefore all things in it will disappear^[1076].”

There is not really any very great difference between this and the Mahommedan tradition quoted above which makes Jesus the messenger sent from above to give knowledge to Adam, especially if we consider that Manes probably, like most of the Gnostics, placed Paradise not upon the earth but in one of the heavens intermediate between us and the abode of the Supreme Being^[1077]. That Manes supposed Jesus to have descended to this earth also is plain from his own words quoted by Al Bîrûnî from the Shapurakan or book written by Manes for King Sapor:

“Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messenger of God. So in one age they have been brought by the messenger called Buddha to India, in another by Zaradusht [i.e. Zoroaster] to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West. Thereupon this revelation has come down, this prophecy in this last age through me, Mânî, the messenger of the God of Truth to Babylonia^[1078].”

Manes’ ideas as to the salvation of man’s soul again differ little in the two streams of tradition. The Christian, here perhaps the fuller of the two, describes him as teaching that the soul of man, as also that of beasts, birds, other animals, and plants, is part of the light which was won by the demons from the First Man, while all bodies are of that matter which is the same as darkness. Man’s body, we are told, is called a cosmos by parallelism with the great Cosmos, and all men have roots 308here below bound to things which are above^[1079]. It is the cutting of these roots by the demons which causes death. On the death of a man who has attained the knowledge of the truth during this life, his soul is taken up in the wheel to the Sun, by whom after it has been purified it is passed over to the Moon, the two luminaries being represented as ships or ferry-boats sailing to-and-fro in the upper air. When the Moon is full, she ferries the souls with which she is filled towards the East, and then delivers them to the Aeons of Light who place them in the Pillar of Glory before described. She then returns for a fresh supply greatly reduced in circumference, whereby her waxing and waning is explained^[1080]. In the case of a man who has not attained the knowledge of the truth, a small portion of the soul only is purified and is then reincarnated in the body of a dog, a camel, or some other animal, according to the sins which it has committed. Thus, if he has killed a mouse, he will become a mouse, if a chicken a chicken, and so on, while those who have been employed in the reaping of corn will themselves become corn or some other kind of plant in order that they may be reaped and cut in turn. The soul of the homicide will, it is said, go to inhabit the body of a leper^[1081]. There will, apparently, be five of these reincarnations^[1082], and between them the soul which has not found knowledge of the truth is given over to the demons in order that they may subdue it in the “Gehennas” of fire. This, like its transference into other bodies, is for the sake of teaching it better; but if it still remains without knowledge, 309it is cast into the great fire until the Consummation of the World^[1083].

The Mahommedan tradition as to what occurs at death goes into more details, and it is here that we catch the first glimpse of that doctrine of predestination which plays so prominent a part in the later teaching of the Manichaean Church. When a just or perfect or “true” Manichaean is on the point of death, the First Man sends to him a “shining god of light” in the form of “the Wise Guide” accompanied by three other gods and with them “the bowl of water, the garment, the fillet for the head, the circlet and the crown of light^[1084].” With them comes the virgin who is like to the soul of the just one. There also appear to him the devil of greed, that of pleasure, and others with them. Directly the just one who is dying sees them, he calls to his help the goddess^[1085] who has taken the form of the Wise Guide and the three gods her companions. They draw near to him, and at the sight of them the devils turn and flee. Then the gods take the just one, do on him the crowns and the garment, put in his hand the bowl of water, and mount with him to the Column of Praises in the sphere of the Moon, to the First Man and to Nahnaha the Mother of Life, until they reach the place in the Paradise of Light he occupied in the beginning^[1086]. 310His body remains stretched (upon the earth) in order that the Sun, the Moon, and the Gods of Light may take from it its powers, i.e. the Water, the Fire, the gentle Breeze, which are then borne upwards to the Sun and become a god. The rest of the body, which is all darkness, is cast into hell^[1087].

This description of the lot of the blessed after death is certainly taken from no other source than that from which the Zoroastrian books put forth by the Sassanian kings are drawn.

“At the end of the third night,” says the Hatoxt Nask^[1088], one of the earliest Zoroastrian documents that have come down to us, “at the dawn of day, the soul of the faithful thinks that it is in a garden and smells its perfumes. Towards it a wind seems to blow from the region of the South perfumed, more perfumed than any other wind. Then the soul of the faithful thinks that he breathes this wind with his nostrils. ‘Whence blows this wind, the most perfumed that I have breathed with my nostrils?’ While encountering this breeze, his religion (conscience, daena, spiritual life), appears to him in the form of a beautiful young girl, shining, with white arms, robust, of fair growth, of fair aspect, tall, high-bosomed, of fair body, noble, of shining race, with the figure of one who is 15 years old, as fair in form as the fairest creatures that exist. Then the soul of the faithful speaks to her, and asks ‘What virgin art thou, thou the most beautiful in form of the virgins that I have ever seen?’ Then she who is his religion answers: ‘O youth of good mind, of good words, of good deeds, of good religion, I am thine own religion incarnate^[1089].’”

So, too, the Vendidad, which may be a little later in date than the document just quoted, represents Ahura Mazda as saying in answer to Zarathustra himself:

311“After a man has disappeared, after a man dies, the impious and malevolent demons make their attack. When the dawn of the third night shines forth and the day begins to lighten, the well-armed Mithra arrives at the mountains giving forth holy radiance and the Sun rises. Then, O Spitama Zarathustra ... she comes, the beautiful, the well-made, the strong, of fair growth, with her dogs, full of discernment, rich in children [i.e. fruitful], the longed-for, virtuous one. She leads the souls of the faithful above the Hara Berezaiti; she sustains them across the bridge Chinvat in the road of the spiritual divinities. Vohu Mano rises from his golden throne. Vohu Mano says, ‘O faithful one, how hast thou come hither from the perishable world to the imperishable?’ Rejoicing, the faithful pass before Ahura Mazda, before the beneficent Immortals, before golden thrones, before the house of hymns, the dwelling of Ahura Mazda, the dwelling of the beneficent Immortals, the dwelling of the other faithful ones. When the faithful is purified, the wicked and malevolent demons tremble by reason of the perfume after his departure as a sheep pursued by a wolf trembles at the [scent of the?] wolf^[1090].”

To return, however, to the Mahommedan account of Manes’ doctrine. This last by no means confined his survey of the state of man’s soul after death to the single case of the justified dead.

“When death draws nigh to a man who has fought for religion and justice, [he is represented as saying,] and who has protected them by protecting the Just, the gods whom I have mentioned appear and the devils are there also. Then he calls the gods to his help and seeks to win them by showing to them his works of piety, and that which he has done to protect the religion and the Just. The gods deliver him from the devils, while leaving him in the condition of a man in this world, who sees fearful shapes in his dreams, and who is plunged in dirt and mud^[1091]. He remains in this state until his Light and his Spirit are freed [evidently by transmigration] when he arrives at the meeting-place of the Just. Then, after having wandered for long, he dons their vesture. But when death appears to the sinful man, to him who has been ruled by greed 312and desire, the devils draw near to him, they seize him, torment him, and put fearful shapes before his eyes. The gods are there also with the vesture, so that the sinful one thinks they have come to deliver him. But they have only appeared to him to reproach him, to remind him of his actions, and to convince him of his guilt in having neglected the support of the Just. He wanders unceasingly throughout the world, and is tortured until the coming of the End of the World, when he will be thrown into hell. Thus, Manes teaches,” continues the tradition, “that there are three paths for the soul of man. One leads to Paradise, which is the path of the Just. Another leads back to the world and its terrors, which is the path of the protectors of the faith and the helpers of the Just. The third leads to hell, which is the path of the sinful man^[1092].”

Yet there is nothing to show that the sins which thus doom a man to hell are within his choice to commit or to leave alone as he chooses. Rather does it appear that his freedom from sin depends on the admixture of light which enters into his composition at his birth. Of all this the Christian tradition says nothing.

It is, nevertheless, in the division here set forth of the adherents of the religion into the Just and the protectors of the Just, that the great distinction between the Manichaean religion and all its contemporaries appears. Both traditions are agreed that those who listen to the teaching of Manes are to be divided into five classes, viz. the Masters who are the sons of Gentleness; those who are enlightened by the Sun, who are the sons of Knowledge or the Priests; the Elders who are the sons of Intelligence; the Just who are the sons of Discretion; and the Hearers who are the sons of Discernment^[1093]. The first three classes we may safely neglect for the present, as they evidently correspond to the three superior or directing orders of the Manichaean Church to which we shall have to return 313later; but the last two, the Just and the Hearers, give us the key to the organization of the sect, and explain how it was able to maintain itself for so long against its numerous enemies. He who would enter into the religion, says the Mahommedan tradition, must examine himself that he may see whether he is strong enough to conquer desire and greed, to abstain from meats, from wine, and from marriage, to avoid all that can be hurtful in (to?) water or fire, and to shun magic and hypocrisy^[1094]. These abstinences are those that are demanded of the perfect Manichaeans, who have been called above the Just or the Sons of Discretion, and who with their superiors constitute the Manichaean Church. These are they whom the Christian tradition speaks of as the Elect, and for whom, as we have seen, there is reserved after death a glorious ascension and an immediate return to the Paradise of Light. So Valentinus, like many other Gnostics, divided Christians into the two classes of pneumatics and psychics, the first-named of whom were to occupy a more distinguished position in the world to come than the other. There is nothing to show, however, that Valentinus or any other Gnostic ever imposed any discipline on the pneumatics than that prescribed for the psychics, or that he thought that those who were going to take a higher rank in the next world should observe a stricter mode of life in this. The Catholics, indeed, had already adopted the view that the celibate member of the Church possessed “a higher calling” than his married brethren; but there is no reason to suppose that they therefore assigned to them a higher place in the next world, or thought that those who had not the gift of continence were to be permitted any relaxation of the moral law imposed upon celibate and married alike. It is therefore probable that it was from Buddhism, with which Manes must have made himself well acquainted during his journeys into India, that he borrowed the scheme by which those who believed in the truth of his teaching could delay subjecting themselves to the austerities necessary for salvation until their next incarnation.

However this may be, there can be little doubt that this is the meaning of the position he assigned to the Hearers.

314“If,” he says according to the Mahommedan author, “he who would enter into the religion does not feel strong enough to practise the abstinences before enumerated, let him renounce the attempt. If, however, he is filled with love for the faith, yet cannot conquer desire and greed, let him seek to progress by protecting the faith and the Just, and let him fight against evil actions on the occasions when he can give himself to labour^[1095], piety, vigilance, prayer and humility. This will fill him with contentment both in this ephemeral world, and in the eternal world to come, and he will put on the body of the second degree in the state which follows after death^[1096].”

Unless they are greatly belied, some of his later followers looked upon this as a licence to the Hearers to commit such sins as they chose^[1097] in this life, yet it is evident that this formed no part of Manes’ original teaching. He imposed upon the Hearers, says the Mahommedan tradition, ten commandments, which were: to abstain from prayers offered to idols, from lying, from avarice, from murder, from adultery, from false teaching, from magic, from double dealing, from doubt in religion and from slackness and want of energy in action. They also had to recite certain prayers which will be mentioned in their place, and to fast two days when the Moon is new as when she is full, as also when the Sun enters the sign of Sagittary. A three days’ fast was also obligatory on the first appearance of the Moon after the entry of the Sun into the signs of Capricorn and of Libra. But they were to feast on Sunday, a day which the Perfect, according to the Mahommedans, kept as a fast, their own weekly feast being held on Monday^[1098].

The attitude of Manes to other religions was also without 315precedent or parallel. Of the Jews and of their religion he seems to have had a detestation so strong and so deeply rooted that it is difficult not to see in it some connection with political events of which we have lost the record. The war of extermination which Hadrian had been forced to wage against the Jews of Palestine must have been over nearly a century before Manes began to teach; but the Babylonian Jews can hardly have been affected by this, and the story of the king of Adiabene quoted above shows that shortly before the time of Ardeshîr they actively pursued the proselytizing policy which their countrymen in the West had been forced to abandon. In doing so, they doubtless contrived, after their manner, to offend the national prejudices of their hosts, while showing themselves greedy, as ever, of political power^[1099]. This probably provoked reprisals, and it is quite possible that Manes’ teaching derived some of its strength from the revulsion felt by Ardeshîr’s Aryan subjects to the borrowings from Judaism to be found both in Mithraism and the Avestic literature. But whatever its cause, there can be no doubt about the hatred felt by Manes for the Jewish religion, which is prominent in every tradition of his teaching. The earlier Gnostics, like Marcion, had made the God of the Old Testament a harsh but just and well-meaning tyrant; but Manes would have none of this, and declared that he was a fiend.

“It is the Prince of Darkness,” the Christian tradition makes him say, “who spoke with Moses, the Jews, and their priests. Thus the Christians, the Jews, and the Pagans are involved in the same error when they worship this God. For he led them astray in the lusts that he taught them, since he was not the God of Truth. 316Whence those who put their hope in that God who spoke with Moses and the Prophets will be bound with him, because they have not put their trust in the God of Truth. For he, the God of the Jews, spoke with them according to their lusts^[1100].”

In a very different spirit, however, Manes dealt with all the other religions that he knew. He acknowledged the Divine origin of the teachings of Zoroaster, of Buddha, and of Jesus alike, with the reservation that he should himself be regarded as the Paraclete, which here seems to mean nothing more than the Legate or Ambassador, sent by the Good God to complete their teaching. “Mânî, the messenger of the God of Truth to Babylonia^[1101]” is the title which, as we have seen, he gives himself in the most authentic record of his teaching. He aimed, in short, at establishing a universal religion which should include within its scope the three faiths that between them commanded the allegiance of the whole civilized world, and should acknowledge him as its founder and chief. Had his plans come to fruition in his lifetime, he would have attained an empire over the minds of men far greater and wider than any ever claimed or dreamed of by the most ambitious of the Roman pontiffs.

The full details of the way in which he proposed to establish this new faith we shall probably never know; but discoveries made during the last decade have shown us that his plans were well fitted to their purpose. The successive expeditions of Drs Grünwedel and von Le Coq to Turfan have shown that up to as late as the XIth century A.D., there was still a strong body of Manichaeans probably belonging to the Ouigur nation in Chinese Turkestan, living apparently in complete amity with their Buddhist countrymen^[1102]. The writings that were there discovered, to which we shall have to refer more in detail later, 317are mostly written in a script resembling the Estranghelo or Syriac but with an alphabet peculiar to the Manichaean religious documents, and which cannot, one would think, have been adopted by those who used it for any other purpose than that of concealment^[1103]. Judging from this and the practice of the sect in Europe from the time of Diocletian onward, it seems highly probable that among Buddhists, the Manichaean hearers professed Buddhism, and among Zoroastrians, Zoroastrianism, hoping that thus they might be able to turn their fellows to their way of thinking without openly dissenting from the reigning religion. The persecution that Bahram I instituted against them immediately upon Manes’ execution was perhaps less a reason than a pretext for this.

This is certainly borne out by their proceedings when they found themselves among Christians.

“You ask me if I believe the gospel,” said the Manichaean Prefect, Faustus, in his dispute with St Augustine (himself for nine years before his conversion a Manichaean Hearer). “My obedience to its commands shows that I do. I should rather ask you if you believe it, since you give no proof of your belief. I have left my father, brother, wife and children and all else that the gospel requires; and you ask me if I believe the gospel. Perhaps you do not know what is called the gospel. The gospel is nothing else than the teaching and the precept of Christ. I have parted with all gold and silver. I have left off carrying money in my purse; content with food obtained from day to day; without anxiety for the morrow and without care as to how I shall be fed or wherewithal I shall be clothed; and you ask if I believe the gospel? You see in me the blessings of the gospel; and yet you ask if I believe the gospel. You see me poor, meek, a peacemaker, pure in heart, mourning, hungering, thirsting, bearing persecutions and hatred for righteousness’ sake; and do you doubt if I believe in the gospel^[1104]?”

So, too, Manes in the epistle to Marcellus which, although much altered and corrupted by its Catholic transcribers, is probably a genuine document, is careful to begin in language which seems imitated from the Epistles of St Paul:

318“Manes, an apostle of Jesus Christ, and all the saints who are with me, and the virgins, to Marcellus, my beloved son; Grace, mercy, and peace be with you from God the Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ; and may the right hand of light preserve you from the present evil world and from its calamities, and from the snares of the wicked one, Amen^[1105].”

While in the Disputation which follows and which is certainly a later interpolation, or possibly a concoction of some later author, he is represented as saying “My brother, I am indeed a disciple of Christ, and, moreover, an apostle of Jesus.” Yet in spite of this and a few other passages of the same kind, it is plain that neither Manes, nor any of those who believed on his teaching, were Christians in any sense in which the term could not be applied to the followers of Mahommed or many another professedly anti-Christian teacher. Manes entirely rejected the account of the Incarnation given in the Gospels, alleging, as a modern critic might do, that it was not the account of eyewitnesses, but a mass of fables which had grown up after the memory of the events recorded had faded away^[1106]. Jesus, he said, was not born of woman, but came forth from the Father or First Man, and descended from heaven in the form of a man about thirty years of age^[1107]. But the body in which He appeared was an illusion only and was no more that of a real man than the dove which descended upon Him at the baptism in Jordan was a real dove, and it was not true to say that He was put to death by the Romans and suffered on the cross^[1108]. So far from that being the case, he declared that Jesus, the mortal or suffering Jesus, was nothing but the universal soul diffused throughout Nature and thus tormented by its association with matter. Thus, he said, the Jesus patibilis may be said to be hanging from every tree^[1109].

To say that such teaching was likely to alter in the course of a generation or two is merely to assert that it followed the 319course of evolution which can be traced in all religions, and it is possible that in what has been said in the last paragraph concerning Jesus, we have rather the opinions of the Manichaeans of the fourth century than those of Manes himself. Yet even in this we see exemplified the chameleon-like habit peculiar to the Manichaeans of modifying their tenets in outward appearance so as to make them coincide as nearly as possible with the views of those whom they wished to win over to them. Thus when the Catholic doctrine of the Trinity, the Three Persons and One God, began to take shape under the pressure of the Arian controversy, the Manichaeans were not long in matching it with a Trinity of their own^[1110]:

“We worship,” said Faustus the Manichaean Perfect, “under the triple appellation of Almighty God, the Father and His Son Christ and the Holy Spirit. While these are one and the same, we believe also that the Father properly dwells in the highest or chief light, which Paul calls ‘light inaccessible,’ and the Son in the second or visible light. And as the Son is himself two-fold according to the apostle, who speaks of Christ as the power of God and the wisdom of God, so we believe that His power dwells in the Sun and His wisdom in the Moon^[1111]. We also believe that the Holy Spirit, the third majesty, 320has His seat and His home in the whole circle of the atmosphere.^[1112] By His influence and inpouring of the spirit, the Earth conceives and brings forth the suffering Jesus, who, as hanging from every tree, is the life and salvation of man^[1113].”

In like manner, while not denying them in terms, the Manichaeans attempted to refine away all the significance of the Crucifixion and the Atonement, by representing them as merely symbolical. In one Apocryphal book called the Wanderings of the Apostles, which seems to be of Manichaean origin, Jesus appears to St John, who is sunk in grief at the supposed sufferings of his Master, and tells him that His Crucifixion was a mere phantasmagoria or miracle-play performed to impress the plebeian crowd at Jerusalem. Then He vanishes and in His stead appears a cross of pure light, surrounded by a multitude of other forms representing the same shape and image. From this cross comes a Divine voice saying sweetly:

“The cross of light is, for your sakes, sometimes called the Word, sometimes Christ; sometimes the Door, sometimes the Way; sometimes the Bread, sometimes the Sun; sometimes the Resurrection, sometimes Jesus; sometimes the Father, sometimes the Spirit; sometimes the Life, sometimes the Truth; sometimes Faith and sometimes Grace^[1114].”

As will presently be seen, now that we have under our hands the writings of Manichaean communities domiciled in Persian and Chinese territory, we find in them similar compromises with the faiths of Zoroaster and Buddha.

Yet after the Mahommedan conquest of Asia, and in regions where they were free, as it would seem, from the pressure of their Zoroastrian and Christian competitors, the Manichaeans appear to have evolved a theology as formal and as detailed as any of the Gnostic systems which we have examined. This 321is in the main set out by Theodore Bar Khôni, the Nestorian Bishop of Kashgar, in his Book of Scholia written in Syriac and Mandaean which has been in part translated by the scholarly care of M. Pognon, late Consul of France at Aleppo, and has lately been commentated by M. Cumont. M. Pognon at first identified Bar Khôni with the nephew of the Nestorian Patriarch Iwannis (Johannes or John), whose reign began in 893 A.D., and he quoted Assemani’s Bibliotheca Orientalis in his support^[1115]. Later, however, he withdrew this, and put him a century earlier^[1116]. M. Cumont, on the other hand, thinks that Bar Khôni lived at the end of the VIth century or the beginning of the VIIth, and therefore before the Mahommedan invasion^[1117]. In any event, the Scholia describe a body of Manichaean doctrine considerably later in date than any of the Christian sources hitherto referred to, and probably formed in an atmosphere where the necessity for outward conformity to either the Zoroastrian or the Christian faith was a good deal less cogent than it was further west. Its agreement with the Mahommedan tradition drawn from above is also well marked, and it derives much support from the Manichaean MSS. lately recovered from the oasis of Turfan in Turkestan, and in that of Tun-huang in China. It is possible, although no proofs are yet forthcoming, that it was this Neo-Manichaeism, as it has been called, that inspired the Manichaean sectaries who were imported in the IXth and Xth centuries into Bulgaria, whence their missionaries found their way later into Italy, France, and other countries of Southern Europe.

The system disclosed in these documents begins, as does nearly every Manichaean writing, with the assertion of the existence of two gods, that is to say, the God of Light and the God of Darkness. As the Kingdom of Darkness, whenever and wherever described, is the exact opposite and counterpart of 322that of the Light, we shall not return to it again, but assume that in describing the one we are mutatis mutandis describing the other. The God of Light has one substance of which all the powers of light were made, but three forms or hypostases, called in the Greek Formula of abjuration “faces” or persons, which added to his own personality make a supreme tetrad. These three hypostases are his wisdom, power, and goodness, by which is probably meant that he operates in the lower powers through these qualities, while remaining himself remote in the “inaccessible light^[1118].” He possesses also five houses or dwellings, which are also called his worlds and even his members. Their names according to Bar Khôni are Intelligence, Knowledge, Thought, Reflexion, and Feeling^[1119]. These seem to be 323ranged in this order below the dwelling of the inaccessible light, so as to cut off all approach to it by a fivefold wall. On the attack of the powers of darkness before mentioned, the God of Light, called by Bar Khôni the Father of Greatness, that is to say, the Very Great or Greatest^[1120], creates by his word the Mother of Life, who in her turn evokes the First Man as already described. Thus is constituted, if M. Cumont be right, the First Triad of Father, Mother, and Son^[1121]. From the Turfan documents, we know that the Father was called, in Turkestan at any rate, by the name of Azrua or Zervan, and the Son Khormizta or Ormuzd^[1122]. As for the appellation of the Mother we are still in ignorance^[1123].

324When the First Man or Ormuzd marched against his enemy, he also evoked five elements called sometimes his sons and sometimes his members. These are the Ether, the Wind, the Light, the Water, and the Fire before mentioned, which together compose the soul of the world, and hence of man, who is in every respect its image. When he was conquered by Satan and dragged down to the lowest pit of hell, he prayed, says Bar Khôni, seven times to the Very Great Father, and he in compassion created, again by his word, the Friend of the Lights^[1124], who evoked the Great Ban^[1125], who evoked the Living Spirit. Here we have the second triad or “second creation,” of which, as has been said, only the last member takes any active part in what follows. As we have already seen, the Living Spirit speaks a word like a sharp sword, and the image of the First Man answers^[1126] and is drawn up out of hell. These two, the sword or Appellant and the image or Respondent, together mount towards the Mother of Life and the Living Spirit, and the Mother of Life “clothes” the Image—no doubt with a form or “nature,”—while the Living Spirit does the same with the compelling word^[1127]. Then they return to the earth of darkness where remains the soul of the First Man in the shape of his five sons.

325In the meantime, the Living Spirit has also given birth to five sons. He, like the Very Great Father of whom he is perhaps the reflexion, has five worlds named like those of his paradigm from which he draws certain other powers. From his Intelligence, says Bar Khôni, he produces The Ornament of Splendour, who is none other than the Splenditenens we have seen drawing the heavens after him; from his Reason, the Great King of Honour, who is described as sitting in the midst of the celestial armies; from his Thought, Adamas of the Light armed with shield and spear; from his Reflexion the King of Glory whose function is to set in motion the three wheels of the fire, the water, and the wind, which apparently raise to the upper spheres the portions of those elements still left below; and finally from his Feeling the great Omophorus or Atlas who bears the earths on his shoulders^[1128]. Immediately on evocation, three of these powers were set to work to kill and flay the rulers of darkness, and to carry their skins to the Mother of Life. She stretches out the skins to make the sky, thereby fashioning ten or eleven or even twelve heavens. She throws their bodies on to the Earth of Darkness, thereby forming eight earths^[1129]. Thus the soul or sons of the First Man are rescued from the Powers of Darkness, and the machinery of the redemption of the Light is set on foot.

There is, however, a third act to the drama. Again, the lesser Powers of Light, this time the Mother of Life, the First Man, and the Living Spirit, cry to the Very Great Father. 326Satan, or, as the Mahommedan tradition calls him, Hummâma, is still in existence, although his “sons,” the Rulers of Darkness, the Hot Wind, the Smoke, and the others have been crucified or fixed in the firmament, and he is still actively working with his remaining powers against the Light. The Light-Powers feel themselves contaminated and oppressed by the contact, and perhaps even in some fear lest they should again have the worst in a renewal of the conflict. Again, the Very Great Father hears them and sends to their assistance a third creation, called this time simply the Messenger.

Who this Messenger is, is the main puzzle of the new documents. The author of the Acta knew something of him, for he speaks of a “Third Legate,” who, when the world is burning in the great conflagration which will mark the redemption of the last particles of light, will be found in the Ship of the Moon with Jesus, the Mother of Life, the Virgin of Light and the twelve other powers to be presently mentioned^[1130]. M. Cumont, in his able analysis of Bar Khôni’s system, thinks that this “Third Legate” resembles the Neryôsang of the Persians, who in the later Mazdean literature is made the 327herald of Ormuzd, and has also features in common with Gayômort the First Man, and Mithras^[1131]. But it is plain from the Tun-huang treatise lately discovered, as well as from the fragments found at Turfan, that the Third Legate corresponds most closely to the Mazdean genius or divinity Sraôsha, the angel of Obedience^[1132]. Sraôsha is described in the Srôsh Yashts as the “Holy and Strong Srôsh,” “the Incarnate Word, a mighty-speared and lordly god.” He it is who is called the “fiend-smiter,” who is said to watch over the world and to defend it from the demons, especially at night, to fight for the souls of the good after death, and, in the older Mazdean traditions, to judge the dead with Mithra and Rashnu as his assessors, like Rhadamanthos, Minos, and Eacus among the Greeks^[1133]. In the Turfan texts he is called the mighty, and in the Tun-huang treatise is likened to a judge, while in both sets of documents he has his proper appellation of Srôsh^[1134].

This third creation was no more content than his two predecessors to enter upon the task allotted to him without further help. His first act upon arriving hither, according to Bar Khôni, was to evoke or call into existence twelve virgins 328with their vestures, their crowns, and their guards. The Turfan texts give us the names of these powers, four of whom seem to be attributes of sovereignty, and eight of them virtues. Their names in the order of the new texts are respectively, Dominion, Wisdom, Victory, Persuasion, Purity, Truth, Faith, Patience, Uprightness, Goodness, Justice and Light, and they are probably the twelve “pilots” whom the Acta describe as being at the Ecpyrosis in the Moon-ship with their father, with Jesus, and with the other powers^[1135]. But there is much plausibility in M. Cumont’s theory that this Third Legate or Srôsh is supposed until that event to inhabit the Sun, and that his 12 “daughters” are the signs of the Zodiac among whom he moves^[1136]. According to Bar Khôni, it is the same Legate who is ordered by the Great Ban to create a new earth and to set the whole celestial machinery—the Sun and Moon-ships and the three wheels of fire, air, and water—in motion^[1137]. Yet we hear nothing in any other document of any addition to the number of eight earths already created, and we can only therefore suppose that Bar Khôni’s phrase refers to the gradual purification of this world of ours by Srôsh.

Bar Khôni also makes the appearance of this last Legate responsible for the appearance of man upon the earth, as to which he recites a story which seems at first sight to be an elaboration of the Gnostic and Manichaean tradition preserved by the Christians and mentioned above. The Legate, he makes 329Manes say, was of both sexes, and on his appearance in the Sun-ship, both the male and female rulers of Darkness became so filled with desire that they began to give up the light which they had taken from the sons of the First Man. With this was mingled their own sin, half of which fell into the sea and there gave birth to a horrible monster like the King of Darkness. This was conquered and slain by Adamas of the Light, but that which fell upon the land fructified as the five kinds of trees^[1138]. Moreover, the female demons, who were pregnant at the time, miscarried and their untimely births ate of the buds of the trees. Yet these females remembered the beauty of the Legate whom they had seen, and Asaqlun or Saclas^[1139], son of the King of Darkness, persuaded them to give him their sons and daughters, in order that he might make from them an image of the Legate. This they did, when he ate the male children and his wife Namraël consumed the female. In consequence Namraël gave birth to a son and a daughter who were called Adam and Eve. Jesus was sent to Adam and found him sleeping a sleep of death, but awoke him, made him stand upright, and gave him to eat of the Tree of Life, while he separated him from his too seductive companion. This story is not confirmed by any of the new documents; and in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say whether it contains an old Asiatic tradition, of which the Biblical accounts of the protoplasts and of the Sons of God making love to the daughters of men are the only remnants which have till now come down to us, or whether—as is at least as likely—the whole story is a blend by the Manichaeans of Jewish, Mandaite, and Pagan legends. The main point in it for our consideration is its introduction of a Jesus who is certainly not the same as the 330Jesus patibilis whom St Augustine and the other Christian Fathers make Manes describe as born of the Living Spirit and the Earth, and as hanging on every tree. This other Jesus, who came to the earth in the time of Adam, is a fourth emissary or Saviour put forth by the second and third creations according to the Fihrist and called by Bar Khôni “Jesus the shining one.” In the Turfan texts he is, as has been said, perhaps equated with the Virgin of Light, and in the Tun-huang treatise he is spoken of as “Jesus the Victorious^[1140].” Evidently he is conceived as one of the Burkhans or Buddhas who fight against the Powers of Darkness, and the Jesus patibilis is but another name for the fragments of light or “armour” of the First Man left on this earth. The borrowing of the name revered among Christians is but one of the compromises by which the Manichaeans hoped to draw those of other faiths into their net.

A like plasticity is shown in the organization of the Manichaean Church. The first disciples of Manes, to whom he gave special commandments, were, according to Christian tradition, only seven in number, in which if anywhere in the system we may see a reflexion of the seven Amshaspands of the Avesta^[1141]. But later there seems to have been instituted a band of twelve Apostles in manifest imitation of the Apostles of Jesus, who perhaps corresponded to the Masters or highest degree that we have seen called the Sons of Gentleness. These were presided over by a Manichaean Pope who figured as the representative and Vicegerent of Manes himself. There were also seventy-two bishops answering to the seventy-two disciples of Christ, who are perhaps to be identified with the Sons of Knowledge. Then came the Presbyters or Sons of Intelligence whose functions were chiefly those of missionaries and who were perpetually, like Faustus, travelling for the propagation of the faith^[1142]. This seems 331to have been the organization generally adopted for Christian countries, and we meet with it there up to a very late date. Yet there is no reason to suppose that it was necessarily copied by the Manichaeans of Central Asia or India, or that the Manichaeans always obeyed some central authority. What organization they did adopt outside Europe and Africa we shall probably have to wait to discover when more of the documents coming from Turkestan have been deciphered.

The extreme simplicity of the Manichaean ritual also made easy to them all such adaptations to the ways of their neighbours. Hating images with as much energy, perhaps, as Zoroaster himself, they had neither statues nor lights nor incense in their meeting-places, which must in the West have been as bare and as unadorned as a Scottish conventicle. The whole service seems to have consisted of hymns and prayers, in the first of which the mythology of the sect doubtless found expression, while the second mainly consisted of those praises of the Powers of Light, which praises were thought, as has been said, to have an actual and objective existence and thus to fulfil a considerable part in the scheme of redemption. Up to the present we have very few examples of the hymns. The Hymn of the Soul, of which Prof. Bevan has published an English translation, is probably Manichaean in origin^[1143], and St Augustine tells of a “love song” in which the Father, meaning thereby probably Srôsh, the third legate^[1144], is represented as presiding at a banquet crowned with flowers and bearing a sceptre, while twelve gods, three from each quarter of the globe, are grouped round him “clothed in flowers” singing praises and laying flowers at his feet. These are said to represent the seasons^[1145]; and we hear also of myths doubtless expressed in song describing 332the great angel Splenditenens, whose care is the portions of Light still imprisoned in matter and who is always bewailing their captivity^[1146]; and of his fellow angel Omophorus who, as has been said, bears the world on his shoulders like the classical Atlas^[1147]. Doubtless, too, some of these hymns described that last conflagration, which seems to have occupied so great a place in the speculations of the early Manichaeans, when the justified faithful, secure in the two great ships which sail about on the ocean of the upper air, shall behold the world in flames and the last portion of the imprisoned Light mounting in the Column of Praises, while Satan and his hosts are confined for ever in the gross and dark matter which is henceforth to be their portion^[1148]. Possibly the Turfan discoveries may yet recover for us some important fragments of this lost literature.

With regard to the prayers, we are a little better informed. “Free us by thy skill, for we suffer here oppression and torture and pollution, only that thou (the First Man?) mayest mourn unmolested in thy kingdom,” is one of those which St Augustine has preserved for us^[1149]. So, too, the Mahommedan tradition has handed down a series of six doxologies or hymns of praise out of a total of twelve which seem to have been obligatory, perhaps on all Manichaeans, but certainly on the Perfect. The suppliant is, we are told, to stand upright, to wash in running water or something else, in which we may perhaps see either the origin or an imitation of the ceremonial ablutions of the Mussulman, then to turn towards the Great Light, to prostrate himself and to say:

“Blessed be our guide, the Paraclete, the Messenger of the 333Light. Blessed be his angels, his guards, and highly praised his shining troops.”

Then he is to rise and, prostrating himself again, to say:

“Thou highly-esteemed one, O thou shining Mânî our guide, thou the root of illumination, branch of uprightness, thou the great tree, thou who art the sovereign Remedy.”

A third prostration, and the praise runs:

“I prostrate myself and praise with a pure heart and a sincere tongue, the Great God, the Father of the Lights and of their elements, the most highly praised, the glorified, thee and all thy Majesty and thy blessed worlds that thou hast called forth! To praise thee is to praise equally thy troops, thy justified ones, thy word, thy majesty, thy good pleasure. For thou art the God who is all Truth, all Life, and all Justice.”

Then comes a fourth prostration and the sentence:

“I praise all the gods, all the shining angels, all the lights, and all the troops who are from the Great God, and I prostrate myself before them.”

The speech after the fifth prostration is:

“I prostrate myself and I praise the great troops, and the shining gods who, with their Wisdom spread over the Darkness, pursue it and conquer it.”

While the sixth, and last given in full, is simply:

“I prostrate myself and I praise the Father of Majesty, the eminent one, the shining one who has come forth from the two sciences^[1150].”

It seems fairly plain that these praises are addressed not so much to the “King of the Paradise of Light” or Highest God of Goodness as to the lesser Powers of Light. The recent expeditions of European scholars to Central Asia have succeeded in recovering for us almost in full the Confession-Prayer repeated 334ritually by the Manichaean Hearers or laymen which, besides confirming the Christian and Mahommedan accounts of Manes’ teaching summarized above, shows a greater belief in the efficacy of repentance and the enforcement of a stricter morality upon all classes of Manichaeans than we should have imagined from the accounts of their adversaries^[1151]. We are fortunate in possessing more than one text of this Confession-Prayer, that found by the energy of our English emissary, Dr (now Sir Marc Aurel) Stein, in the “Cave of the Thousand Buddhas” at Tun-huang, proving almost identical with the one discovered in Turfan by the Russian Expedition and now in St Petersburg, while both can be checked and supplemented by fragments also found at Turfan by Profs. Grünwedel’s and von Le Coq’s expeditions to the same place and taken to Berlin^[1152]. The title and first few lines of this prayer have been lost, owing to the fact that the Chinese plan of writing on a continuous sheet of paper many yards in length, which was then rolled up with the last lines innermost, was adopted by its transcribers. All the specimens yet found are in Turkish, the Russian MS. being in the dialect called after the nation using it, Ouigour or Uighur, and like that found by Dr Stein and the Berlin fragments, in the Manichaean modification of the Estranghelo or Syriac script. The prayer or litany is in 15 sections or classes, the number having doubtless a mystical reference^[1153], and is followed in the Russian and English examples by a recapitulation which is not without value. The version which follows is a compound 335of all the three sources mentioned above, and has been here divided into three parts, although it is not so in the original, for convenience of commentary.

KHUASTUANIFT.

Sect. I. “[The Son of?] the God Khormuzta even the Fivefold God descended from the heavens with the purity of all the gods, to war against the Demon; he (the Fivefold God) battled against the Shimnus^[1154] of evil deeds, and against the five species of the Kingdom of the Demons. God and the Devil, Light and Darkness then intermingled. The youth of the Divine Khormuzta even the Fivefold God, and our souls, joined battle with Sin and the Demon-world and became ensnared and entangled with it. All the princes of the Demons came with the insatiable and shameless Demon of Envy and a hundred and forty myriads of demons banded together in evil intent, ignorance, and folly. He himself, the Born and Created (i.e. the Fivefold God or son of Khormuzta) forgot the eternal heaven of the Gods and became separated from the Gods of Light. Hence, O my God! if the Shimnu (Great Devil) of evil intent has led astray our thoughts and inclined us to devilish deeds.—If, becoming thereby foolish and without understanding, we have sinned and erred against the foundation and root of all bright spirits, even against the pure and bright Azrua the Lord^[1155].—If thereby Light and Darkness, God and the Devil have intermingled ...

here follows a lacuna of several pages which Prof. von Le Coq suggests was filled with “an explanation of the allegorical story of the combat” and its practical application.

“... If we have said ... is its foundation and root.—If we have said if anyone animates a body it is God; or that if anyone kills, it is God.—If we have said Good and Evil have alike been created by God. If we have said it is He [God] who has created the eternal 336Gods. If we have said the Divine Khormuzta and the Shimnu (Great Devil) are brethren^[1156]. O my God, if in our sin we have spoken such awful blasphemies, having unwittingly become false to God. If we have thus committed this unpardonable sin. O my God, I N.N.^[1157] now repent. To cleanse myself from sin, I pray: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (My sin remit!)”

Sect. II. “When because of the God of the Sun and Moon and of the Gods enthroned in the two resplendent Palaces, the foundation and root of the light of all the Burkhans^[1158] of Earth and Water go to the heaven prepared for their assembly (foundation and root), the first gate they reach is the God of the Sun and Moon. In order to deliver the Fivefold God and to sever the Light from the Darkness he rolls along the lower part of the heavens in fulness and lights up the four corners of the earth. O my God, if in our sin we have unwittingly sinned against the God of the Sun and Moon, the Gods enthroned in the two resplendent Palaces. If, although calling him the True, Mighty, and Powerful God, we have not believed in him. If we have uttered many spoken blasphemies. If we have said the God of the Sun and Moon dies, and his rise and setting comes [?] not by [his own?] strength, and that should he [trust to his?] own strength, he will not rise [?]. If we have said, our own bodies were created before the Sun and Moon. To cleanse ourselves from this unwitting sin also, we pray: Manâstâr hîrzâ (Our sin remit).”

Sect. III. “Since, in defence of the Fivefold God, even the youth of the Divine Khormuzta, his five members, that is to say, First, the God of the Ether; Secondly, the God of the Wind; Thirdly, the God of the Light; Fourthly, the God of the Water; Fifthly, the God of the Fire, having battled against Sin and the 337Demon-world were ensnared and entangled^[1159], and have intermingled with the Darkness. Since they were unable to go to the heaven of God and are now upon the earth. Since the ten heavens above, the eight earths beneath, exist on account of the Fivefold God. Since of everything that is upon the earth the Fivefold God is the Majesty, the Radiance [?], the Likeness, the Body, the Soul, the Strength, the Light, the Foundation and the Root. O my God, if in our sin we have unwittingly offended against or caused grief to the Fivefold God by an evil and wicked mind. If we have allowed our fourteen members to gain domination over us. If by taking animated beings with our ten snake-headed fingers and our thirty-two teeth, we have fed upon them and have thus angered and grieved the Gods [?]^[1160]. If we have in any way sinned against the dry and wet earth, against the five kinds of animals, and against the five kinds of herbs and trees. O my God, to cleanse ourselves from sin, so pray we now: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (Our sin remit!)”

Sect. IV. “If we have unwittingly sinned against the divine Burkhans of the hosts (of the Messenger God^[1161]) and against the merit-attaining pure Elect. If although we have called them the true and divine Burkhans and the well-doing and pure Elect, we have not believed on them. If although we have uttered the word of God, we have through folly acted against it and not performed it [?]. If instead of spreading the decrees and commandments, we have impeded them. O my God, we now repent and to cleanse ourselves from sin, we pray: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (Our sin remit!)”

Sect. V. “If we have wandered into sin against the five kinds of animated beings, that is to say, First, against two-footed man; Secondly, against the four-footed animals; Thirdly, against the flying animals; Fourthly, against the animals in the water; Fifthly, against the animals upon earth which creep on their bellies. O my God, if in our sin against these five kinds of animated and moving 338beings from the great to the small, we have beaten and wounded, abused, and injured, and pained, or even put them to death. If thus we have become the tormentors of so many animated and moving beings. O my God, to cleanse ourselves from sin, so pray we now: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (Our sin remit!)”