Note 1046 — Chapter XIII · MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS

See Chapter XII, p. 251 supra. Here, again, the traditional and monstrous figure of Satan may have been copied from the sculptured representations of the composite demons of Babylonia (e.g. Rogers, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, Frontispiece and Figs. 1 and 13). Yet if we take the Mithraic lion, as M. Cumont would have us do, as the symbol of fire and the serpent as that of the earth, we have in the five sorts of animals the five στοιχεῖα or elements of Aristotle. Cf. Aetius, de Placitis Philosophorum, ed. Didot, Bk I. c. iii. § 38 (Plutarch, Moralia, II.), p. 1069. Yet the nearest source from which Manes could have borrowed the idea is certainly Bardesanes, who, according to Bar Khôni and another Syriac author, taught that the world was made from five substances, i.e. fire, air, water, light and darkness. See Pognon, op. cit. p. 178; Cumont, La Cosmogonie Manichéenne d’après Théodore bar Khôni, Bruxelles, 1908, p. 13, n. 2.