Note 1047 — Chapter XIII · MANES AND THE MANICHAEANS
Reading edition
En Nadîm in Kessler, op. cit. p. 388; Flügel, op. cit. p. 87. As the ancients were unacquainted with the properties of gases, it is singular that they should have formed such a conception as that of the compressibility and expansibility of spirits. Yet the idea is a very old one, and the Arabian Nights story of the Genius imprisoned in a brass bottle has its parallel in the bowls with magical inscriptions left by the Jews on the site of Babylon (Layard, Nineveh and Babylon, 1853, pp. 509 sqq.), between pairs of which demons were thought to be imprisoned. Cf. Pognon, op. cit. p. 3. Something of the kind seems indicated in the “Little Point,” from which all material powers spring, referred to by Hippolytus and the Bruce Papyrus.