Note 523 — Chapter I · (continued 3)

The author of the Dabistán names no other famous teachers or sectaries of Magism, after the death of Zoroaster, besides Ardai Viraf, Azarbád, and Mazdak: he treats of this last in particular in the subsequent section, previously to which we cannot omit adverting to Mani or Manes, whose name occurs in this book but once occasionally, as that of a painter (see note, p. 205). He is however much more reputed as the founder of a new doctrine, called from him Manichæism, which spread its ramifications widely through the Christian world. According to several authors, Mani was a Christian priest, and pretended to act the part of Paraclet, the announced successor to Jesus Christ; according to Khondemir, he endeavored to substitute himself for Mohammed, to whom that prophecy respecting a Paraclet was applied by the Muselmans. However it be, Mani’s Enghelion, or Gospel, has not been preserved, nor any other work written by himself; the books of his followers too, such as could be found, were burnt. His religion is stated to have been a mixture of Magism, Brahmanism or Buddhism, Judaism, and Christianism; Shahristani, often quoted in this work, and Mohammed Ibn el Nedim el Werrak, author of the Fehrist (a history of literature), agree in representing his doctrine as a branch of Magism with some Christianism ingrafted upon it.

The two points attributed to Mani by the commentator of the Desátir, namely, the permission to kill harmless animals, and the prohibition of sexual intercourse, belong rather to the ethical or practical, than to the theological, part of his religion, which distinguished itself by particular dogmas and opinions relative to the duality of principle, good and bad, light and darkness, involving other metaphysical questions. These, we know, were common to other religions in all times. Before Manes, Christian sects combined the said principles with the dogmas of their religion: so did the followers of Basilides, Marcion, Bardesanes, Valentius, and others. These, as well as after them the disciples of Manes, happen to be not seldom confounded with the Gnostics, which name was applied to different sectaries, chiefly Neo-platonics, from the earliest to later times of Christianism. The Manichæans rejected the Old Testament entirely, and partly the New, which they interpreted according to their opinion. They disputed about the nature of Jesus, and modified Christian theology; they believed a region inhabited by God and the pure spirits, prior to the creation; a world, created of an eternal and self-existing matter; ten heavens and eight earths; two empires, the one of light and the other of darkness; the last, ruled by the great Lord, called “matter;” demons with material souls and bodies; the soul no part of the divinty, but united with the body to govern it; two souls in every man; the propagation of souls; a transmigration of souls into animals; the stars, and every thing in nature, even the stones, animated; the rotundity of heaven and of the earth; antipodes; and other theses too many to be all enumerated in this place. They had besides particular rites of worship, from which the veneration of the sun, the moon, and other stars, was not excluded; they were averse to matrimony, and generally austere in their manners. See about this extensive subject the Mémoires of the learned Abbé Foucher, in the Hist. de l’Acad. Royale des Insc. et Belles-Lett., t. xxix, and the work quoted, Hist. crit. de Manichée, by Beausobre.—A. T.