Mani, the Ambassador of Ligh

His Life and Times

"Eastern Gnosticism took a somewhat different course. Under the influence of traditional Iranian religion, the semi-Gnostic Manichaeism developed an absolute cosmic dualism between soul and matter. Moreover, it showed the enormous influence of Syrian asceticism, but it was equally rooted in popular Gnosticism and preserved its essential doctrines."
     - Encyclopaedia Britannica

"A more extreme form of this dualistic religion was Manicheanism, named after its founder, the Persian sage Mani. Mani was born about AD 215 to a family whose religious beliefs were culled from a number of sources. Mani himself was initiated into the mysteries of Mithra, and he studied early Christian heretical sects before establishing his own religious philosophy in about AD 240, at the Persian court of King Shapur 1. Mani and his followers regarded the world as irreconcilably divided into the kingdoms of light and darkness, good and evil. They believed that Satan, born from the darkness, had robbed part of the light - or goodness - from primal man. Mani proclaimed himself the 'ambassador of the light' and set out a system by which humans could rid themselves of the darkness. Manichaeans practiced extreme asceticism in their struggle toward the light. They were forbidden, for example, to kill any animal or plant for food; in fact, they were even enjoined against the breaking of a single twig."
     - Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects

"My Lord! We are full of defects and sins, we are deep in guilt; because of the insatiable shameless demon of greed we always and incessantly, in thought, word and deed, and in seeing with our eyes, in hearing with our ears in speaking with our mouths, in grasping with our hands, and in walking with our feet, torment the Light of the Five Gods, the dry and the wet earth, the five kinds of animals, the five kinds of herbs and trees."
     - Manichaean Prayer

"Manes, redeemed from slavery by a rich Persian widow, whence he was called the 'son of the widow', and his disciples 'sons of the widow'..."
     - Charles William Heckethorn, The Secret Societies of All Ages and Countries

"The followers of Mani, known as the 'Sons of the Widow' in memory of the widowed Isis and of the Osirian mysteries of Egypt were accused of the crime of believing the spirit of God to be Light..."
"Mani was taught by "the Egyptian philosopher and magician Terebinthus."
     - Peter Tompkins, The Magic of Obelisks

"In the 'Hymn of the Pearl', a gnostic myth preserved in the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, a prince is sent into Egypt to recover the lost pearl. However, he falls under the spell of Egyptian magic and forgets who he is, where he has come from, and his destiny. meanwhile his twin, or double, continues to exist in his home. This double is his true self, his transcendental identity, who sends forth messengers to awaken his memory and recall him to himself. As the prince returns to his heavenly home, his double comes forth to meet him.
"In gnostic lore, the spiritual counterpart is sometimes experienced as an angel. Another version is the doctrine of the spiritual union, or syzygy, consisting of the feminine soul and her masculine counterpart, the spirit. (Twinship may also be shared by brother and sister; indeed, ancient Iranians believed that every man had a celestial image in the form of a beautiful maiden, with whom he was united on the third day after his death.) In Manichaeism, the spiritual double is, again, the twin. Mani...claimed to have a 'twin self' in the heavens, who came down and united with him, bringing revelations from the deity."
     - An Encyclopedia of Archetypal Symbolism

"...Mani organized his followers into two groups. There were the 'elect', who lived a monastic and celibate life, and there were the 'hearers', who were allowed to marry, eat meat, drink wine, etc. The hearers had to make annual confession of these transgressions, to undertake certain penitential fasts, and to contribute to the maintenance of the order of the elect. These arrangements reflected Buddhist categories - in the division between the Sangha and the laity, who were also called 'hearers' by the Buddhists.
     - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

"Mani traveled into what is now western China and as far south as India to spread his gospel. Although he had been held in high regard at the Persian court, by the time he returned home around AD 270, the royal milieu had changed. The priestly caste of the ancient Persian religion Zoroastrianism resented Mani's presence and succeeded in exerting considerable political pressure on the new king, Bharam I, to get rid of him. Mani was imprisoned, and in AD 276, he was crucified and his corpse flayed."
"After his death, a trusted group of followers carried on the Manichean traditions, including its initiation rites and the use of its secret symbols and passwords; one annual ceremony commemorated the death of the prophet."
     - Ancient Wisdom and Secret Sects

His Teachings

Mani "regarded Zarathustra, Buddha and Jesus as his forerunners and declared that he, like them, had received essentially the same enlightenment from the same source. His teachings consisted of a Gnostic dualism wedded to an imposing and elaborate cosmological edifice. Pervading everything was the universal conflict of light and darkness; and the most important battlefield for these two opposed principles was the human soul. Like the later Cathars, Mani espoused the doctrine of reincarnation. Like the Cathars, too, he insisted on an initiate class, an 'illuminated elect'. He referred to Jesus as the 'Son of the Widow' - a phrase subsequently appropriated by Freemasonry. At the same time he declared Jesus to be mortal - or, if divine at all, divine only in a symbolic or metaphorical sense, by virtue of enlightenment. And Mani, like Basilides, maintained that Jesus did not die on the cross, but was replaced by a substitute."
     - Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail

"Mani had preached a synchretic doctrine combining Buddhist, Zoroastrian, and Christian ideas, wherein the Old Testament Creator was identified with the Zoroastrian power of darkness and deception, Angra Mainyu, and these two, in turn, with the Buddhist principle of delusion (maya), by which the mind is turned from the pure light of unconditioned consciousness and made captive by the fascination of those things, mixed of light and darkness, that are the passing phenomena of this spatially and temporally conditioned universe of names and forms. He correlated both the Christian and Zoroastrian prophecies of a literal end of the world with the purely psychological Buddhist doctrine of illumination (bodhi) as the end of delusion (maya), declaring that the former, the literal end, would result when the latter, a total realization of illumination, had been achieved. And he associated the world-abandoning doctrine of social disengagement preached by Jesus and illustrated by his forty days in the desert with the Great Departure and world-abandonment of the Buddha."
     - Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

"In certain primeval events which he described in a mythological and poetical manner, particles of light became imprisoned in the dark material world. The aim of the pious was to liberate these particles, so that they could return to the heavenly world of light. The way to accomplish this was by severe asceticism, including abstention from meat-eating, and abstention from sexual intercourse, which in generating new bodies, promoted the continued imprisonment of the light particles or souls in the demonic material world."
     - Ninian Smart, The Religious Experience of Mankind

"We know the Manichaeans had a theory of Three Phases in the history of the universe: firstly, the anterior phase when the two opposing principles - the light filled with wisdom and the darkness of stupidity - exist separately; then a middle phase in which the light is attacked by the darkness and the 'muddle' is produced; and, thirdly, the conclusive phase, which is that of a definitive restoration of the primordial separation. This notion of Three Phases, derived from Iranian myths, underlies all the Gnostic systems..."
     - Jean Doresse, The Secret Books of the Egyptian Gnostics

"Darkness rises up against light, and this stirs the world of Light, which is too peaceable to resist, to create a savior, Primal Man. Primal Man is defeated, and the soul is taken as booty and fettered in impurity. Primal Man regains consciousness and calls on the Father.
"This results in the second creation, producing the Living Spirit who releases Primal Man. Soul is still imprisoned, but this pre-liberation is the guarantee of salvation. The Living Spirit now creates the cosmos, but out of the remains of the powers of evil. The world is an embodiment of the Arch Power of Darkness, and a prison for all the powers of Darkness, and only a small potion of Light is left within it. Built is the scene of the Soul's purification.
"Now the Father performs His third act of creation, the Messenger, who is to be liberator and savior. He forms plants and animals. The King of Darkness counters by forming Adam and Eve as a prison for the soul; the human body is thus designed by the powers of darkness. The powers of Light send Jesus, who is an emanation of the Messenger. Jesus makes Adam eat from the Tree of Knowledge (the Jewish myth is turned on its head), and reveals himself as the personification of all the Light imprisoned in matter, the suffering form of Primal Man, who 'every day is born, suffers and dies', who 'hangs from every tree', who is thus redeemer and redeemed."
     - John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions

"I am in everything. I bear the skies. I am the foundation. I support the earths. I am the Light that shines forth, that gives joy to the souls.
I am the life of the world; I am the milk that is in all trees; I am the sweet water that is beneath the sons of matter...
I bore these things until I had fulfilled the will of my father; the First Man is my father whose will I have carried out...
O soul, raise your eyes to the height and contemplate your bond...look, your Fathers are calling you."
     - Manichaean Psalm

"There had then come to Carthage a certain Bishop of the Manichees, Faustus by name, a great snare of the Devil, and many were entangled by him through that lure of his smooth language: which though I did commend, yet could I separate from the truth of the things which I was earnest to learn: nor did I so much regard the service of oratory as the science which this Faustus, so praised among them, set before me to feed upon. Fame had before bespoken him most knowing in all valuable learning, and exquisitely skilled in the liberal sciences. And since I had read and well remembered much of the philosophers, I compared some things of theirs with those long fables of the Manichees, and found the former the more probable; even although they could only prevail so far as to make judgment of this lower world, the Lord of it they could by no means find out."
     - Saint Augustine, Confessions

"Saint Augustine (354-430) was a Manichaean for nine critical years before accepting the Christian faith of his mother, Saint Monica, and composing then his dualistic work, The City of God. Every bit of his enormously influential theology is shot through with a Gnostic-Manichaean revulsion of the flesh, his principal change, ontologically, having been simply from the Manichaean doctrine of the immanence of divine light as the life within all beings to the Christian doctrine of the absolute transcendence of divinity - which, nevertheless, is the life that animates the life within all beings."
     - Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology

"Thou art not the bodies, nay not yet the soul, which is the life of bodies. But Thou art the life of souls."
     - Saint Augustine, Confessions

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