Franz Cumont
1908
translated by Jason Colavito
2025
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NOTE |
Franz Cumont (1868-1947) was a Belgian archaeologist and historian who became famous for his work attempting to reconstruct and analyze Late Antique religions, including Mithraism and Manichaeism. Although his views on Mithras as a derivative of the Persian god Mithra have not withstood modern scrutiny, his 1908 study of Manichaean cosmology through the lens of the extracts made by the eighth-century Syrian Christian Theodore bar Konai remains a foundational account of the Manichaean faith. Below, I present this study in English for the first time. For this version, to make reading easier, I have dispensed with the largely outdated scholarly apparatus (I have moved his citations to key texts to parenthetical references) and have quietly revised the quotation marks away from the old French style to better distinguish between Cumont’s words and those of his sources. Cumont’s appendix on the Seduction of the Archons, referenced in the text, can be found on its own page, and two of his key sources, Chapter 11 of Theodore bar Konai’s Book of the Scholion and Chapter 9 of ibn al-Nadim’s Fihrist, are linked here. Cumont offered a slightly different translation of Theodore than Henri Pognon, whose translation is the basis for my own, so the quotations Cumont uses do not always match perfectly those on my page for Theodore.
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THE MANICHAEAN COSMOLOGY
According to Theodore bar Konai
In 1898, Mr. Pognon published, with a good French translation, extensive extracts from the Book of the Scholion by Theodore bar Konai, Nestorian bishop of Kashkar, who appears to have lived at the end of the 6th or the beginning of the 7th century. The eleventh book of his work contains an “enumeration of the sects which appeared at various times,” and it gives in particular the most detailed exposition that we possess of the Manichaean cosmogony. This exposition is more complete than the succinct summary found in Greek in the Acta Archelaï and less altered than the philosophical transpositions of the doctrine which are refuted by Alexander of Lycopolis or by Titus of Bostra. It even provides data which one would seek in vain in the very important passages of ibn al-Nadim in the Fihrist, which Flügel formerly edited and commented on with sagacious erudition. This relatively pure Arabic source, where a faded but faithful image of the Genesis according to Mani appears, derives from an approximate translation. Theodore, on the contrary, and this circumstance significantly increases the value of his testimony, wrote in Syriac, in the Syriac of Babylonia which sometimes resembles Mandaean, that is, in the very language used by Mani, and he has preserved for us, in particular, the original form of the names attributed by the latter to the celestial or infernal spirits who intervene in creation.
However, not all that can be provided from this precious text seems to have been extracted, and even its editor, far from exaggerating its value, as often happens, seems rather to have undervalued it. “It is evident,” he observes, “that, in order to ridicule the Manichaeans, Theodore bar Konai, instead of clearly expounding their dogmas, cited, one after the other, phrases borrowed from the works of Mani.” This is, in fact, more or less the procedure he uses: He introduces with the words “he says” a series of extracts from a book which he strips rather than summarizes, and if these cuttings have, better than the more systematic summaries or commentaries, preserved the dramatic form that the prophet had lent to his ideas on the origin of things, their apparent disjointedness can make them be taken at first sight for a series of enigmas and nonsensical interchanges. The sequence of ideas does not appear immediately in an abridgement where the transitions are skipped; but a little attention is enough to convince oneself that the sequence of facts reported by the Syriac scholiast forms a continuous development and that the whole story is from a single narrative. This conclusion will become a certainty, if we compare the somewhat incoherent mythology of Theodore with the very concise summary of the Acta Archelai (ch. 7.): Despite the difference in the two redactions, we will easily realize that the sequence of events is the same on both sides and that the two narratives go back to a common source, from which is also derived at least in part the cosmogony expounded in the Fihrist.
We know the titles of all the writings left by Mani, and to some extent their character. Among them, the one where we would be tempted to look first for the origin of our three derivatives, Syriac, Arabic and Greek, it is the Book of Giants which recounted the battles sustained at the origin of the world by hellish monsters rising up against heaven. But the little that we know of its content agrees badly with such a hypothesis, and it seems that in this book Mani has implemented, by adapting them to his system, the rich epic legends of Iran, which filled a good part of the Avesta and which later still provided Ferdowsi with admirable material to put into Persian verse. We do not find anything like it in our cosmogonic fragments.
This is, I think, a much less developed work than the Book Giants which was read and summarized by Christian and Muslim writers: the Fundamental Epistle (Epistula Fundamenti) from which St. Augustine has preserved for us long Latin extracts. These allow us to form a fairly accurate account of the subject of this letter. Addressed to a certain Patticius, it covered “what had existed before the creation of the world and in what manner the battle was fought which made it possible to separate light from darkness”; it recounted “the struggle waged by God against the nation of darkness and how he had mixed with their demonic nature a part of his substance which was to be bound and defiled by it”, and it continued this narration until the coming into the world of Adam and Eve. Now, as we shall see, this is precisely, neither more nor less, all that Theodore bar Konai reports. Moreover, it is sometimes noted that where it seems to deviate from the tradition of the Acta Archelai, this divergence is explained by a different borrowing made from the narrative of the Fundamental Epistle, and not by the use of two distinct sources. We can therefore conclude with great probability that the Syriac text of this letter provided Theodore not only with the substance of his narration but also with the very form of certain sentences. This philological question could be resolved with certainty if the Epistula had not undergone a real reworking in the version used by St. Augustine. The barbaric names have been replaced by vague “virtues” or powers, and the cosmic geniuses, living and acting in the great epic of Mani, have become pale abstractions without personality. We are undoubtedly dealing with a watered-down Latin translation of a translation in which the Greek philosophical spirit had already altered the religious thought of the Babylonian prophet, and Hellenic taste discreetly corrected the deviations of its oriental imagination.
Theodore not only has the merit of repeating to us in their original vigor the very words of Mani. He has indicated in their order of succession all the decisive events of the action that unfolds in the universe from its primordial state to the moment when man acquires the knowledge of good and evil. None of the modern historians who have dealt with the Manichean creation of the world has sufficiently distinguished the different acts of this great cosmic drama. Theodore’s account, despite its gaps, allows us to mark its decisive twists and turns; thanks to him, we can place in their proper place the scattered data in the Greek and Latin controversialists, and above all, the extracts cited by St. Augustine. Even the truncated and gap-ridden fragments of Persian translations, deciphered with difficulty on the shreds of Manichean manuscripts recently brought back from Chinese Turkestan, can be compared with the extracts of the Syrian bishop and are illuminated by their contact. By gathering the membra disjecta of tradition, we will succeed in bringing this torn body back to life, and we will be able to form some idea of this cosmogony of splendid extravagance, which borders on both gigantomachy and apocalypse.
“Before the existence of heaven and earth and all that is in them, there were two principles, one good and the other evil.” This beginning from Theodore clearly defines the subject: what we are going to learn is how heaven and earth were first created, then everything that is in them, that is to say, the stars on the one hand, plants, animals and man on the other. He then affirms the antithesis of the two opposing principles and formulates this dualism, or rather this ditheism, which Mani borrowed from the Mazdeans and developed with more consistent rigor. For him, as for the Magi, God resides in the infinite clarity of the sky which opposes the bottomless darkness of the infernal abysses. “The good principle,” continues Theodore, “dwells in the land of light and is called the Father of Grandeur.” This is the supreme being, whom a Greek source calls τὸν τετραπρόσωπον Πατέρα τοῦ Μεγέθους (“the Four-Face Father of Greatness”), because he is sometimes conceived as formed of four divine persons. He sits in the upper part of the world in the “land of light,” the terra lucida of the Latin translation, resplendent, eternal and blessed like him.
“Outside the Father,” continues the scholiast, “are his five dwellings, intelligence, reason, thought, reflection, and will.” The “land of light” is divided into five superimposed regions, which are the divine “dwellings.” But Manichean theology, which is a split pantheism, conceives of God as filling these spaces entirely: they are, as the Fihrist says, his “members,” his parts, although they are also “outside of him.” Although having an existence distinct from him, they participate in his substance. The Syriac term itself, which Mâni used, škintâ, already had a double meaning before him. It properly means “dwelling, habitation,” but it is also used to designate the divine “glory” or “majesty,” without our being able to see by what transition it passed from the material to the abstract sense. Further on (p. 11) these “dwellings” are likened to “worlds” or “centuries” or “aeons”, because the word used (‘âlam) means all of these things. There is no doubt that pagan theology had already used and abused these amphibological terms before the conversion of the Syrians to Christianity. We must therefore regard the five “dwellings” of the Father as being at the same time his five attributes or, to borrow this term from Greek philosophy, his five hypostases: intelligence, reason, thought, reflection, will.
Opposite the Father, in the lower part of the universe, the “evil principle” also exercises a sovereign empire. This “King of Darkness resides in his gloomy land” which opposes the land of light. This pestilential land, of infinite depth and breadth, is also formed of five “worlds” all occupied by the infernal Spirit. First, there is that of smoke or fog, populated by nebulous and sooty beings, then that of a fire which does not purify but corrupts, then that of the furious and destructive wind, lower down that of the troubled and muddy waters, finally that of darkness, a bottomless abyss.
We may wonder what could have suggested to Mani the idea, surprising to us, of these five-story buildings, where he houses the opposing powers that divide the universe. It seems that he only reproduced, at least for the superposition of the lower regions, a concept common in Mesopotamia. A Syriac treatise on astronomy, which, in its current form, dates from the 6th century AD, but which “as a whole reflects old Chaldean doctrines barely modified by a few Greek elements,” teaches that “beneath the earth is the formidable sea of many waters, beneath the waters fire, beneath the fire wind, beneath the wind darkness” and, the author adds, “beneath the darkness, seek nothing.” The analogy with Mani’s doctrine is striking; only he increased the number of worlds from four to five, no doubt because his predecessor Bardesanes and other philosophers recognized five elements. He deifies them because in Persia as in Mesopotamia paganism worshipped these world-forming substances.
The two enemy princes, who had only one common border and whose domains extended on three sides without limits, could have lived eternally in peace, if the “King of Darkness” had not planned to ascend to the land of light, whose splendor aroused his lust. The disturbance introduced into the primitive order of things and which resulted in our current world was therefore due to the undertakings of the Spirit of Evil, as in Mazdaism, where Ahriman similarly emerges from the infernal abyss to rise towards the infinite brightness of Ormuzd.
“Then,” adds Theodore, “the five dwellings were afraid.” Indeed, the terrifying noise of this devastating incursion spread successively from each of the five worlds to the upper world, and was finally perceived by God himself. He put himself in a position to resist the invasion of his enemy. “Then the Father of Grandeur reflected and said: ‘Of my worlds (aeons), these five abodes, I will not send any to war, but I myself will go and fight against him,, because they were created for tranquility and peace.’” He did not want to expose his dwellings to the ravages of war and opposed a new power, issued from him, to the minions of hell to preserve, by destroying these invaders, “a perpetual tranquility for the inhabitants of the Light.” Moreover, the peaceful worlds of the Spirit of Good were incapable of doing harm even to their enemies. Therefore, “the Father of Greatness evoked the Mother of Life, the Mother of Life evoked Primitive Man.” For the Manicheans, these two new beings form a unity with the Father: thus is explained the expression used by the latter: “I will go myself and fight.” The first creation therefore has the effect of replacing the primitive One with a Trinity.
Where did Mani take the names of his second and third divine persons? He was certainly inspired, by modifying them, by certain systems taught by Christian sects. For the Gnostics of Irenaeus, the Trinity is composed of the Primitive Man (primus homo), who is the Father of the second man, who is the Son, and of the Mother of the Living (Mater Viventium), who is the Holy Spirit. We know that the word “spirit” (ruhá) is most often feminine in Aramaic. Bardesanes, whom Mani knew particularly well, also knew similar powers: in accordance with his astrological theories, he assimilated, we are told, the sun to the Father of Life and the moon to the Mother of Life.
As for Primitive Man, there are few concepts as widespread in the East. Already in Mazdaism, from which Mani seems to have borrowed it, he causes by his death the birth of the first human couple. An ingenious interpretation of this strange cosmogonic character has recently been proposed. The human sacrifice which, according to certain agrarian rites, annually ensured the fertility of the countryside, would have been transported by mythological imagination to the origins of the world. The latter, or at least the beings who populate it, would owe their formation and growth to the murder of a celestial man, just as the harvest germinates and grows following the immolation of the earthly victim. Whatever one thinks of this hypothesis, it is certain that the belief in a Primitive Man, the cause or occasion of creation, is found in India as in anterior Asia, among pagans as well as among Jews and Gnostics. These were therefore figures familiar to Easterners that Mani brought together to form his supreme triad.
Primitive Man, diverted from his ancient meaning, has the mission of repelling the assault of the powers of evil. “He evoked,” says Theodore, “his five sons, like a man who puts on armor for combat.” The obscure conciseness of this sibylline sentence is clarified by a comparison with other sources. Primitive Man gave birth to five elements, opposed to the “worlds” of the King of Darkness: clear air to smoke, refreshing wind to torrid wind, light to darkness, life-giving water to corrupted water, warming fire to devouring fire; then he clothed himself in them as in armor. “He covered himself first with the gentle breeze of the air,” says the Fihrist, “then wrapped himself in light as in a flaming cloak, threw over the light the fluidity of the waters, and then surrounded himself with the breath of the winds. Then he seized fire as his shield and spear, and rushed from the heights of paradise towards the threatened frontier of the empire of Good.” “An angel called Nahashbat,” adds Theodore, “preceded him, holding in his hand the crown of victory.” This is undoubtedly the one that the Greeks call Stephanophoros (Στεφανοφόρος).
The duel that ensued is nowhere recounted with more characteristic and picturesque details than by our Syrian author. “Primitive Man projected his light before him, and, seeing it, the King of Darkness reflected and said: ‘What I sought far away, I have found near me.’” He then armored himself, as his adversary had done, with his five elements, and marched to meet him. After they had fought for a long time, the victory leaned in favor of the infernal Spirit. “Then primitive Man gave himself as food with his five sons to the five sons of the Darkness, like a man who, having an enemy, mixes a deadly poison into a cake and gives it to him. When the sons of Darkness had eaten them, intelligence was taken from the five resplendent gods, and they became, through the poison of the sons of the Darkness, like a man bitten by a mad dog or by a serpent.”
Thus, all authors agree on this point: Primitive Man, with the five elements that shielded him, is defeated. He then resorts to a stratagem: He offers himself as prey to the demons, hoping in this way to amend their perversity and appease their bestial rage, but the opposite happens: the venom of the sons of Darkness obscures the intelligence of the celestial spirits.
The symbolism here is transparent, and the meaning of this myth has not escaped Greek commentators. Beneficial and harmful principles mingle in all things; the luminous and life-giving elements are held captive in the thickness of impure matter, as the human soul is in its bodily prison. For the world is a great animated being, and man is a microcosm: The spirit sometimes dominates the flesh in us, but more often the corruption that surrounds it blinds and perverts it. Likewise, the divine soul of the universe claimed to tame the dark powers and make them obey her “like a wild beast, made to lie down by a magic word” (Titus of Bostra Contra Manichæos 1.17); but she herself, having lost her power, became defiled by contact with them, “like the contents of an unclean vessel become infected” (Alexander of Lycopolis, Against the Manicheans 3).
Thus, the first battle delivered to the King of Darkness ended with the defeat of Primitive Man and his defenders. He succumbs, as in Mazdaism Gayômart dies under the blows of Ahriman, and, in both faiths, a temporary victory of the infernal Spirit serves to explain the existence of evil here below, which, for orthodox and Gnostic Christianity, is the consequence of an original Fall. Imprisoned and poisoned, the celestial envoys were struck with madness. But, says Theodore, “Primitive Man recovered his reason,” and, in his anguish, “he addressed a prayer seven times to the Father of Greatness.” The latter, moved with pity, wishes to help him. “He evoked, as a second creation, the Friend of the Lights, the Friend of the Lights evoked the great Ban, the Great Ban evoked the Living Spirit.”
Thus, compassionate to the sufferings of his creatures, the Father brings forth from his bosom a second divine triad. Like Mani, the ancient Babylonian religion placed at the head of the pantheon and at the origin of things two triads, the second of which is subordinate to the first, those of Anu, Bel, Ea and of Shamash, Sin, and Ishtar. The theological system of triads, single or double, was imposed even on the Syrian cults, to which it was originally foreign, and it was generally accepted by the pagan Semites at the time when Manichaeism was born. We will see (below) that the doctrine of the latter offers in particular a remarkable analogy with that of the Chaldaic Oracles, which seem to be roughly contemporary with its birth.
The new powers created by God are not depicted, except for the last, with a well-characterized personality. The Friend of Lights is named only once, and inappropriately at that, in the extract from the Fihrist; the Great Ban is not mentioned anywhere else except in Theodore, and his very name remains uncertain. As in the first trinity, the active person, who will intervene in the struggle, is the third, the Living Spirit, and it is, consequently, the only one who has penetrated into the Western tradition. This latter calls him sometimes, by translating his name exactly, τὸ Ζῶν Πνεῦμα, Spiritus Vivens, and sometimes, by interpreting it by a Greek equivalent, the Demiurge (Δημιουργός). It is he, in fact, who will form the world.
For the parallelism between the first and second creations of the Father to be perfect, the Living Spirit, like Primitive Man before him, must begin by giving birth to five sons. “He brought forth,” says Theodore, “from his intellect the Ornament of Splendor, from his reason the great King of Honor, from his thought Adamas-Light, from his reflection the King of Glory, and from his will the Bearer.”
An observation is necessary here. We see from this passage that the Living Spirit has the same faculties, or, to speak in the language of Mani, the same “dwellings,” as the Father of Greatness: intellect, reason, thought, reflection, and will. The prophet's theology did not, in fact, conceive the members of the two divine triads as distinct from the First Cause, which had called them into existence; they are its extensions, or, if we prefer this Neoplatonic term, emanations, but they are beings of the same nature and substance as the supreme God.
The five sons of the Living Spirit, his collaborators in the glorious work he was given to accomplish, were sung about by the Manicheans in their sacred hymns. St. Augustine describes each of them from one of these poems, with a few characteristic traits (Contra Faustem 15). He lists, in the same order as Theodore, the Ornament of Splendor or, as he says, the great Splenditenens, provided with six faces and sparkling with light; the King of Honor, surrounded by his armies of angels; Adamas, the warlike hero, holding the spear in his right hand and the shield in his left; the King of Glory, setting in motion the three wheels of fire, water and wind; and finally the gigantic Atlas, one knee bent, carrying on his shoulders the world which he supports with both hands. We will find the explanation of all this in the continuation of Theodore’s cosmogony.
“They went,” he says, “to the Land of Darkness and found Primitive Man absorbed by the Darkness, him and his five sons. Then the Living Spirit cried aloud, and this voice was like a sharpened sword and it revealed the form of Primitive Man.” By the sole virtue of the divine call, the celestial Man thus frees himself from the grasp of the infernal powers, he resumes his primitive form, and rises from the depths of the abyss. For the peoples of the East, speech is creative, speech is evocative, and mysterious names have limitless power over the spirit world. “The Living Spirit,” also says the Fihrist, “called Primitive Man aloud, and with the speed of lightning, Primitive Man became a god again.”
A dialogue then begins between the captive and his liberator. “The Living Spirit said: ‘Hail to you, good being in the midst of the wicked, luminous being in the midst of darkness, god who dwells in the midst of the animals of anger who do not know their honor.’ Primitive Man answered him: ‘Come in peace, you who bring a commodity of quietude and peace.’ He said to him again: ‘How are our fathers, the sons of light, in their city?’ The Caller answered him: ‘They are well.’” Then, after some obscure adventures (Theodore’s text here is difficult to understand), the Living Spirit brought Primitive Man out of his deep prison—by holding out his right hand to him, says the Acta (ch. 7),—and they rose into the higher spheres towards the Mother of Life.
The Living Spirit thus snatched their prey from the Darkness, or at least left them only the “armor” of their prisoner, the five useful elements which remained mixed with their harmful substances. The victorious Demiurge can now begin his creative work. “The Living Spirit,” says Theodore, “ordered three of his sons that one should kill, the other flay the Archons, sons of Darkness, and that they should bring them to the Mother of Life. The Mother of Life stretched the sky with their skins; she made eleven (or twelve) heavens. They threw their bodies onto the earth of Darkness; they made eight earths, and the five sons of the Living Spirit were initiated, each one to his task. It is the Ornament of Splendor which holds the five resplendent gods by their loins, and, below their loins, the heavens were extended. It is the Bearer who, kneeling on one of his knees, supports the earths. When the heavens and the earths had been made, the great King of Honor sat in the middle of the sky and stood guard to guard them all.” Here is one of the most surprising episodes of this strange cosmogony: the heavens would be formed from the stretched skins of the Archons or flayed demons. “To believe such extravagances,” says the reasonable Beausobre, “I would like better guarantors than [John of] Damascus and Epiphanius, who report them.” The oriental authors came to add their authorized testimony to the affirmations of the Greek Fathers Mani here only reproduces an old popular belief of his compatriots. It is found in the sacred literature of Mazdaism, and the Chaldaic Oracles also teach that a membrane (ὑμήν) separates the higher intellectual fire from the lower or cosmic fire. Did the doctrine thus propagated in various Asian cults originate from the comparison of the sky with a nomad’s tent covered with skins? Or did the firmament, studded with stars, remind hunters of the spotted fur of certain animals? It is difficult to know. But in Mani this naive idea is part of a broader conception, which supposes the entire world to be formed from the gigantic bodies of the “Archons.” “Their bodies were thrown onto the earth of Darkness,” says Theodore, and others specify: “the mountains were made of their bones, the earth of their flesh” (John of Damascus, Contra Manichaeos 29). Thus, all the parts of nature that surround us come from the filthy corpses of evil powers. Pessimism has rarely found a more striking imagination.
Here, Mani has taken the opposite view of a very ancient Indo-European myth: In India, as in Persia and among the Germans, we find the idea that the universe is formed from the various parts of an immolated victim, but this primitive victim is a god or a hero, while the Babylonian reformer made the whole world a great demonic body.
The heavens, which number not eleven or twelve but ten, as among the Pythagoreans, were supported by an immense genius, the Ornament of Light or Splenditenens, “who holds by his loins the five resplendent gods,” that is to say the five beneficent elements, partly remaining in the “earth of light,” while the rest had been seized by the demons during the great defeat of Primitive Man. The Latin translation used by St. Augustine had softened the crudeness of the Syriac expression and spoke simply of the Splenditenens who “holds the head of the elements and supports the suspended world.” Beneath these celestial elements, extends the firmament formed from the remains of the Archons. The angel who sits above the shining heavens and prevents them from falling is certainly an ancient creation of Semitic mythology, although we cannot find a distant ancestor for him in Chaldea, as we can for his companion “the Carrier.” This Carrier, whom the Greeks call the “Omophore” (Ωμοφόρος) and the Latins “Atlas,” supported the eight earths on his sturdy shoulders. A similar genius “kneeling on one of his knees” and holding his heavy burden with both hands, appears in the religious iconography of Babylon and on the monuments of the mysteries of Mithras. These are therefore popular beliefs, very anciently widespread in Mesopotamia, that Mani had here admitted into his composite theology.
The creation of the heavens and the earths is followed by that of the stars. “Then the Living Spirit,” says Theodore, “revealed his forms to the sons of Darkness, he purified a certain quantity of the light which they had absorbed by removing it from the five resplendent gods, and he made the sun, the moon and besides these vessels, the lights (stars).”
We already knew from Greek and Latin authors that the stars, and particularly the two great celestial luminaries, had been formed from the purest essences, freed from the material matrix that contained them (Alexander of Lycopolis, ch. 3). St. Augustine goes even further and teaches us that the sun is formed from “good fire” and the moon from “good water” (Against Heresies 46), and a fragment from Turfan tells us almost the same thing, that “the mixture having been purified, the sun was created from fire and light, the moon from wind and water.” But Theodore alone gives us a glimpse of the myth in which Mani had enveloped his thoughts. He was telling, it seems, a fable analogous to that of the seduction of the Archons, which we will find again later. Certain demons, crucified or chained by him in the sky (Acta Archelai ch. 8), are forced to disgorge, if I may express it thus, “and the light which they had absorbed by taking it from the five resplendent gods, condenses into brilliant stars.”
After the stars, the elements are created. “The Living Spirit made the wheels of Wind, Water and Fire; he descended and formed them below (the earth) near the Carrier. The King of Glory created and placed on them a bed (?) so that they would mount on these Archons, who were subjugated on earth, so that they would serve the five resplendent gods, lest they burn with the poison of the Archons” (Acta Archelai ch. 13). This whole passage is incomprehensible, notes Mr. Pognon. However, we can grasp at least its general scope, if we compare it with incidental indications from St. Augustine, which clarify this text as they are clarified by him (Contra Faustum 15.6, 20.10). The bishop speaks twice of the “glorious King” who, in the lower part of the world (in imo), turns the wheels of fire, water, and wind. Fragments of Manichean works, translated into Persian, which were recently found at Turfan, likewise mention several times a god “who, from the lowest earth, leads upwards the wind, water, and fire.” The Living Spirit, therefore, created air, water, and fire beneath the earth, and then his son, the King of Glory, by some artifice, made them rise above these earths, formed from the bodies of the vanquished Archons, and raised them to the ethereal spaces occupied by the five resplendent gods. They will have to “serve” these gods, that is to say, stretched out like a “mattress” or a “bed” above the earth, the elements, especially the wind and the water, one might believe, must prevent the inhabitants of the heavens from being “burned by the poison of the Archons.” This interpretation seems to be confirmed by a passage in the Turfan manuscripts where it is said that the creator clothed the sun god with three envelopes, of wind, water, and fire. Clearly there is here a memory of the concentric spheres of the elements (water, air, fire), which, according to the Stoics, surround the earth, which is placed at the center of the universe.
But creation is always threatened by evil powers. It risks being consumed and contaminated by the Archons. Mani showed the Splenditenens weeping over the divine principles “captive, oppressed and defiled” by the minions of hell (Augustine, Contra Faustum 20.9). “Then,” continues Theodore, “the Mother of Life, the Primitive Man and the Living Spirit began to pray and implore the Father of Greatness. The Father of Greatness heard them and created, as a third creation, the Messenger.”
Thus, it is the supplication of the spirits of Light, concerned about the evil from which the world suffers, that brings about the third creation, like the second. In his mercy, the Father sends them a savior, his Messenger, the one the Latins call Legatus tertius. This heavenly Messenger is the Manichean successor of the Mazdean genius Nairyosangha, who fulfilled the function of herald of Ormuzd: Both were represented in the charming form of an ephebe, similar to the Hellenic Hermes. But certain traits of his character seem to be borrowed from Gayômart and even Mithras.
Why did Mani add this new creature of the Father to his two triads? No doubt to arrive, as a total, at the sacred number of seven. This system offers a fundamental similarity, which cannot be fortuitous, with the theology of the Chaldaic Oracles, which seem to have been formulated in verse around the year 200 of our era, that is to say, shortly before the time when Mani wrote, and which are based largely on old Eastern ideas. We also find there, if we can believe the Neoplatonists who transmitted it to us, a divine hebdomad, comprising two triads and a monad. The founder of Manichaeism probably only adopted and transformed a doctrine that other sects before him had honored.
As the Primitive Man and the Living Spirit before had done him, the Messenger, before attacking the Darkness, begins by creating allies for himself; but his “children” are no longer five in number. “The Messenger,” says Theodore, “conjured up twelve Virgins with their clothes, their crowns and their habits (?). The first was Royalty, the second Wisdom, the third Victory, the fourth Persuasion, the fifth Purity, the sixth Truth, the seventh Faith, the eighth Patience, the ninth Righteousness, the tenth Goodness, the eleventh Justice, the twelfth Light.” The Messenger had as his residence the Sun, which the Manicheans represented in the form of a boat, and the twelve Virgins sailed with him: they were “the twelve pilots” of the celestial vessel (Acta Archelai ch. 13). The number twelve seems inspired by that of the signs of the zodiac, through which the sun passes, each of the Virgins being opposed to one of the Archons chained in the firmament. But Western authors, who readily insist on the obscene fables of the Babylonian sect, are very restrained in the details on this group of chaste virtues.
“When the Messenger,” continues Theodore, “came to these vessels, that is, the sun and the moon, he charged three servants to make them move, and soon they arrived in the middle of the sky.” If this first act of the divine Messenger is easily explained by what other sources tell us about his heliacal dwelling, we do not see so clearly, in the shortened account of the Syrian bishop, how he can be useful to the threatened creation. To understand this, we must recall Mani’s theories on the physical role of the sun and the moon. This function consists, according to him, in attracting the luminous particles enclosed in matter and transporting this precious charge to the eternal clarity of the supreme sky. The revolution of the stars results in the dissociation of the two principles which combine in nature, and this work of purification or, if I dare say, of disinfection, must only end when, after all the light is brought back by the divine boatmanship to its celestial source, the current world will be destroyed. Now, at the moment of their formation, the two sidereal boats were motionless, it was the Messenger who started them, and by launching them into space, ensured the final salvation of the universe.
“Then,” according to Theodore bar Konai, “he charged the Great Ban with building a new earth and the three wheels with rising.” The Turfan fragments name together “the god who is placed on the lowest earth and maintains the (other) earths in order and the god who, with him, makes Wind, Water and Fire rise.” In other words, at the same time as the stars glide in the heavens, the spheres of water, wind and fire, created by the Living Spirit, begin to turn around the earth, pushed by the King of Glory. The perpetual agitation and metamorphosis of the elements begins. The whole machine of the world is suddenly set in motion. We do not know what divine operation Mani attributed in nature to these three wheels of water, wind, and fire (cf. Augustine, Contra Faustum 20.10); but long before him, as we have said, the veneration of the elements as cosmic agents was part, as well as that of the stars, of the religion practiced in Mesopotamia.
The work of purification that the light accomplishes in this contaminated world had been exposed by Mani in a mythical form. It is here that, according to Theodore, the strange episode of the seduction of the Archons occurs, which provoked the noisy indignation of the Christian controversialists. When the radiant ships reached the middle of the sky, the Messenger “who was beautiful in his forms” appeared to the Archons chained in the sky. To the male Archons he showed himself in the guise of an attractive young girl, to the female Archons in that of a young man in the flower of health. Inflamed with concupiscence, the demons “began in their desire to return that light which they had absorbed by taking it away from the five resplendent gods.” It can be proven that this strange tale goes back to an old Mazdean myth of obscene naturalism, which Mani transformed to suit his system. The eroticism of the sons and daughters of Darkness becomes a means of ensuring the liberation of light, towards which all life in this transitory world must tend.
“But,” Theodore continues, “the sin that had mixed with the light in the Archons came out at the same time and in the same proportion.” The Messenger then hid his forms, and “he separated the light of the five resplendent gods and the sin that was with them. The sin, coming out of the Archons, fell back on them, but they did not receive it, like a man who abhors his own spit. Then this sin fell on the earth, half on the wet part and half on the dry part. (The first) changed into a horrible beast like the King of Darkness. Adamas Light was sent against it, gave battle to it and defeated it. He turned it on its back, struck it in the heart with his spear, pushed his shield over its mouth, placed one of its feet on his thighs and the other on its chest. The sin that had fallen on the dry part began to sprout in the form of five trees.” The moral of this disconcerting fable will be easily understood if we compare it with a passage from the Treasury of Mani, quoted in Latin by St. Augustine. After recounting the temptation of the Archons and recalling that the pure light, which they let escape, rises to the sky, its first homeland, he adds that the part stained by the race of Darkness descended in particles by the effect of heat and cold to the trees and plants and mingled with them, coloring itself with various hues (Augustine, On the Nature of Good 44). What is here a physical effect of regular changes in temperature was at the origin of the world an extraordinary act, from which resulted the growth of vegetation. Plants, in the Manichean pessimism, are, like all living beings, a creation of evil (Augustine, Contra Faustum 24.2). In vain Adamas pierced the sea monster, born of the sin of the Archons; a portion of it germinated in the earth and produced the first trees. After plant life, animal life appears on earth, and here the legend takes on a singularly shameless form. “The Daughters of Darkness “—who had been attached to the firmament—“were previously pregnant with their own nature. As a result of the beauty of the forms of the Messenger that they had seen, they miscarried. Their fetuses fell to the earth and ate the buds of the trees.” 1 St. Augustine reports the same tradition, only he attributes the miscarriages of the devils to the discomfort caused by the rotation of the sky. But, more importantly, he adds "that the Abortions, having fallen to the earth, were able to live there, grow there, mate and multiply, and that from them were born all beings, provided with flesh, which move on the earth, in the water and in the air." 2 This story, which left Beausobre perplexed 3, is restored by Theodore in its context: it is intended in the cosmogony of Mâni to explain the origin of animal species. It was probably not he who imagined from scratch this story of the abortions swarming on earth, but the source from which he drew it remains unknown to us.
Theodore finally moves on to a more important article, the creation of man: “The Abortions held counsel among themselves and remembered the form of the Messenger which they had seen. They said: ‘Where is the form which we saw?’ Ashaqlun, son of the King of Darkness, said to the Abortions: Give me your sons and your daughters and I will make you a form like the one you saw. They brought them to him and gave them to him. But he ate the males and gave the females to Namrael, his companion. Namrael and Ashaqlun united together, Namrael conceived and bore a son to Ashaqlun, whom she named Adam; she conceived and bore a daughter, whom she named Eve.” What Theodore tells us is only a truncated summary of a passage preserved from the Epistula Fundamenti, which recounts the birth of the first human couple. Mani’s Latin translator has here, as in the rest of the letter, eliminated the Syriac names of the actors portrayed, but these very names have been transmitted to us elsewhere by Western writers. So, “the demons perceive the great light that moves the heavens and agitates the multitude of Archons” (Augustine, On the Nature of Good 46) that is to say the Messenger, and the prince of Darkness—the Greeks identified Ashaqlun with a Gnostic Aeon and called him Saklas—fearing that all his companions would also be deprived of the light that they had in themselves, asks them to abandon it to him so that he may form from it, in the image of the glorious Virtue that appeared to them, a being that will assure them lasting domination (Augustine, ibid.). After deliberation, the demons consented. The males then had intercourse with the females and the children born from these couplings inherited the light of their parents. The Prince of Darkness devoured these offspring, and uniting with his wife, who was called in the West Nebroel or Nebrod, he poured into her womb all this light that he had absorbed. Nebroel conceived Adam, who is the epitome of the world, the original microcosm. A second coming together of the king and queen of the underworld resulted in the birth of Eve.
Thus, as his foresight revealed to him that the movement of the stars, divine purifiers, would soon exhaust all the celestial substance still contained in the world, the power of Darkness created another, smaller world, the human microcosm, where this clear essence would be deeply buried.
There is clearly in this anthropogony a combination of two different and almost contradictory traditions: The first is well known: Man was formed in the image of a god, and the very terms used in the Epistle of Mani (imaginem fingam) still betray the old belief found in Genesis, in Assyria in the legend of Bel, in Greece in that of Prometheus, that the first human being was molded from the earth, like a clay statue modeled by the artist. But this idea is here obscured by another, which attributes the origin of our species to generation and makes it descend from superior beings. The very episode of the murder of the Abortions, eaten by their parents, is found almost identically in an older religion, Mazdaism. According to the Bundahishn (14.2), “to Mâshya and Mashyôï, the first human couple, two twins were born after nine months, a boy and a girl, and, as a result of the affection they felt for their offspring, the father devoured one and the mother the other.” This myth is probably linked to the custom, observed among many savage peoples, of sacrificing and consuming the first-born. It goes back, its barbarity indicates, to a time of cannibalism where it was believed that by devouring the flesh of a human being one assimilated a particular force and power, and it would be easy to find in the fables of the most diverse countries the memory of these conceptions and these primitive immolations: The Greek Kronos has doubles in all latitudes.
The work of creation is now accomplished. The power of Darkness, in giving life to Adam, has enclosed the divine light (that is to say, the soul) in an impure flesh whose “tenacious bond” holds it captive. But her distress again moves the celestial spirits. The Messenger, the Mother of Life, the Primitive Man and the Living Spirit wanted to deliver her from the domination of evil and sent her a savior, Jesus—who, let us note, is not an the eighth creation of the Father but owes his existence to secondary powers.—“Jesus the luminous,” says Theodore, “approached innocent Adam and awakened him from a sleep of death, so that he might be delivered from many spirits. Like a righteous man who finds a man possessed by a fearsome demon and soothes him with his art, so was Adam, when this friend found him in a deep sleep, woke him up, made him move, roused him, drove the seductive demon from him, and bound the powerful female Archon away from him. Then Adam examined himself and knew who he was.” Thus, Adam lay at first insensible and inert, and Jesus awakened him to self-awareness. This idea is directly linked to that of the formation of an “image” of earth, which a god must then animate. In fact, they are found together among the Gnostics, from whom Mani seems to have borrowed them. For the Naassenes, “Adam is the man produced by the earth, a body devoid of soul, he lay without breath, without movement, without agitation, like a statue, being the image of the man above, the one they sing under the name of Adamas” (Hippolytus, Against Heresies 5.1).
Adam, awakened from his torpor, becomes an intelligent being, and Jesus instructs him in the necessary truths. He explained to him, the Fihrist says dryly, the paradises and the gods, the hells and the demons, the heavens and the earths, the sun and the moon, in a word, the constitution of the universe. But Theodore, less complete, preserves, as usual, certain details of Mani’s exposition: “Jesus,” he says, “showed Adam the Fathers residing in the (celestial) heights and his own person exposed to everything, to the teeth of the panther and the teeth of the elephant, devoured by the voracious, swallowed by the gluttons, eaten by dogs, mixed and imprisoned in all that exists, bound in the stench of Darkness.” By a bold symbolism, the Manicheans saw in the passion of Christ the pains of the divine substance spread throughout all nature and “which is born, suffers and dies every day” (Evodius, De fide 34), which, insinuating itself into the trees, is suspended and (as it were) crucified in all the woods, and which, penetrating into fruits and vegetables, is served on tables and consumed in food (Augustine, Contra Faustum 20.3). This is what they called the “passable Jesus.” Nowhere are his tortures depicted with more striking energy than in Theodore bar Konai.
After receiving a revelation of the evils of this world, Adam learns about his own nature. “Jesus made him stand up and give him a taste of the Tree of Life. Then Adam looked and wept. He raised his voice loudly like a roaring lion, tore out his hair, beat his breast, and said, ‘Woe, woe to the creator of my body, to him who bound my soul, and to the rebels who have enslaved me.’”
This is where Theodore’s story ends. By giving him a taste of the fruit of knowledge, Jesus, and not the Tempter, revealed to Adam the full depth of his miseries. But man will also now know the way to free himself from them. He will have to devote his life to keeping his soul free from all bodily defilement by practicing abstinence and renunciation, gradually freeing from the bonds of matter the divine substance enclosed within him and disseminated in nature, and thus contributing to the great work of purification that God is pursuing in the universe. This was probably the conclusion of the Fundamental Epistle.
However, not all that can be provided from this precious text seems to have been extracted, and even its editor, far from exaggerating its value, as often happens, seems rather to have undervalued it. “It is evident,” he observes, “that, in order to ridicule the Manichaeans, Theodore bar Konai, instead of clearly expounding their dogmas, cited, one after the other, phrases borrowed from the works of Mani.” This is, in fact, more or less the procedure he uses: He introduces with the words “he says” a series of extracts from a book which he strips rather than summarizes, and if these cuttings have, better than the more systematic summaries or commentaries, preserved the dramatic form that the prophet had lent to his ideas on the origin of things, their apparent disjointedness can make them be taken at first sight for a series of enigmas and nonsensical interchanges. The sequence of ideas does not appear immediately in an abridgement where the transitions are skipped; but a little attention is enough to convince oneself that the sequence of facts reported by the Syriac scholiast forms a continuous development and that the whole story is from a single narrative. This conclusion will become a certainty, if we compare the somewhat incoherent mythology of Theodore with the very concise summary of the Acta Archelai (ch. 7.): Despite the difference in the two redactions, we will easily realize that the sequence of events is the same on both sides and that the two narratives go back to a common source, from which is also derived at least in part the cosmogony expounded in the Fihrist.
We know the titles of all the writings left by Mani, and to some extent their character. Among them, the one where we would be tempted to look first for the origin of our three derivatives, Syriac, Arabic and Greek, it is the Book of Giants which recounted the battles sustained at the origin of the world by hellish monsters rising up against heaven. But the little that we know of its content agrees badly with such a hypothesis, and it seems that in this book Mani has implemented, by adapting them to his system, the rich epic legends of Iran, which filled a good part of the Avesta and which later still provided Ferdowsi with admirable material to put into Persian verse. We do not find anything like it in our cosmogonic fragments.
This is, I think, a much less developed work than the Book Giants which was read and summarized by Christian and Muslim writers: the Fundamental Epistle (Epistula Fundamenti) from which St. Augustine has preserved for us long Latin extracts. These allow us to form a fairly accurate account of the subject of this letter. Addressed to a certain Patticius, it covered “what had existed before the creation of the world and in what manner the battle was fought which made it possible to separate light from darkness”; it recounted “the struggle waged by God against the nation of darkness and how he had mixed with their demonic nature a part of his substance which was to be bound and defiled by it”, and it continued this narration until the coming into the world of Adam and Eve. Now, as we shall see, this is precisely, neither more nor less, all that Theodore bar Konai reports. Moreover, it is sometimes noted that where it seems to deviate from the tradition of the Acta Archelai, this divergence is explained by a different borrowing made from the narrative of the Fundamental Epistle, and not by the use of two distinct sources. We can therefore conclude with great probability that the Syriac text of this letter provided Theodore not only with the substance of his narration but also with the very form of certain sentences. This philological question could be resolved with certainty if the Epistula had not undergone a real reworking in the version used by St. Augustine. The barbaric names have been replaced by vague “virtues” or powers, and the cosmic geniuses, living and acting in the great epic of Mani, have become pale abstractions without personality. We are undoubtedly dealing with a watered-down Latin translation of a translation in which the Greek philosophical spirit had already altered the religious thought of the Babylonian prophet, and Hellenic taste discreetly corrected the deviations of its oriental imagination.
Theodore not only has the merit of repeating to us in their original vigor the very words of Mani. He has indicated in their order of succession all the decisive events of the action that unfolds in the universe from its primordial state to the moment when man acquires the knowledge of good and evil. None of the modern historians who have dealt with the Manichean creation of the world has sufficiently distinguished the different acts of this great cosmic drama. Theodore’s account, despite its gaps, allows us to mark its decisive twists and turns; thanks to him, we can place in their proper place the scattered data in the Greek and Latin controversialists, and above all, the extracts cited by St. Augustine. Even the truncated and gap-ridden fragments of Persian translations, deciphered with difficulty on the shreds of Manichean manuscripts recently brought back from Chinese Turkestan, can be compared with the extracts of the Syrian bishop and are illuminated by their contact. By gathering the membra disjecta of tradition, we will succeed in bringing this torn body back to life, and we will be able to form some idea of this cosmogony of splendid extravagance, which borders on both gigantomachy and apocalypse.
“Before the existence of heaven and earth and all that is in them, there were two principles, one good and the other evil.” This beginning from Theodore clearly defines the subject: what we are going to learn is how heaven and earth were first created, then everything that is in them, that is to say, the stars on the one hand, plants, animals and man on the other. He then affirms the antithesis of the two opposing principles and formulates this dualism, or rather this ditheism, which Mani borrowed from the Mazdeans and developed with more consistent rigor. For him, as for the Magi, God resides in the infinite clarity of the sky which opposes the bottomless darkness of the infernal abysses. “The good principle,” continues Theodore, “dwells in the land of light and is called the Father of Grandeur.” This is the supreme being, whom a Greek source calls τὸν τετραπρόσωπον Πατέρα τοῦ Μεγέθους (“the Four-Face Father of Greatness”), because he is sometimes conceived as formed of four divine persons. He sits in the upper part of the world in the “land of light,” the terra lucida of the Latin translation, resplendent, eternal and blessed like him.
“Outside the Father,” continues the scholiast, “are his five dwellings, intelligence, reason, thought, reflection, and will.” The “land of light” is divided into five superimposed regions, which are the divine “dwellings.” But Manichean theology, which is a split pantheism, conceives of God as filling these spaces entirely: they are, as the Fihrist says, his “members,” his parts, although they are also “outside of him.” Although having an existence distinct from him, they participate in his substance. The Syriac term itself, which Mâni used, škintâ, already had a double meaning before him. It properly means “dwelling, habitation,” but it is also used to designate the divine “glory” or “majesty,” without our being able to see by what transition it passed from the material to the abstract sense. Further on (p. 11) these “dwellings” are likened to “worlds” or “centuries” or “aeons”, because the word used (‘âlam) means all of these things. There is no doubt that pagan theology had already used and abused these amphibological terms before the conversion of the Syrians to Christianity. We must therefore regard the five “dwellings” of the Father as being at the same time his five attributes or, to borrow this term from Greek philosophy, his five hypostases: intelligence, reason, thought, reflection, will.
Opposite the Father, in the lower part of the universe, the “evil principle” also exercises a sovereign empire. This “King of Darkness resides in his gloomy land” which opposes the land of light. This pestilential land, of infinite depth and breadth, is also formed of five “worlds” all occupied by the infernal Spirit. First, there is that of smoke or fog, populated by nebulous and sooty beings, then that of a fire which does not purify but corrupts, then that of the furious and destructive wind, lower down that of the troubled and muddy waters, finally that of darkness, a bottomless abyss.
We may wonder what could have suggested to Mani the idea, surprising to us, of these five-story buildings, where he houses the opposing powers that divide the universe. It seems that he only reproduced, at least for the superposition of the lower regions, a concept common in Mesopotamia. A Syriac treatise on astronomy, which, in its current form, dates from the 6th century AD, but which “as a whole reflects old Chaldean doctrines barely modified by a few Greek elements,” teaches that “beneath the earth is the formidable sea of many waters, beneath the waters fire, beneath the fire wind, beneath the wind darkness” and, the author adds, “beneath the darkness, seek nothing.” The analogy with Mani’s doctrine is striking; only he increased the number of worlds from four to five, no doubt because his predecessor Bardesanes and other philosophers recognized five elements. He deifies them because in Persia as in Mesopotamia paganism worshipped these world-forming substances.
The two enemy princes, who had only one common border and whose domains extended on three sides without limits, could have lived eternally in peace, if the “King of Darkness” had not planned to ascend to the land of light, whose splendor aroused his lust. The disturbance introduced into the primitive order of things and which resulted in our current world was therefore due to the undertakings of the Spirit of Evil, as in Mazdaism, where Ahriman similarly emerges from the infernal abyss to rise towards the infinite brightness of Ormuzd.
“Then,” adds Theodore, “the five dwellings were afraid.” Indeed, the terrifying noise of this devastating incursion spread successively from each of the five worlds to the upper world, and was finally perceived by God himself. He put himself in a position to resist the invasion of his enemy. “Then the Father of Grandeur reflected and said: ‘Of my worlds (aeons), these five abodes, I will not send any to war, but I myself will go and fight against him,, because they were created for tranquility and peace.’” He did not want to expose his dwellings to the ravages of war and opposed a new power, issued from him, to the minions of hell to preserve, by destroying these invaders, “a perpetual tranquility for the inhabitants of the Light.” Moreover, the peaceful worlds of the Spirit of Good were incapable of doing harm even to their enemies. Therefore, “the Father of Greatness evoked the Mother of Life, the Mother of Life evoked Primitive Man.” For the Manicheans, these two new beings form a unity with the Father: thus is explained the expression used by the latter: “I will go myself and fight.” The first creation therefore has the effect of replacing the primitive One with a Trinity.
Where did Mani take the names of his second and third divine persons? He was certainly inspired, by modifying them, by certain systems taught by Christian sects. For the Gnostics of Irenaeus, the Trinity is composed of the Primitive Man (primus homo), who is the Father of the second man, who is the Son, and of the Mother of the Living (Mater Viventium), who is the Holy Spirit. We know that the word “spirit” (ruhá) is most often feminine in Aramaic. Bardesanes, whom Mani knew particularly well, also knew similar powers: in accordance with his astrological theories, he assimilated, we are told, the sun to the Father of Life and the moon to the Mother of Life.
As for Primitive Man, there are few concepts as widespread in the East. Already in Mazdaism, from which Mani seems to have borrowed it, he causes by his death the birth of the first human couple. An ingenious interpretation of this strange cosmogonic character has recently been proposed. The human sacrifice which, according to certain agrarian rites, annually ensured the fertility of the countryside, would have been transported by mythological imagination to the origins of the world. The latter, or at least the beings who populate it, would owe their formation and growth to the murder of a celestial man, just as the harvest germinates and grows following the immolation of the earthly victim. Whatever one thinks of this hypothesis, it is certain that the belief in a Primitive Man, the cause or occasion of creation, is found in India as in anterior Asia, among pagans as well as among Jews and Gnostics. These were therefore figures familiar to Easterners that Mani brought together to form his supreme triad.
Primitive Man, diverted from his ancient meaning, has the mission of repelling the assault of the powers of evil. “He evoked,” says Theodore, “his five sons, like a man who puts on armor for combat.” The obscure conciseness of this sibylline sentence is clarified by a comparison with other sources. Primitive Man gave birth to five elements, opposed to the “worlds” of the King of Darkness: clear air to smoke, refreshing wind to torrid wind, light to darkness, life-giving water to corrupted water, warming fire to devouring fire; then he clothed himself in them as in armor. “He covered himself first with the gentle breeze of the air,” says the Fihrist, “then wrapped himself in light as in a flaming cloak, threw over the light the fluidity of the waters, and then surrounded himself with the breath of the winds. Then he seized fire as his shield and spear, and rushed from the heights of paradise towards the threatened frontier of the empire of Good.” “An angel called Nahashbat,” adds Theodore, “preceded him, holding in his hand the crown of victory.” This is undoubtedly the one that the Greeks call Stephanophoros (Στεφανοφόρος).
The duel that ensued is nowhere recounted with more characteristic and picturesque details than by our Syrian author. “Primitive Man projected his light before him, and, seeing it, the King of Darkness reflected and said: ‘What I sought far away, I have found near me.’” He then armored himself, as his adversary had done, with his five elements, and marched to meet him. After they had fought for a long time, the victory leaned in favor of the infernal Spirit. “Then primitive Man gave himself as food with his five sons to the five sons of the Darkness, like a man who, having an enemy, mixes a deadly poison into a cake and gives it to him. When the sons of Darkness had eaten them, intelligence was taken from the five resplendent gods, and they became, through the poison of the sons of the Darkness, like a man bitten by a mad dog or by a serpent.”
Thus, all authors agree on this point: Primitive Man, with the five elements that shielded him, is defeated. He then resorts to a stratagem: He offers himself as prey to the demons, hoping in this way to amend their perversity and appease their bestial rage, but the opposite happens: the venom of the sons of Darkness obscures the intelligence of the celestial spirits.
The symbolism here is transparent, and the meaning of this myth has not escaped Greek commentators. Beneficial and harmful principles mingle in all things; the luminous and life-giving elements are held captive in the thickness of impure matter, as the human soul is in its bodily prison. For the world is a great animated being, and man is a microcosm: The spirit sometimes dominates the flesh in us, but more often the corruption that surrounds it blinds and perverts it. Likewise, the divine soul of the universe claimed to tame the dark powers and make them obey her “like a wild beast, made to lie down by a magic word” (Titus of Bostra Contra Manichæos 1.17); but she herself, having lost her power, became defiled by contact with them, “like the contents of an unclean vessel become infected” (Alexander of Lycopolis, Against the Manicheans 3).
Thus, the first battle delivered to the King of Darkness ended with the defeat of Primitive Man and his defenders. He succumbs, as in Mazdaism Gayômart dies under the blows of Ahriman, and, in both faiths, a temporary victory of the infernal Spirit serves to explain the existence of evil here below, which, for orthodox and Gnostic Christianity, is the consequence of an original Fall. Imprisoned and poisoned, the celestial envoys were struck with madness. But, says Theodore, “Primitive Man recovered his reason,” and, in his anguish, “he addressed a prayer seven times to the Father of Greatness.” The latter, moved with pity, wishes to help him. “He evoked, as a second creation, the Friend of the Lights, the Friend of the Lights evoked the great Ban, the Great Ban evoked the Living Spirit.”
Thus, compassionate to the sufferings of his creatures, the Father brings forth from his bosom a second divine triad. Like Mani, the ancient Babylonian religion placed at the head of the pantheon and at the origin of things two triads, the second of which is subordinate to the first, those of Anu, Bel, Ea and of Shamash, Sin, and Ishtar. The theological system of triads, single or double, was imposed even on the Syrian cults, to which it was originally foreign, and it was generally accepted by the pagan Semites at the time when Manichaeism was born. We will see (below) that the doctrine of the latter offers in particular a remarkable analogy with that of the Chaldaic Oracles, which seem to be roughly contemporary with its birth.
The new powers created by God are not depicted, except for the last, with a well-characterized personality. The Friend of Lights is named only once, and inappropriately at that, in the extract from the Fihrist; the Great Ban is not mentioned anywhere else except in Theodore, and his very name remains uncertain. As in the first trinity, the active person, who will intervene in the struggle, is the third, the Living Spirit, and it is, consequently, the only one who has penetrated into the Western tradition. This latter calls him sometimes, by translating his name exactly, τὸ Ζῶν Πνεῦμα, Spiritus Vivens, and sometimes, by interpreting it by a Greek equivalent, the Demiurge (Δημιουργός). It is he, in fact, who will form the world.
For the parallelism between the first and second creations of the Father to be perfect, the Living Spirit, like Primitive Man before him, must begin by giving birth to five sons. “He brought forth,” says Theodore, “from his intellect the Ornament of Splendor, from his reason the great King of Honor, from his thought Adamas-Light, from his reflection the King of Glory, and from his will the Bearer.”
An observation is necessary here. We see from this passage that the Living Spirit has the same faculties, or, to speak in the language of Mani, the same “dwellings,” as the Father of Greatness: intellect, reason, thought, reflection, and will. The prophet's theology did not, in fact, conceive the members of the two divine triads as distinct from the First Cause, which had called them into existence; they are its extensions, or, if we prefer this Neoplatonic term, emanations, but they are beings of the same nature and substance as the supreme God.
The five sons of the Living Spirit, his collaborators in the glorious work he was given to accomplish, were sung about by the Manicheans in their sacred hymns. St. Augustine describes each of them from one of these poems, with a few characteristic traits (Contra Faustem 15). He lists, in the same order as Theodore, the Ornament of Splendor or, as he says, the great Splenditenens, provided with six faces and sparkling with light; the King of Honor, surrounded by his armies of angels; Adamas, the warlike hero, holding the spear in his right hand and the shield in his left; the King of Glory, setting in motion the three wheels of fire, water and wind; and finally the gigantic Atlas, one knee bent, carrying on his shoulders the world which he supports with both hands. We will find the explanation of all this in the continuation of Theodore’s cosmogony.
“They went,” he says, “to the Land of Darkness and found Primitive Man absorbed by the Darkness, him and his five sons. Then the Living Spirit cried aloud, and this voice was like a sharpened sword and it revealed the form of Primitive Man.” By the sole virtue of the divine call, the celestial Man thus frees himself from the grasp of the infernal powers, he resumes his primitive form, and rises from the depths of the abyss. For the peoples of the East, speech is creative, speech is evocative, and mysterious names have limitless power over the spirit world. “The Living Spirit,” also says the Fihrist, “called Primitive Man aloud, and with the speed of lightning, Primitive Man became a god again.”
A dialogue then begins between the captive and his liberator. “The Living Spirit said: ‘Hail to you, good being in the midst of the wicked, luminous being in the midst of darkness, god who dwells in the midst of the animals of anger who do not know their honor.’ Primitive Man answered him: ‘Come in peace, you who bring a commodity of quietude and peace.’ He said to him again: ‘How are our fathers, the sons of light, in their city?’ The Caller answered him: ‘They are well.’” Then, after some obscure adventures (Theodore’s text here is difficult to understand), the Living Spirit brought Primitive Man out of his deep prison—by holding out his right hand to him, says the Acta (ch. 7),—and they rose into the higher spheres towards the Mother of Life.
The Living Spirit thus snatched their prey from the Darkness, or at least left them only the “armor” of their prisoner, the five useful elements which remained mixed with their harmful substances. The victorious Demiurge can now begin his creative work. “The Living Spirit,” says Theodore, “ordered three of his sons that one should kill, the other flay the Archons, sons of Darkness, and that they should bring them to the Mother of Life. The Mother of Life stretched the sky with their skins; she made eleven (or twelve) heavens. They threw their bodies onto the earth of Darkness; they made eight earths, and the five sons of the Living Spirit were initiated, each one to his task. It is the Ornament of Splendor which holds the five resplendent gods by their loins, and, below their loins, the heavens were extended. It is the Bearer who, kneeling on one of his knees, supports the earths. When the heavens and the earths had been made, the great King of Honor sat in the middle of the sky and stood guard to guard them all.” Here is one of the most surprising episodes of this strange cosmogony: the heavens would be formed from the stretched skins of the Archons or flayed demons. “To believe such extravagances,” says the reasonable Beausobre, “I would like better guarantors than [John of] Damascus and Epiphanius, who report them.” The oriental authors came to add their authorized testimony to the affirmations of the Greek Fathers Mani here only reproduces an old popular belief of his compatriots. It is found in the sacred literature of Mazdaism, and the Chaldaic Oracles also teach that a membrane (ὑμήν) separates the higher intellectual fire from the lower or cosmic fire. Did the doctrine thus propagated in various Asian cults originate from the comparison of the sky with a nomad’s tent covered with skins? Or did the firmament, studded with stars, remind hunters of the spotted fur of certain animals? It is difficult to know. But in Mani this naive idea is part of a broader conception, which supposes the entire world to be formed from the gigantic bodies of the “Archons.” “Their bodies were thrown onto the earth of Darkness,” says Theodore, and others specify: “the mountains were made of their bones, the earth of their flesh” (John of Damascus, Contra Manichaeos 29). Thus, all the parts of nature that surround us come from the filthy corpses of evil powers. Pessimism has rarely found a more striking imagination.
Here, Mani has taken the opposite view of a very ancient Indo-European myth: In India, as in Persia and among the Germans, we find the idea that the universe is formed from the various parts of an immolated victim, but this primitive victim is a god or a hero, while the Babylonian reformer made the whole world a great demonic body.
The heavens, which number not eleven or twelve but ten, as among the Pythagoreans, were supported by an immense genius, the Ornament of Light or Splenditenens, “who holds by his loins the five resplendent gods,” that is to say the five beneficent elements, partly remaining in the “earth of light,” while the rest had been seized by the demons during the great defeat of Primitive Man. The Latin translation used by St. Augustine had softened the crudeness of the Syriac expression and spoke simply of the Splenditenens who “holds the head of the elements and supports the suspended world.” Beneath these celestial elements, extends the firmament formed from the remains of the Archons. The angel who sits above the shining heavens and prevents them from falling is certainly an ancient creation of Semitic mythology, although we cannot find a distant ancestor for him in Chaldea, as we can for his companion “the Carrier.” This Carrier, whom the Greeks call the “Omophore” (Ωμοφόρος) and the Latins “Atlas,” supported the eight earths on his sturdy shoulders. A similar genius “kneeling on one of his knees” and holding his heavy burden with both hands, appears in the religious iconography of Babylon and on the monuments of the mysteries of Mithras. These are therefore popular beliefs, very anciently widespread in Mesopotamia, that Mani had here admitted into his composite theology.
The creation of the heavens and the earths is followed by that of the stars. “Then the Living Spirit,” says Theodore, “revealed his forms to the sons of Darkness, he purified a certain quantity of the light which they had absorbed by removing it from the five resplendent gods, and he made the sun, the moon and besides these vessels, the lights (stars).”
We already knew from Greek and Latin authors that the stars, and particularly the two great celestial luminaries, had been formed from the purest essences, freed from the material matrix that contained them (Alexander of Lycopolis, ch. 3). St. Augustine goes even further and teaches us that the sun is formed from “good fire” and the moon from “good water” (Against Heresies 46), and a fragment from Turfan tells us almost the same thing, that “the mixture having been purified, the sun was created from fire and light, the moon from wind and water.” But Theodore alone gives us a glimpse of the myth in which Mani had enveloped his thoughts. He was telling, it seems, a fable analogous to that of the seduction of the Archons, which we will find again later. Certain demons, crucified or chained by him in the sky (Acta Archelai ch. 8), are forced to disgorge, if I may express it thus, “and the light which they had absorbed by taking it from the five resplendent gods, condenses into brilliant stars.”
After the stars, the elements are created. “The Living Spirit made the wheels of Wind, Water and Fire; he descended and formed them below (the earth) near the Carrier. The King of Glory created and placed on them a bed (?) so that they would mount on these Archons, who were subjugated on earth, so that they would serve the five resplendent gods, lest they burn with the poison of the Archons” (Acta Archelai ch. 13). This whole passage is incomprehensible, notes Mr. Pognon. However, we can grasp at least its general scope, if we compare it with incidental indications from St. Augustine, which clarify this text as they are clarified by him (Contra Faustum 15.6, 20.10). The bishop speaks twice of the “glorious King” who, in the lower part of the world (in imo), turns the wheels of fire, water, and wind. Fragments of Manichean works, translated into Persian, which were recently found at Turfan, likewise mention several times a god “who, from the lowest earth, leads upwards the wind, water, and fire.” The Living Spirit, therefore, created air, water, and fire beneath the earth, and then his son, the King of Glory, by some artifice, made them rise above these earths, formed from the bodies of the vanquished Archons, and raised them to the ethereal spaces occupied by the five resplendent gods. They will have to “serve” these gods, that is to say, stretched out like a “mattress” or a “bed” above the earth, the elements, especially the wind and the water, one might believe, must prevent the inhabitants of the heavens from being “burned by the poison of the Archons.” This interpretation seems to be confirmed by a passage in the Turfan manuscripts where it is said that the creator clothed the sun god with three envelopes, of wind, water, and fire. Clearly there is here a memory of the concentric spheres of the elements (water, air, fire), which, according to the Stoics, surround the earth, which is placed at the center of the universe.
But creation is always threatened by evil powers. It risks being consumed and contaminated by the Archons. Mani showed the Splenditenens weeping over the divine principles “captive, oppressed and defiled” by the minions of hell (Augustine, Contra Faustum 20.9). “Then,” continues Theodore, “the Mother of Life, the Primitive Man and the Living Spirit began to pray and implore the Father of Greatness. The Father of Greatness heard them and created, as a third creation, the Messenger.”
Thus, it is the supplication of the spirits of Light, concerned about the evil from which the world suffers, that brings about the third creation, like the second. In his mercy, the Father sends them a savior, his Messenger, the one the Latins call Legatus tertius. This heavenly Messenger is the Manichean successor of the Mazdean genius Nairyosangha, who fulfilled the function of herald of Ormuzd: Both were represented in the charming form of an ephebe, similar to the Hellenic Hermes. But certain traits of his character seem to be borrowed from Gayômart and even Mithras.
Why did Mani add this new creature of the Father to his two triads? No doubt to arrive, as a total, at the sacred number of seven. This system offers a fundamental similarity, which cannot be fortuitous, with the theology of the Chaldaic Oracles, which seem to have been formulated in verse around the year 200 of our era, that is to say, shortly before the time when Mani wrote, and which are based largely on old Eastern ideas. We also find there, if we can believe the Neoplatonists who transmitted it to us, a divine hebdomad, comprising two triads and a monad. The founder of Manichaeism probably only adopted and transformed a doctrine that other sects before him had honored.
As the Primitive Man and the Living Spirit before had done him, the Messenger, before attacking the Darkness, begins by creating allies for himself; but his “children” are no longer five in number. “The Messenger,” says Theodore, “conjured up twelve Virgins with their clothes, their crowns and their habits (?). The first was Royalty, the second Wisdom, the third Victory, the fourth Persuasion, the fifth Purity, the sixth Truth, the seventh Faith, the eighth Patience, the ninth Righteousness, the tenth Goodness, the eleventh Justice, the twelfth Light.” The Messenger had as his residence the Sun, which the Manicheans represented in the form of a boat, and the twelve Virgins sailed with him: they were “the twelve pilots” of the celestial vessel (Acta Archelai ch. 13). The number twelve seems inspired by that of the signs of the zodiac, through which the sun passes, each of the Virgins being opposed to one of the Archons chained in the firmament. But Western authors, who readily insist on the obscene fables of the Babylonian sect, are very restrained in the details on this group of chaste virtues.
“When the Messenger,” continues Theodore, “came to these vessels, that is, the sun and the moon, he charged three servants to make them move, and soon they arrived in the middle of the sky.” If this first act of the divine Messenger is easily explained by what other sources tell us about his heliacal dwelling, we do not see so clearly, in the shortened account of the Syrian bishop, how he can be useful to the threatened creation. To understand this, we must recall Mani’s theories on the physical role of the sun and the moon. This function consists, according to him, in attracting the luminous particles enclosed in matter and transporting this precious charge to the eternal clarity of the supreme sky. The revolution of the stars results in the dissociation of the two principles which combine in nature, and this work of purification or, if I dare say, of disinfection, must only end when, after all the light is brought back by the divine boatmanship to its celestial source, the current world will be destroyed. Now, at the moment of their formation, the two sidereal boats were motionless, it was the Messenger who started them, and by launching them into space, ensured the final salvation of the universe.
“Then,” according to Theodore bar Konai, “he charged the Great Ban with building a new earth and the three wheels with rising.” The Turfan fragments name together “the god who is placed on the lowest earth and maintains the (other) earths in order and the god who, with him, makes Wind, Water and Fire rise.” In other words, at the same time as the stars glide in the heavens, the spheres of water, wind and fire, created by the Living Spirit, begin to turn around the earth, pushed by the King of Glory. The perpetual agitation and metamorphosis of the elements begins. The whole machine of the world is suddenly set in motion. We do not know what divine operation Mani attributed in nature to these three wheels of water, wind, and fire (cf. Augustine, Contra Faustum 20.10); but long before him, as we have said, the veneration of the elements as cosmic agents was part, as well as that of the stars, of the religion practiced in Mesopotamia.
The work of purification that the light accomplishes in this contaminated world had been exposed by Mani in a mythical form. It is here that, according to Theodore, the strange episode of the seduction of the Archons occurs, which provoked the noisy indignation of the Christian controversialists. When the radiant ships reached the middle of the sky, the Messenger “who was beautiful in his forms” appeared to the Archons chained in the sky. To the male Archons he showed himself in the guise of an attractive young girl, to the female Archons in that of a young man in the flower of health. Inflamed with concupiscence, the demons “began in their desire to return that light which they had absorbed by taking it away from the five resplendent gods.” It can be proven that this strange tale goes back to an old Mazdean myth of obscene naturalism, which Mani transformed to suit his system. The eroticism of the sons and daughters of Darkness becomes a means of ensuring the liberation of light, towards which all life in this transitory world must tend.
“But,” Theodore continues, “the sin that had mixed with the light in the Archons came out at the same time and in the same proportion.” The Messenger then hid his forms, and “he separated the light of the five resplendent gods and the sin that was with them. The sin, coming out of the Archons, fell back on them, but they did not receive it, like a man who abhors his own spit. Then this sin fell on the earth, half on the wet part and half on the dry part. (The first) changed into a horrible beast like the King of Darkness. Adamas Light was sent against it, gave battle to it and defeated it. He turned it on its back, struck it in the heart with his spear, pushed his shield over its mouth, placed one of its feet on his thighs and the other on its chest. The sin that had fallen on the dry part began to sprout in the form of five trees.” The moral of this disconcerting fable will be easily understood if we compare it with a passage from the Treasury of Mani, quoted in Latin by St. Augustine. After recounting the temptation of the Archons and recalling that the pure light, which they let escape, rises to the sky, its first homeland, he adds that the part stained by the race of Darkness descended in particles by the effect of heat and cold to the trees and plants and mingled with them, coloring itself with various hues (Augustine, On the Nature of Good 44). What is here a physical effect of regular changes in temperature was at the origin of the world an extraordinary act, from which resulted the growth of vegetation. Plants, in the Manichean pessimism, are, like all living beings, a creation of evil (Augustine, Contra Faustum 24.2). In vain Adamas pierced the sea monster, born of the sin of the Archons; a portion of it germinated in the earth and produced the first trees. After plant life, animal life appears on earth, and here the legend takes on a singularly shameless form. “The Daughters of Darkness “—who had been attached to the firmament—“were previously pregnant with their own nature. As a result of the beauty of the forms of the Messenger that they had seen, they miscarried. Their fetuses fell to the earth and ate the buds of the trees.” 1 St. Augustine reports the same tradition, only he attributes the miscarriages of the devils to the discomfort caused by the rotation of the sky. But, more importantly, he adds "that the Abortions, having fallen to the earth, were able to live there, grow there, mate and multiply, and that from them were born all beings, provided with flesh, which move on the earth, in the water and in the air." 2 This story, which left Beausobre perplexed 3, is restored by Theodore in its context: it is intended in the cosmogony of Mâni to explain the origin of animal species. It was probably not he who imagined from scratch this story of the abortions swarming on earth, but the source from which he drew it remains unknown to us.
Theodore finally moves on to a more important article, the creation of man: “The Abortions held counsel among themselves and remembered the form of the Messenger which they had seen. They said: ‘Where is the form which we saw?’ Ashaqlun, son of the King of Darkness, said to the Abortions: Give me your sons and your daughters and I will make you a form like the one you saw. They brought them to him and gave them to him. But he ate the males and gave the females to Namrael, his companion. Namrael and Ashaqlun united together, Namrael conceived and bore a son to Ashaqlun, whom she named Adam; she conceived and bore a daughter, whom she named Eve.” What Theodore tells us is only a truncated summary of a passage preserved from the Epistula Fundamenti, which recounts the birth of the first human couple. Mani’s Latin translator has here, as in the rest of the letter, eliminated the Syriac names of the actors portrayed, but these very names have been transmitted to us elsewhere by Western writers. So, “the demons perceive the great light that moves the heavens and agitates the multitude of Archons” (Augustine, On the Nature of Good 46) that is to say the Messenger, and the prince of Darkness—the Greeks identified Ashaqlun with a Gnostic Aeon and called him Saklas—fearing that all his companions would also be deprived of the light that they had in themselves, asks them to abandon it to him so that he may form from it, in the image of the glorious Virtue that appeared to them, a being that will assure them lasting domination (Augustine, ibid.). After deliberation, the demons consented. The males then had intercourse with the females and the children born from these couplings inherited the light of their parents. The Prince of Darkness devoured these offspring, and uniting with his wife, who was called in the West Nebroel or Nebrod, he poured into her womb all this light that he had absorbed. Nebroel conceived Adam, who is the epitome of the world, the original microcosm. A second coming together of the king and queen of the underworld resulted in the birth of Eve.
Thus, as his foresight revealed to him that the movement of the stars, divine purifiers, would soon exhaust all the celestial substance still contained in the world, the power of Darkness created another, smaller world, the human microcosm, where this clear essence would be deeply buried.
There is clearly in this anthropogony a combination of two different and almost contradictory traditions: The first is well known: Man was formed in the image of a god, and the very terms used in the Epistle of Mani (imaginem fingam) still betray the old belief found in Genesis, in Assyria in the legend of Bel, in Greece in that of Prometheus, that the first human being was molded from the earth, like a clay statue modeled by the artist. But this idea is here obscured by another, which attributes the origin of our species to generation and makes it descend from superior beings. The very episode of the murder of the Abortions, eaten by their parents, is found almost identically in an older religion, Mazdaism. According to the Bundahishn (14.2), “to Mâshya and Mashyôï, the first human couple, two twins were born after nine months, a boy and a girl, and, as a result of the affection they felt for their offspring, the father devoured one and the mother the other.” This myth is probably linked to the custom, observed among many savage peoples, of sacrificing and consuming the first-born. It goes back, its barbarity indicates, to a time of cannibalism where it was believed that by devouring the flesh of a human being one assimilated a particular force and power, and it would be easy to find in the fables of the most diverse countries the memory of these conceptions and these primitive immolations: The Greek Kronos has doubles in all latitudes.
The work of creation is now accomplished. The power of Darkness, in giving life to Adam, has enclosed the divine light (that is to say, the soul) in an impure flesh whose “tenacious bond” holds it captive. But her distress again moves the celestial spirits. The Messenger, the Mother of Life, the Primitive Man and the Living Spirit wanted to deliver her from the domination of evil and sent her a savior, Jesus—who, let us note, is not an the eighth creation of the Father but owes his existence to secondary powers.—“Jesus the luminous,” says Theodore, “approached innocent Adam and awakened him from a sleep of death, so that he might be delivered from many spirits. Like a righteous man who finds a man possessed by a fearsome demon and soothes him with his art, so was Adam, when this friend found him in a deep sleep, woke him up, made him move, roused him, drove the seductive demon from him, and bound the powerful female Archon away from him. Then Adam examined himself and knew who he was.” Thus, Adam lay at first insensible and inert, and Jesus awakened him to self-awareness. This idea is directly linked to that of the formation of an “image” of earth, which a god must then animate. In fact, they are found together among the Gnostics, from whom Mani seems to have borrowed them. For the Naassenes, “Adam is the man produced by the earth, a body devoid of soul, he lay without breath, without movement, without agitation, like a statue, being the image of the man above, the one they sing under the name of Adamas” (Hippolytus, Against Heresies 5.1).
Adam, awakened from his torpor, becomes an intelligent being, and Jesus instructs him in the necessary truths. He explained to him, the Fihrist says dryly, the paradises and the gods, the hells and the demons, the heavens and the earths, the sun and the moon, in a word, the constitution of the universe. But Theodore, less complete, preserves, as usual, certain details of Mani’s exposition: “Jesus,” he says, “showed Adam the Fathers residing in the (celestial) heights and his own person exposed to everything, to the teeth of the panther and the teeth of the elephant, devoured by the voracious, swallowed by the gluttons, eaten by dogs, mixed and imprisoned in all that exists, bound in the stench of Darkness.” By a bold symbolism, the Manicheans saw in the passion of Christ the pains of the divine substance spread throughout all nature and “which is born, suffers and dies every day” (Evodius, De fide 34), which, insinuating itself into the trees, is suspended and (as it were) crucified in all the woods, and which, penetrating into fruits and vegetables, is served on tables and consumed in food (Augustine, Contra Faustum 20.3). This is what they called the “passable Jesus.” Nowhere are his tortures depicted with more striking energy than in Theodore bar Konai.
After receiving a revelation of the evils of this world, Adam learns about his own nature. “Jesus made him stand up and give him a taste of the Tree of Life. Then Adam looked and wept. He raised his voice loudly like a roaring lion, tore out his hair, beat his breast, and said, ‘Woe, woe to the creator of my body, to him who bound my soul, and to the rebels who have enslaved me.’”
This is where Theodore’s story ends. By giving him a taste of the fruit of knowledge, Jesus, and not the Tempter, revealed to Adam the full depth of his miseries. But man will also now know the way to free himself from them. He will have to devote his life to keeping his soul free from all bodily defilement by practicing abstinence and renunciation, gradually freeing from the bonds of matter the divine substance enclosed within him and disseminated in nature, and thus contributing to the great work of purification that God is pursuing in the universe. This was probably the conclusion of the Fundamental Epistle.
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Thus, to summarize the system whose gaps in the account of Theodore bar Konai nevertheless do not prevent us from recognizing the coherent symmetry: Originally two opposing kingdoms existed coeternally, that of Light above, that of Darkness below, and they did not penetrate each other. In the upper luminosity reigns the Father of Grandeur, whose five holy “dwellings” compose the “luminous earth.” The infernal abysses and their five pernicious “worlds” form the empire of the King of Darkness. The Spirit of Evil, attracted by their splendor, ascends toward the dwellings of the Father, and the latter, to combat him, brings forth from his bosom the Mother of Life and the Primitive Man, who form with him the first divine triad. The Primitive Man, armored with the five elements to which he gave birth, descends toward the dark kingdom of demons; but he is defeated, the light of his armor is absorbed by the infernal powers, and from this furious melee results the commixture of pure and impure principles that constitutes the substance of the present world.
However, yielding to the prayers of Primitive Man, captive of Darkness, the Father creates a second triad: the Friend of Lights, the Great Ban, and the Living Spirit. The last of these, like his predecessor, produces five glorious sons, with whom he returns to assail the adversaries of Good. These are defeated, and from their dismembered bodies, the Living Spirit, the demiurge, forms the world: first ten heavens, then eight earths, then the stars, and finally the wind, water, and fire that surround the earth.
But all these bodies are threatened with being “burned by the poison of the Archons,” and again the supplication of the alarmed gods rises to the heavenly Father, who comes to their aid with a third creation. He sends them the Messenger, who will ensure the salvation of the world. This beneficent genius resides with twelve Virtues, his daughters, in the Sun, and he launches into space the “luminous vessels” of the sky; at the same time the elements begin to move around the earth. Cosmic phenomena manifest themselves, and the revolutions of the stars will gradually purify nature. The Messenger causes the absorbed light to spring forth from the bodies of the Archons, chained to the firmament, but, unfortunately, a stained portion of it falls back on the earth, germinates there and produces vegetation; as a result of miscarriages of the female Archons, Abortions are born, which, multiplying, engender animal species. Finally, from the coupling of the king and queen of Darkness, nourished by the children of demons, results the creation of man, where the divine light groans, captive and soiled in a carnal prison. But the celestial spirits take pity on his distress: Jesus comes to awaken him to self-awareness, to reveal to him the struggle between good and evil in the world, to instruct him in his own nature and to indicate to him his future mission.
However powerful the imagination of the founder of Manichaeism may be, he could not have invented such a complicated system from scratch, and however persuasive his words might have been, he would not have been able to impose it, if his disciples had not been prepared by their past beliefs to welcome it. His revelation had to use the figurative language of myths that were familiar to them, and his fantastic reconstruction of the origins of the world had to use much reused material, borrowed from the ancient religions of the East. But, as the judicious Beausobre had already observed, “Manichean theology is full of bold and bizarre fictions, the origin of which is difficult to discover.” Without flattering ourselves today that we can draw up an inventory of the books that the prophet had read, we can, however, with more certainty than in the 18th century, go back to his principal sources of inspiration. They appear to have been multiple and the complication of his cosmogony comes from a syncretism that combines heterogeneous traditions. Mani borrows from Mazdaism his overarching conception of the antagonism of two opposing principles, of the eternal coexistence of the kingdoms of Light and Darkness, and of a primitive struggle provoked by the Spirit of Evil. Babylon furnished him with the prototype of his two divine triads and, if he added a Mazdaean god, the Messenger. Perhaps he found in Chaldean theology the model of this hebdomad. From the Christian Gnostics—rather than from orthodox Christianity—he took a series of names, whose meaning he also transformed—first among them those of Adam and Jesus—and then the idea of a series of successive generations, which are at the same time emanations consubstantial with God. Finally, his pessimistic conception of life and nature, his theory of renunciation, the abdication of all desire imposed on his disciples, bring him closer to Buddhism. After having studied this Manichean Genesis, even with the gaps found in the account of Theodore bar Konai, we better understand the beginning of the Shāpuragān, the Persian book that the reformer presented to King Shapur to convert him to his doctrine. “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God. So in one age they have been brought by the messenger, called Buddha, to India, in another by Zaradusht to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West. Thereupon this revelation has come down, this prophecy in this last age through me, Mani, the messenger of the God of truth to Babylonia” (al-Biruni, Chronology, trad. Sachau, p. 190). His perfect religion is the consummation of all those which preceded it, it contains the absolute truth of which each taught a part. But this very pretension marked the close dependence of his system on the previous doctrines, of which he wants to appear as the completion but of which he often succeeds in being only the agglomerate.
Mani—and this distinguishes him from most of the great founders of religions—Mani had read and written a great deal. But his activity was obviously not that of an eclectic philosopher laboriously gathering and coldly arranging the elements of a doctrinal synthesis. Reflection alone did not guide him in the search for truth. When inspiration, which he believes to be divine, springs within him from the depths of the subconscious, he gives free rein to his creative imagination. From then on, the figures that he remodels with his powerful hand and animates with his inner life, even when they offer an apparent resemblance to those of earlier theologies, are penetrated by another spirit and obey another will. A strongly constructed dogmatic system does not hinder either the fantasy of the poet or the strength of the playwright. The Babylonian prophet was not only the original defender of a consistent dualism, which provided a seemingly simple solution to the eternal problem of the existence of evil, an apostle who had enough influence over souls to raise them to the heights of an almost superhuman renunciation. His religion, despite the logical rigor that gave it a strong hold on educated minds, was not a pure metaphysics, implying certain principles of morality. As we have seen in this study, an exuberant mythology unfolded in his cosmology, and these fantastic legends certainly contributed to seducing Eastern imaginations. But, discolored in pale translations, they appeared contemptible to Greek science and shocking to Roman common sense. It was above all these “interminable fables about the sky, the stars, the sun and the moon,” these innumerable tales about the making of the world, “full of sacrilegious madness” (Augustine, Confessions 5.7; Contra Faustum 20.9), which turned St Augustine away from the sect into which he had strayed, after he had vainly tried to reconcile them with the theories of astronomers and physicists.
However, yielding to the prayers of Primitive Man, captive of Darkness, the Father creates a second triad: the Friend of Lights, the Great Ban, and the Living Spirit. The last of these, like his predecessor, produces five glorious sons, with whom he returns to assail the adversaries of Good. These are defeated, and from their dismembered bodies, the Living Spirit, the demiurge, forms the world: first ten heavens, then eight earths, then the stars, and finally the wind, water, and fire that surround the earth.
But all these bodies are threatened with being “burned by the poison of the Archons,” and again the supplication of the alarmed gods rises to the heavenly Father, who comes to their aid with a third creation. He sends them the Messenger, who will ensure the salvation of the world. This beneficent genius resides with twelve Virtues, his daughters, in the Sun, and he launches into space the “luminous vessels” of the sky; at the same time the elements begin to move around the earth. Cosmic phenomena manifest themselves, and the revolutions of the stars will gradually purify nature. The Messenger causes the absorbed light to spring forth from the bodies of the Archons, chained to the firmament, but, unfortunately, a stained portion of it falls back on the earth, germinates there and produces vegetation; as a result of miscarriages of the female Archons, Abortions are born, which, multiplying, engender animal species. Finally, from the coupling of the king and queen of Darkness, nourished by the children of demons, results the creation of man, where the divine light groans, captive and soiled in a carnal prison. But the celestial spirits take pity on his distress: Jesus comes to awaken him to self-awareness, to reveal to him the struggle between good and evil in the world, to instruct him in his own nature and to indicate to him his future mission.
However powerful the imagination of the founder of Manichaeism may be, he could not have invented such a complicated system from scratch, and however persuasive his words might have been, he would not have been able to impose it, if his disciples had not been prepared by their past beliefs to welcome it. His revelation had to use the figurative language of myths that were familiar to them, and his fantastic reconstruction of the origins of the world had to use much reused material, borrowed from the ancient religions of the East. But, as the judicious Beausobre had already observed, “Manichean theology is full of bold and bizarre fictions, the origin of which is difficult to discover.” Without flattering ourselves today that we can draw up an inventory of the books that the prophet had read, we can, however, with more certainty than in the 18th century, go back to his principal sources of inspiration. They appear to have been multiple and the complication of his cosmogony comes from a syncretism that combines heterogeneous traditions. Mani borrows from Mazdaism his overarching conception of the antagonism of two opposing principles, of the eternal coexistence of the kingdoms of Light and Darkness, and of a primitive struggle provoked by the Spirit of Evil. Babylon furnished him with the prototype of his two divine triads and, if he added a Mazdaean god, the Messenger. Perhaps he found in Chaldean theology the model of this hebdomad. From the Christian Gnostics—rather than from orthodox Christianity—he took a series of names, whose meaning he also transformed—first among them those of Adam and Jesus—and then the idea of a series of successive generations, which are at the same time emanations consubstantial with God. Finally, his pessimistic conception of life and nature, his theory of renunciation, the abdication of all desire imposed on his disciples, bring him closer to Buddhism. After having studied this Manichean Genesis, even with the gaps found in the account of Theodore bar Konai, we better understand the beginning of the Shāpuragān, the Persian book that the reformer presented to King Shapur to convert him to his doctrine. “Wisdom and deeds have always from time to time been brought to mankind by the messengers of God. So in one age they have been brought by the messenger, called Buddha, to India, in another by Zaradusht to Persia, in another by Jesus to the West. Thereupon this revelation has come down, this prophecy in this last age through me, Mani, the messenger of the God of truth to Babylonia” (al-Biruni, Chronology, trad. Sachau, p. 190). His perfect religion is the consummation of all those which preceded it, it contains the absolute truth of which each taught a part. But this very pretension marked the close dependence of his system on the previous doctrines, of which he wants to appear as the completion but of which he often succeeds in being only the agglomerate.
Mani—and this distinguishes him from most of the great founders of religions—Mani had read and written a great deal. But his activity was obviously not that of an eclectic philosopher laboriously gathering and coldly arranging the elements of a doctrinal synthesis. Reflection alone did not guide him in the search for truth. When inspiration, which he believes to be divine, springs within him from the depths of the subconscious, he gives free rein to his creative imagination. From then on, the figures that he remodels with his powerful hand and animates with his inner life, even when they offer an apparent resemblance to those of earlier theologies, are penetrated by another spirit and obey another will. A strongly constructed dogmatic system does not hinder either the fantasy of the poet or the strength of the playwright. The Babylonian prophet was not only the original defender of a consistent dualism, which provided a seemingly simple solution to the eternal problem of the existence of evil, an apostle who had enough influence over souls to raise them to the heights of an almost superhuman renunciation. His religion, despite the logical rigor that gave it a strong hold on educated minds, was not a pure metaphysics, implying certain principles of morality. As we have seen in this study, an exuberant mythology unfolded in his cosmology, and these fantastic legends certainly contributed to seducing Eastern imaginations. But, discolored in pale translations, they appeared contemptible to Greek science and shocking to Roman common sense. It was above all these “interminable fables about the sky, the stars, the sun and the moon,” these innumerable tales about the making of the world, “full of sacrilegious madness” (Augustine, Confessions 5.7; Contra Faustum 20.9), which turned St Augustine away from the sect into which he had strayed, after he had vainly tried to reconcile them with the theories of astronomers and physicists.
Source: Franz Cumont, La cosmogonie manichéenne d'après Théodore bar Khôni (Brussels: H. Lamertin, 1908), 1-53.
