Manichaeism

Mani was born in 216 CE near Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital on the Tigris, to a family of Parthian descent. He grew up among a Jewish-Christian baptising community, and from his youth reported visions of a heavenly companion he called his ‘Twin’. In his twenties he broke away and began to preach a new religion that, in his own account, completed the teachings of the Buddha, Zarathushtra and Jesus. Unlike them, he said, he would write his scriptures himself, so that they could not be corrupted.

His teaching rests on two principles, Light and Darkness, and three times. In the beginning the two were separate. In the middle time, which is now, Darkness has attacked and swallowed particles of Light, which lie trapped in matter, in plants and in human bodies. In the end time the Light will be fully freed and the two separated for ever. The community was divided into the Elect, who kept strict rules of diet, celibacy and harmlessness, and the Hearers, who lived ordinary lives and supported them. Mani’s followers sang hymns, kept a weekly fast and celebrated the Bema, a spring festival marking his death.

At the Sasanian court

Mani found favour with Shapur I and wrote for him the Shabuhragan, a summary of his teaching in Middle Persian. He travelled widely, and sent missions west into the Roman empire and east into Central Asia. Under Bahram I the Zoroastrian priesthood, led by Kerdir, turned against him. Mani died in prison at Gundeshapur (Bēth Lapaṭ) in Khuzestan, in about 274 or 277; his followers called his death the crucifixion of the apostle of light.

His religion outlived him by a thousand years. Augustine of Hippo was a Hearer for about nine years before becoming a Christian. Sogdian merchants carried Manichaeism along the Silk Road, and in 762 or 763 the ruler of the Uyghur Khaganate adopted it. A small Manichaean shrine survives at Cao’an in Fujian, China. In the early twentieth century German expeditions to Turfan found thousands of Manichaean fragments in Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian and Uyghur, written in an elegant script of the community’s own, many beautifully illuminated. Among them are cycles of Parthian hymns, such as the Huyadagman, whose lament of the trapped soul longing for the light is among the finest religious poetry of pre-Islamic Iran.

Mani the painter

In Persian memory Mani is above all a painter. Later tradition credits him with a book of pictures, the Arzhang (or Artang), made to teach those who could not read, and Persian poets use ‘Mani’ as a byword for a matchless artist, and ‘the Arzhang of Mani’ for a scene of perfect beauty. The faith itself disappeared from Iran, but the name of its founder still signals what a brush can do.