A Once-Vast Religion Recovered in Fragments

This entry records that Manichaeism, founded by the prophet Mani in third-century Sasanian Persia and once a genuinely major world religion spreading from North Africa to China before its eventual extinction as a living, continuously practiced tradition by around the fourteenth century, maintained an extensive tradition of prayer and hymnody addressed within its distinctive dualistic cosmology of light and darkness, without reproducing specific Manichaean prayer texts here.

Surviving Manichaean religious material comes from scattered and often fragmentary sources recovered across a very wide geographic range, including Coptic-language texts from Egypt, Middle Persian and Parthian fragments from Central Asia, most significantly the substantial early twentieth-century finds at Turfan, and Chinese-language Manichaean texts preserved partly because Manichaeism was for a time reclassified and tolerated in China under a Buddhist-influenced guise, a genuinely unusual and geographically scattered survival pattern reflecting the religion's once very wide but ultimately not permanently sustained geographic spread. Manichaean cosmology divided the universe sharply between realms of light and darkness locked in ongoing conflict, a dualistic framework that drew hostile attention and active suppression from both Christian and Zoroastrian religious authorities across the regions where Manichaeism spread, contributing significantly to its eventual disappearance as an openly practiced religion.