Mani the Prophet

Mani was born in Babylonia in about 216, in the territory then passing from Parthian to Sasanian rule, and grew up in a Jewish Christian baptising community usually identified with the Elchasaites. He reports two revelations, at twelve and at twenty four, from a being he calls his Twin, his heavenly counterpart, who disclosed to him the true nature of the world and commissioned him to preach. He left the community, which had rejected his teaching about ritual washing, and began a mission that took him to India and back and eventually to the Sasanian court.

He treated the fate of earlier revelations as a problem to be engineered around. Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus had all, in his account, taught the truth, and in every case their teaching had been corrupted after them because they had left the writing to their disciples. So he wrote his own: a Living Gospel, a Treasure of Life, a Book of Mysteries, a Pragmateia, a Book of Giants, and a body of letters, together with a picture book so that those who could not read could see the cosmology set out.

He also built a religion designed for translation. It presented itself as the completion of whichever tradition it met, so that in the Roman west it spoke Christian, in Iran Zoroastrian, and in Central Asia and China Buddhist, and its texts were rendered into Syriac, Greek, Coptic, Middle Persian, Parthian, Sogdian, Uyghur and Chinese. That flexibility is why it travelled so far and part of why it was so widely persecuted.

The Manichaean system begins with two eternal and unmixed principles, Light and Dark, and explains the world as the consequence of an attack by the second on the first. Particles of light became trapped in matter, and the whole history of the cosmos is the machinery of their release. The believer's discipline follows from that: the Elect, the inner order, kept strict celibacy and a vegetarian diet and were forbidden even to harvest, because injuring a plant injures the light in it, while the Hearers, the wider body, supported the Elect, prepared their food, and expected a better rebirth rather than immediate release.

Mani was favoured by the Sasanian king Shapur I, who permitted him to preach across the empire, and lost that protection under Bahram I. Pressed by the Zoroastrian priesthood, he was imprisoned in chains and died in custody at Gundeshapur about 276, an end the tradition treats as a crucifixion in the pattern of Jesus.

The religion outlived him by a thousand years and then vanished. It was established across the Roman world, where Augustine of Hippo was a Hearer for nine years before his conversion and afterwards its most effective opponent; it was adopted as the state religion of the Uyghur Khaganate in 762; and it survived in China into the Ming period. Its own literature was almost entirely destroyed, and for centuries it was known only through the reports of its enemies, until manuscript finds at Turfan and in Egypt in the twentieth century gave it back its own voice.