PAGANS AND GNOSTICSreligiously among separate competing faiths, and Manichaeism sur-
vived as one of them.
Mani's message was the usual gnostic dualism of Good and Evil,
Light and Darkness, originally separate and opposed, which had be-
come mixed in the world through the aggression of the evil principle.
In an elaborate myth of cosmic conflict between good beings of light
and evil beings of darkness, Mani explained how the sky and the earth
had been made from the dismembered parts of the evil Archons, as
in the Babylonian Creation Myth. The human soul was a particle of
light which was trapped in an evil material body. The Manichaean
mechanism, whereby the pure souls of the dead were drawn up from
earth to pass through the sun and the moon by means of a revolving
wheel with twelve jars, was adapted from the Chaldaean belief that
the soul ascended through the signs of the zodiac.^86
Manichaeans were antinomian, elitist, and ascetic. From Christian
gnosticism and possibly from Magians they acquired the attitude that
Judaism was created by the Lord of Darkness (they called him Ahri-
man) and that Moses (the lawgiver) and the prophets were devilsP
Because ?uman procreation ensured the continued entrapment of Light
in the material world, men and women initiates who were filled with
Light (the Elect) were required to suppress physical desires by extreme
forms of asceticism. They could not eat meat or drink wine, be married,
work, own property, or injure any living thing. Although such forms
of asceticism were not unknown in the Hellenistic period and are easily
justified by the gnostic outlook, this combination of celibacy, vege-
tarianism, poverty, and indigence seems to have been a form of Indian
asceticism that was introduced into western Asia by the Manichaeans.
The division of Manichaeans into the Elect and the Hearers came
from the Marcionites. The Hearers could marry and own property,
but were expected to devote themselves to righteous works, pray at
night, and fast on Sundays; desist from idolatry, magic, lying, avarice,
killing, adultery, and theft; and support the Elect by their charity.
Hearers expected to be reincarnated according to their works. Man-
ichaean worship was preceded by an ablution with water and consisted
86 F. Cumont, "La roue a puiser les ames du Manicheisme," RHR, 72 (1915), 384-
88; Ibn an·Nadim, Fihrist, 11, 773-74; Mitchell, Prose Refutations, pp. 208-9; J. Pe-
dersen, "The Siibians," in A Volume of Oriental Studies Presented to Edward G. Browne
(Cambridge, 1922), pp. 384-85; Shahrastiini, Milal, 11, 49. On Manichaeism in general,
see G. Widengren, Mani and Manichaeism (London, 1961, 1965), and idem, Mani-
chaeism (Uppsala, 1949).
87 Neusner, Talmudic Judaism, p. 147.