Following up on my last post, what really drew me to Gardens of Light, of course, was my fascination with myths, comparative religion, and spirituality (geez, talk about a tonal shift with that. And it's arguably more true crime, but hey). This section got long enough it seemed like it warranted a post of its own, so here we are, and apologies for the bits where it is clear that this was originally attached to the previous one.
I first came across Manichaeism in an assigned essay for a godawful English class. One of those real up-their-own-ass professors, we've all had one. He assigned some reading that used the term and a student asked what it meant, the professor didn't know, stumbled over his words for a minute, then after some digging, I found the term intriguing, and the rest is history. These days, there's a pretty decent little online selection of sources but a decade or so ago, that wasn't the case.
Anyway, the dualistic nature struck me as fascinating, as did the very vivid descriptions from the fragments I came across. Their chimeric devil figure, described in the Kephalaia, is intriguing and sounds like something out of Greek myth—though I believe I also have seen a scholar refer to the heavy use of images this way as "childish." It was even more interesting to see a religion that drew on the concept of dualism and, unlike the more violent Zoroastrians, was pacifistic. I was also intrigued St. Augustine had been a former Manichaean and wondered whether his recounting of his exchange with Faustus of Mileve might have, heavily changed, influenced Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (sadly, this seems to have been one of my more half-baked ideas, no mentions of a connection I've found, just boring Johann Georg Faust).
That rambling stream aside, St. Augustine carried many of the tenets and attitudes of Manichaeism with him into his Christian philosophy (and, like many things he touched, he tainted them). Most prominent of these was the dualistic, or black-and-white, good vs. evil approach to the world that Manichaeism primarily drew from Zoroastrianism. Untethered from pacifism, which had been replaced by sanctioned violence, this became a fearsome weapon.
Augustine's dualistic attitudes can be seen, for example, in the Cathars of northern Italy and southern France, who were obliterated during the Albigensian Crusade. This is a less talked about Crusade as it did not involve a quest to the Holy Land and war with Muslims. The Albigensian Crusade reflects a dualistic dichotomy, turned inward toward Christian realms instead of outward toward Muslim ones, and channeled toward violence. The Crusaders arguably embody the Dark material world out to obliterate the Light, which they did in exterminating the Cathars. We see both the survival of a dualistic religion and a justification of their fear of a Dark world tainted by Augustine's perverted teachings condoning violence.
Augustine's moral basis for violence was a major underpinning of all of the Crusades, in fact, so I don't know why I'm singling out the Albigensian Crusade other than that it's a historical oddity particularly linked to dualism. Augustine also heavily contributed to Christians replacing the pacifistic St. Martin with the combative St. Michael for Christianity's foremost Saint. This shift occurred around the time when Christians in Rome went from being a persecuted sect to being the official state religion and being the ones doing the persecuting (tangential, but Jonathan Kirsch's God Against the Gods is a great book about this period and the shift from polytheism to monotheism). Many of the early Christian 'heretics' that were hunted down by the newly-empowered Christian church belonged to a rather broad category we now know as Gnosticism, which even Manichaeism can be considered to fall under.
Syncretism, mentioned in a previous post, also appears in the history of Manichaeism: Mani claimed to incorporate the teachings of Jesus, Zoroaster, and Buddha into his own. There are differing accounts of how he described this, but my preferred translation has him referring to himself as more of a guide who helps people to see that the individual rivers of these enlightened prophets all lead to one great ocean.
As a pacifist religion, Manichaeism enjoyed the spoils of neutrality: fury from all sides. The conflict in The Gardens of Light with Bahram I and Kartir reflects this quite well. Within the Christian realms, they were stamped out as a heresy and Manichaeism was referred to as 'madness,' playing on a pun on Mani's name in Greek that I don't understand cause I'm terrible with languages. Similarly, in the language Mani spoke, "paradise" and "garden" had a similar meaning, allegedly leading to Manichaeans being staked to the ground to create "gardens" of the dying. To the East, there are rumors of Manichaeism surviving but they were still stamped out at some point (very behind on my Chinese history).
As far as Manichaeism's 'creation story,' or Garden of Eden equivalent: well, it gets thorny. As a dualistic religion, it does not subscribe to a single omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent Being. Instead, we have two anthropomorphized principles: Light and Darkness, which are separated. I've read accounts where Darkness, driven by greed for Light, attacks and consumes an off-guard Light, leading to the creation of the material world; others where Light attempts to preempt Darkness by sending down First Man, who is knocked out and partially embroiled in the material world by Darkness and needs to be reminded of his celestial mission of purifying Light from Darkness. Either way, the world was created as a result of the mixing of Light and Darkness and functions as a sort of distillation tool for sifting spiritual Light, or a being's internal Divine Spark, from the material Dark.
In the end, there isn't quite the Judgment Day you might expect: Light just kinda sifts itself out from Darkness and leaves. There's a bit of tension between the cosmology, mythos, and teachings here, which you can ascribe to childishness as with the image-heavy texts of the Manichaeans—alternatively, you can see it as the inherent tensions of violent Zoroastrianism compromising with the diametrically different attitudes of pacifistic Buddhism. The Light World of Manichaeism bears resemblance to the Nirvana of Buddhism, as well—not to mention to the Heaven of Christianity and the Pleroma of Gnosticism.
Going back to it, the Divine Spark is an interesting little concept of Manichaeism as well as the reason they frowned upon procreation: the Spark needed to be nurtured. This could be accomplished by avoiding foods like meat and drinks like alcohol while opting for fruits. Melons were held in particularly high regard. This food was provided to the Elect by Hearers, as even picking food could be seen as an impure act of violence that could taint the Elect. This was mockingly called the 'Apology to the Bread' by some Christian enemies and raises the troubling specter of religion used as a means of control.
I digress: procreation was effectively 'splitting' one's Spark by putting part of it into a child, and thus perpetuating the cycle of the Dark material world. Interesting in theory, though imagining living this way presents a set of challenges, thus the separation of the Elect and the Hearers.
The theory of the Divine Spark is meant in a peaceful way in Manichaeism, as these beliefs and practices can also get batshit crazy off the rails. For an example of that, we can look to Carlos Castaneda of The Teachings of Don Juan (The Drug One, Not the Sex One) fame: after he'd built up his reputation with a fake story about a wise old Native and doing too much peyote in the desert, he decided to take the next step and start up a cult (as Creed Bratton would have us know: more money as a leader, more fun as a follower). He eventually came to a vaguely similar 'Divine Spark' concept and believed it meant parents should kill their kids to 'reclaim' that light. Big no-no.
As a final note: the term dualism has its surface-meaning, of course, but there is also a very interesting split between the different types of dualism. Within the philosophy of, I believe, the Greeks—those brilliant bastards who gaze us ouzo, olive oil, and anal sex, quite possibly in that order—dualism is more often associated with the dichotomy between spirit and body while within Persian/Zoroastrian sources, we see it as a conflict between good and evil. Manichaeism, of course, muddles or else intentionally blends these two by linking the physical/material with the evil/Dark and the spiritual/mental with the good/Light.
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