Fantastic Metropolis

Well, right there we’ve got enough reason for Bernard to hate them, if the Cathars were anything like the Carpocratians. Being Gnostic in outlook, one expects the Carpocratians to hold similar views to those revealed to us in the Nag Hammadi texts, an outlook somewhat like that of the Apostle Mani and early Manichaeism as well. Before I turn you over to master Stoyanov for a quick and dirty overview of Gnosticism, I’ll try and do a roundup of the Manichaean worldview. The Apostle Mani was born in Babylon on or around April 14^th of the year 216. he was a distant relative of the Arsacid Dynasty, and his father was a member of a Baptist sect known as the Katharoi (and our ears perk up, do they not?), which claimed to be in possession of hidden knowledge inherited from Elchasai, who claimed he received his teachings from a giant angelic figure who identified himself as the Son of God and another, gigantic angelic figure who called herself the Holy Spirit. In still Zoroastrian Persia, Elchasai argued against the fire worship of the Parsis and towards following water instead, hence the baptist elements of the sect. Despite their particular quirks, the Elchasaites were, on the main, straightforwardly Judeo-Christian as one could be at that time, following the Sabbath and denouncing the Apostle Paul and his innovations as “Greek thinking” which did not follow the law of Moses. The Elchasaites also believed in seven elements to baptism, an invocation of heaven, water, the holy spirits, the angels of prayer, oil, salt and the earth. If this in any way reminds you of the seven Amesha Spentas of classical Zoroastrianism, or the seven angels who constantly precede the throne of God in post-Babylonian captivity Judaism, you’re on the ball. Anyway, I could sit here and talk about the resemblances between Elchasaite theology and Zoroastrianism all day, but that only gets us so far along the path to explaining Manichaean thought. Mani himself broke with the Elchasaites either because of their practice of worshipping two sisters descended from Elchasai as living gods, or over their obsession with the purification of the body via baptism.

Mani believed and taught a form of dualism that differed from Zoroatrianism in one key way, a way that would come to influence Gnosticism and which seems clearly influenced by “Greek thinking” itself, namely earlier Orphist thought. To Mani, all things physical, especially the body, were inherently corrupt and souls were the only pure elements, trapped in “the cage of fleshly existence” unless freed by knowledge of the truth of existence. Mani believed that his own divine essence, or twin (called the syzygus) was given direct knowledge of the mystery of existence from the Father himself. These secrets were called the mysteries of the Deep and the High, Light and Darkness, and of the coming together of Light and Darkness and the creation of the world. Mani believed that all life on earth was the unfolding between two contrary principles, that they had been separated and rejoined again and again, and that in the future they would be finally split asunder forever. This melding of Zoroastrian dualism with the war between Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu (the war that led to the death of the holy bull, the release of Ativad, the clash between the stars and the planets) and the Orphic belief in the primacy of spirit over matter (definitely not true in original Zoroastrian thought, as matter was a full part of the Good Creation of Ahura Mazda) led Mani to declare himself as the ultimate manifestation of the fight against “Error” and the Apostle of Light. I could go into Mani’s role in the Sassanid Empire of the time and his possible encounter with Valerian while he was a captive, but it really isn’t important to understanding what Mani believed. Ultimately, Mani fused Marcionic thought with that of Zoroaster, and created a cosmos eternally at war with itself. All life is corrupt unless purified by the truth as given to Mani. And the Gnostics?

Conversely, the multifarious Gnostic schools did share, on the whole, an anti-cosmic dualism—the material world was negated as an imperfect and evil creation of an inferior demiurgic or clearly “Satanic” power and was opposed to the supernal spiritual world of the true but remote and unknown God. As with Orphic-Pythagorean religiosity, in Gnosticism the soul was seen as a stranger and an exile in the body, the souls of men were “precious pearls,” divine sparks from this spiritual realm and had descended into the wicked material world of the “howling darkness” to be imprisoned in material bodies and could be released only through the redeeming mediation of gnosis, a revelatory knowledge of the divine secrets.

—Yuri Stoyanov, The Other God