a scheme of religious eclecticism, which sprung up in Persia during the third century A.D., and rapidly spread through Syria and Palestine, Egypt and North Africa, as far as Italy, Gaul, and Spain. To its ensnaring philosophy Augustine fell an early victim, but lived to repent his error and to become its most vigorous assailant. The founder of the system was a Persian of the name of Mani, or Manes, a word derived by some from the Hebrew Menahem, which signifies the comforter or paraclete, but now generally regarded as from a Sanscrit root signifying a jewel or treasure. The eastern accounts of his history differ widely from the representations given by the writers of the western church, who wrote, however, under the bias of ecclesiastical dislike. From the oriental tradition we learn that he sprang from the sacred race of the Magi, that his family was among the most distinguished in Persia, and that in pomp of dress he always preserved the dignity of his house. He was a proficient in the mathematical sciences, had studied geography, and was an adept in the mysteries of music and painting. All these accomplishments he laid at the feet of the Christian church, and became a presbyter in one of the provinces bordering on Babylonia. His love, however, for the Parseeism of his country soon polluted his Christian teaching, and he was at once excommunicated and exiled for his faith. This latter calamity he owed to the rigour of Sapor I., to whom he unfolded his new gospel of a universal religion, but who was as little inclined to tolerate an inroad on Magianism as the Persian presbyters were to allow the corruption of their Christianity. Mani fled to the east, visiting India and even China, where he studied the principles of Buddhism in order to give a wider basis to his scheme. Returning to a grotto in Turkestan, while his followers believed he had ascended to heaven, he blended together the elements of his religious experience into a gorgeous picture-book, called afterwards the Ertenki-Mani, which became the sacred writing of the sect. On the death of Sapor he returned to Persia, when Hormisdas became his patron, and gave him a splendid residence in Susana. Here he continued to spread his doctrines far and wide; but when Varanes succeeded to the throne, the jealousy of the Magians wrought his ruin. Mani was challenged to a conference, declared to be defeated, and flayed alive as a religious impostor. His skin, stuffed with straw, was suspended over the gate of the city of Sapor as a warning to all his adherents.

In the western accounts there is less both of consistency and romance. According to them, Manicheism owes its origin to a Saracen tradesman named Scythianus, who settled at Alexandria soon after the apostolic age, and bequeathed his doctrines to a pupil called Terebinthus. Soon after the death of his master, Terebinthus went to Babylon where he assumed the name of Buddhas, and pretended to have been born of a virgin, and to have been brought up on a solitary mountain by an angel. An unlucky fall from the roof of his house, however, cut short his days, and a young slave, called Cubricus, decamping with his manuscripts, and with them inheriting his wisdom, earned a more lasting reputation under the assumed name of Manes. At the court of Persia this impostor of the third generation succeeded in forming a school of disciples, whom he instructed and despatched abroad to disseminate his views. Having been unsuccessful in his treatment of one of the princes during a fatal illness, Manes was thrown into prison, and his apostles speedily returned to him with the intelligence that the Christians everywhere counterworked their charms. In the solitude of his dungeon he is said to have studied the Christian Scriptures; and, as soon as he was liberated, he proclaimed himself the promised Paraclete, commissioned to divulge and teach what Christ himself had left unspoken. With this new gospel Manes regained his former favour at the court; and from the Arabian, a castle on the borders of Mesopotamia, he was permitted freely to promulgate his views. A defeat which he suffered in open dispute with the Bishop Archelaus at Cascar, was the signal for his destruction (A.D. 277). Both accounts agree in the mode and circumstances of his death.

Tragic as was the fate of the founder of Manicheism, neither denunciation of divines nor tyranny of kings could daunt the adherents of this intoxicating heresy. In vain they were proscribed and trampled down. From Diocletian to Valentinian III. the severest statutes were framed against them. They were banished from their homes, and excluded from the common privileges of humanity; but after every wave of persecution, they reappeared to defend their doctrines, and the controversy was prolonged far into the middle ages. They are mentioned with as bitter hatred in the Koran as in the pages of Augustine.

It is impossible to give a full account of the Manichean system without expounding the systems from which it borrowed its constituent parts. These are given under separate heads in this work, and it is therefore only necessary here to note the particular dogmas of different creeds which were embraced within its vast eclecticism. These are admirably summed up by Dean Milman—“From his native Persia he derived his Dualism, his antagonist worlds of light and darkness; and from Magianism, likewise, his contempt of outward temple and splendid ceremonial. From Gnosticism, or rather from universal orientalism, he drew the inseparable admixture of moral and physical notions, the eternal hostility between mind and matter, the rejection of Judaism, and the identification of the God of the Old Testament with the evil spirit, the distinction between Jesus and the Christ, with the Docetism or unreal death of the incorporeal Christ. From Cabalism, through Gnosticism came the primal man, the Adam Cardmon of that system, and (if that be a genuine part of this system) the assumption of beautiful human forms, those of graceful boys and attractive virgins, by the powers of light and their union with the male and female spirits of darkness. From India he took the emanation theory (all light was a part of deity, and in one sense the soul of the world), the metempsychosis, the triple division of human souls (the one the pure, which reascended at once, and was reunited to the primal light; the second the semi-pure, which, having passed through a purgatorial process, returned to earth to pass a second ordeal of life; the third of obstinate and irreclaimable evil). From India, perhaps, came his Homophorus, as the Greeks called it, his Atlas, who supported the earth upon his shoulders, and his Splendidens, the circumambient air. From Chaldea he borrowed the power of astral influences; and he approximated to the solar worship of expiring Paganism. Christ the mediator, like the Mithra of his countrymen, dwelt in the sun. From his native country Mani derived the simple diet of fruits and herbs; from the Buddhist of India his respect for animal life, which was neither to be slain for food nor sacrifice; from all the anti-materialist sects or religions, the abhorrence of all sensual indulgences, even the bath as well as the banquet,—and the proscription, or at least the disparagement, of marriage. And the whole of these foreign and extraneous tenets his creative imagination blended with his own form of Christianity; for so completely are they mingled, that it is difficult to decide whether Christianity or Magianism formed the groundwork of the system." (Hist. Lat. Christ. ii. 322 ff.)

This cumbrous and complex system had the strange power of evoking a fanaticism as keen as any that the world has ever witnessed; and the fanatical zeal of the sect was stimulated by a severe asceticism and a rigid gradation of ranks. Although the Manichean worship was simple and seldom, their daily life was tinged, in even the most trivial acts, by the presence of superstition. The members of the church were divided into the perfecti, or sacerdotal class, and the auditores, or catechumens. The head of the priesthood was Mani and his successors in office; and under him twelve apostles, and seventy-two bishops, with presbyters, deacons, and evangelists, formed a descending series of dignitaries. From their founder they received neither temple nor ceremonial. Prayers to the sun, and hymns to the divine principle of light, constituted their vocal worship. They observed the Lord's day, baptized with oil, and celebrated the Eucharist in water mingled with raisins. They rejected animal food, and tolerated marriage only in the inferior orders. Christmas and Good Friday had to them no meaning, as they denied the reality both of Christ's birth and death; but they hallowed annually the day of Mani's martyrdom. The purity of their morals is conceded by Augustine, and probably the eastern Manichees long continued to retain their unblemished character; but in Italy, at least, they soon sank into hopeless degradation.

The best special authorities on the subject of the Manicheans are.—Is. de Beausobre, Hist. Crit. de Manichée, Amst. 1734 and 1739; Matter's Hist. du Gnosticisme; and F. Chr. Baur's Manichaïsche Religions-System, Tübingen, 1831; with Schneckenburger's Review in the Studien und Kritiken, iii., 1833.