482. This psalm offers one of the best summaries of Manichean myth.
tiny. His starting point was a cosmic dualism. As one Manichean psalm proclaims it:
Let us worship the Spirit of the Paraclete [= Mani]. . . . He came, He separated us from the error of the world. He brought us a mirror. We looked; [we] saw this universe in it. When the Holy Spirit came, he revealed to us the way of truth. He taught us that there are two natures, that of the Light and that of the Darkness, [separate] from one another from the beginning.2
The visible universe, reflected in the "mirror" of Mani's revelation, is a tumultuous war-torn frontier land, the front lines of a cosmos-wide struggle between the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness. The anguish of our world is traceable back to a great battle that took place before the creation of the present material universe. Long ago, long before our present world, light and darkness, good and evil, were once originally separate realms. How then did this terrible mixed-up world of ours come into being? According to Mani, border forces within the Kingdom of Darkness, instinctively drawn to the beauty of light across the frontier, plotted and succeeded in invading a segment of the Kingdom of Light. In response, God (or "the Father of Greatness") evoked emanations of his own light-substance and sent one of them, Primal Man, to turn back this invasion from the Kingdom of Darkness. In the great battle that followed, the forces of darkness succeeded in capturing and imprisoning this Primal Man. He himself was eventually rescued, but what got left behind was the current muddled material world, with its painful mixture of divine brightness and dark evil matter. This primeval battle is but the opening episode in Mani's intricate mythological account of how the world came about and how it will slowly come to be redeemed. Something about Manichean myth resonated deeply with ancient audiences. Its appeal is not unlike that of modern films such as Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. Both film series tell entertaining epic tales of a many-sided, universe-wide clash between long-suffering goodness and a seemingly invincible evil empire. Manicheism, in its own day and in its own way, offered just such a cosmic tale. Its story helped explain why our world is so dark and yet why there exists hope of salvation, at least for some.
According to Mani, every person carries this cosmic battle of the Kingdom of Light and the Kingdom of Darkness within himself or herself. He claimed that we do not really know ourselves; we do not realize that, in our deepest core, we are sparks of divine light trapped in material bodies. We
2. Coptic Manichean Psalm 223.2–3. For the Coptic text, see C. R. C. Allberry, A Manichaean Psalm-Book, part 2 (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1938). The translation here is from Jason D. BeDuhn, "Manichean Theology," in Religions of Late Antiquity in Practice, ed. Richard Valantasis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 482. This psalm offers one of the best summaries of Manichean myth.