The major Gnostic rival to Christianity that spanned from Rome to China.
Mani — The Apostle of Light; the synthesis of Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus.
- The Elect and the Hearers — The structure of the Manichaean community (paralleling Cathar Perfecti).
“The main doctrine of Manichaeism is the existence of two eternal and opposing principles, Light and Darkness, whose mixture resulted in the current state of the world and whose separation is the goal of the cosmic process.”
― Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity, 1958,
The Seduction of the Archons
The Seduction of the Archons story within the Manichaean canon is a part of the Third Creation, the third and final phase of the three-phase Manichaean creation narrative.
After the Second Creation, which created the physical universe—the stars, the sun, the moon, the ten heavens and the eight earths—the Father of Greatness bound many great demons from the realm of darkness—called the archons—within the heavens, for the sake of recovering the light that they had swallowed from the World of Light. The Mother of Life, Primal Man, and the Living Spirit then call to the Father of Greatness to liberate the light from the archons. A complex process of extracting the light from the two-hundred captive archons then follows. The Father creates a being of light called the Third Messenger, which calls upon the Virgins of Light. The Virgins of Light, or the Messenger themself, then perform sensually towards the archons, taking on boyish forms towards the female archons and the forms of beautiful women towards the male archons. Inflamed with lust towards the creature(s) of light, the male archons ejaculate and the female archons miscarry, a mixture of light and darkness interred in both materials. The ejaculate of the male archons rains down upon the earth, creating the first plants, and the miscarriages fall down, becoming animals and monstrous "abortions." The "abortions" feed upon the plants and riot across the surface of the earth, dispersing light throughout the material realm further. Through acts of cannibalism and complex sexual intercourse, they created the first material human beings—Adam and Eve—in the remembered images of the transgender Messenger.