DeConick A.D

313
PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
His propensity for learning, his natural aptitude, and the revelatory
takeaway from his mystical visions all contributed to his Gnostic understanding
of the mysteries of God and the world, how humans got here,
and how humans get out. Mani’s metaphysics is Gnostic spirituality on
steroids.
The cosmos, in fact, was viewed by Mani as a giant mechanism to
filter out our souls and save them from evil. Where did our souls come
from? Mani did not believe there was ever a time when there was nothing.
He thought that there have always been opposites: light and darkness,
good and evil, truth and falsehood. As opposites they were separate. This
state of separation is the original, pristine condition of existence. Trouble
erupts when opposites mix, when light intersperses into darkness, when
good fraternizes with evil, when truth gets mixed up with falsehood. In
Mani’s account of the origins of the cosmos, this is exactly what happens.
Mixture occurs.
This mixture takes place when the princes of darkness, who live in five
realms of smoke, fire, wind, water, and darkness, first notice the kingdom
of light and decide to conquer it. The father of light, who dwells in the
five realms of mind, knowledge, intellect, thought, and reflection, becomes
nervous when he realizes the intent of his neighbors.
Because the father of light is goodness par excellence, he has no arms
to defend himself. His only defense is self-sacrifice, to allow the light to
be devoured by the darkness. So the father and mother of light send their
son, Primal Man, into the darkness, where he is eaten by the princes of
darkness. This is something of a trick, because the light acts like a virus,
infecting the darkness and putting it into a stupor. Although this stops
the advance of the dark princes, it also enmeshes the light in the darkness,
where it suffers.
The light-contaminated darkness takes shape, materializing as the
build ing blocks of the universe. This means that all cosmic and human
structures —from the planets and the sun to the rivers and trees to the animals
and human beings—are made of darkness contaminated with light.
It is this enmeshed light that becomes the stuff of souls in human beings.
But sparks of God are buried in matter, enmeshed in the natural world,
too. It is the enmeshed light that makes the entire universe sentient.
The creator god, a good deity named the Living Spirit, designs the
world to function as an alchemical still, an elaborate apparatus that distills
the light, the soul stuff, out of the dark matter. Mani envisioned the