DeConick A.D

314
PLEASANTVILLE RELIGIONS
planets and the fixed stars as a rotating giant sphere hung with twelve
vessels representing the zodiac houses. As the sphere turns, souls of the
faithful who have died are drawn up into the vessels and are ferried to the
moon.
Each month, the distillation of the light into moonlight can be observed
as the face of the moon becomes brilliant and full. Once the monthly cycle
is complete and the moon empties, the distilled moonlight is ferried by
heavenly barge to the sun and the Milky Way. This distilled moonlight is
soul stuff on its way back to the kingdom of light.
The Extreme Body
The human body is also an alchemical still, but only when it has been
ritually transformed through severe ascetic practices and profound moral
dedication. The alchemical body Mani instituted is the body that avoids
sexual activity, agricultural labor, meat, and alcohol. It is the body that
seals its mouth, hand, and breast. It is a body that inhabits radical quietude
and nonviolence as it labors to do no more harm to a sentient universe.
This extreme body, Mani believed, was capable of distilling the light
from food eaten. Through highly choreographed once-a-day ritual meals,
the extreme body separated the sentient light, the living self, from the
flesh of the vegetables served. The distilled light either could be stored
inside the stomach until the person died, when it would be taken up
into the cosmic still with the person’s soul, or it could be released on
its sky journey immediately after the meal, through the person’s mouth.
Augustine, bishop of Hippo and a former Manichaean, tells us that the
release of the living self came through the mouth when one belched.
Other texts suggest that the release through the mouth occurred during
the singing of the after-meal hymns, which included lines such as, “O light
soul, great light self” and “You, Lord Mani, liberate my soul” (Sogdian
text M 114).
Mani’s system of soul liberation, like other Gnostic systems we have
examined, was highly ritualized. But the soul’s ascent was not initiatory or
mystical. It was concrete and pragmatic, the consequence of extreme bodies
eating daily ritual meals (BeDuhn 2000). These extreme bodies were
vessels for the living self, discharging the soul stuff back into the spheres
so that it could be returned to the transcendent realm of light.