ter
which his skin was to be stuffed and hung up over the gates of the
royal city. His teaching consisted in a mixture of Persian and
Christian-Gnostic views; its middle final point was the dualism of good
and evil which rules in the world and in the human breast.

According to Mani's creed, there were originally two principles, God in
His kingdom of light, and the demon with his kingdom of darkness, and
these two principles existed independently of each other. The powers
of evil fell into strife with each other, until, hurled away by their
inward confusion, they reached the outermost edge of their own kingdom,
and from there beheld the kingdom of light in all its glory. Now they
ceased their strife among themselves and united to do battle to the
kingdom of light. To meet them, God created the "original man" who,
armed with the five pure elements, light, fire, air, water, and earth,
advanced to meet the hostile powers. He was defeated, though finally
saved; but a part of his light had thus made its way into the realm of
darkness. In order gradually to regain this light, God caused the mother
of life to create the visible world, in which that light lies hidden as
a living power or world-soul awaiting its deliverance from the bonds of
matter. In order to accomplish this redemption, two new beings of light
proceed from God, viz.: Christ and the Holy Ghost, of whom the former,
Christus Mithras, has his abode in the sun and moon, the latter in the
ether diffused around the entire world. Both attract the powers of light
which have sunk into the material world in order to lead them back,
finally, into the everlasting realm of light. To oppose them, however,
the demons created a new being, viz.: man, after the example of the
"original man," and united in him the clearest light and the darkness
peculiar to themselves, in order that the great strife might be renewed
in his breast, and so man became the point of union of all the forces in
the universe, the microcosm in which two principles ever strive for the
mastery. Through the enticements of the material and the illusions
of the demon, the soul of light was held in bondage in spite of its
indwelling capacity for freedom, so that in heathenism and Judaism the
"son of everlasting light," as the soul of the universe, was chained
to matter. In order to accomplish this work of redemption more quickly,
Christ finally leaves his throne at God's right hand, and appears
on earth, truly