In the meantime, the Living Spirit has also given birth to five sons. He, like the Very Great Father of whom he is perhaps the reflexion, has five worlds named like those of his paradigm from which he draws certain other powers. From his Intelligence, says Bar Khôni, he produces The Ornament of Splendour, who is none other than the Splenditenens we have seen drawing the heavens after him; from his Reason, the Great King of Honour, who is described as sitting in the midst of the celestial armies; from his Thought, Adamas of the Light armed with shield and spear; from his Reflexion the King of Glory whose function is to set in motion the three wheels of the fire, the water, and the wind, which apparently raise to the upper spheres the portions of those elements still left below; and finally from his Feeling the great Omophorus or Atlas who bears the earths on his shoulders[[1128]]. Immediately on evocation, three of these powers were set to work to kill and flay the rulers of darkness, and to carry their skins to the Mother of Life. She stretches out the skins to make the sky, thereby fashioning ten or eleven or even twelve heavens. She throws their bodies on to the Earth of Darkness, thereby forming eight earths[[1129]]. Thus the soul or sons of the First Man are rescued from the Powers of Darkness, and the machinery of the redemption of the Light is set on foot.
There is, however, a third act to the drama. Again, the lesser Powers of Light, this time the Mother of Life, the First Man, and the Living Spirit, cry to the Very Great Father. Satan, or, as the Mahommedan tradition calls him, Hummâma, is still in existence, although his “sons,” the Rulers of Darkness, the Hot Wind, the Smoke, and the others have been crucified or fixed in the firmament, and he is still actively working with his remaining powers against the Light. The Light-Powers feel themselves contaminated and oppressed by the contact, and perhaps even in some fear lest they should again have the worst in a renewal of the conflict. Again, the Very Great Father hears them and sends to their assistance a third creation, called this time simply the Messenger.
Who this Messenger is, is the main puzzle of the new documents. The author of the Acta knew something of him, for he speaks of a “Third Legate,” who, when the world is burning in the great conflagration which will mark the redemption of the last particles of light, will be found in the Ship of the Moon with Jesus, the Mother of Life, the Virgin of Light and the twelve other powers to be presently mentioned[[1130]]. M. Cumont, in his able analysis of Bar Khôni’s system, thinks that this “Third Legate” resembles the Neryôsang of the Persians, who in the later Mazdean literature is made the herald of Ormuzd, and has also features in common with Gayômort the First Man, and Mithras[[1131]]. But it is plain from the Tun-huang treatise lately discovered, as well as from the fragments found at Turfan, that the Third Legate corresponds most closely to the Mazdean genius or divinity Sraôsha, the angel of Obedience[[1132]]. Sraôsha is described in the Srôsh Yashts as the “Holy and Strong Srôsh,” “the Incarnate Word, a mighty-speared and lordly god.” He it is who is called the “fiend-smiter,” who is said to watch over the world and to defend it from the demons, especially at night, to fight for the souls of the good after death, and, in the older Mazdean traditions, to judge the dead with Mithra and Rashnu as his assessors, like Rhadamanthos, Minos, and Eacus among the Greeks[[1133]]. In the Turfan texts he is called the mighty, and in the Tun-huang treatise is likened to a judge, while in both sets of documents he has his proper appellation of Srôsh[[1134]].
This third creation was no more content than his two predecessors to enter upon the task allotted to him without further help. His first act upon arriving hither, according to Bar Khôni, was to evoke or call into existence twelve virgins with their vestures, their crowns, and their guards. The Turfan texts give us the names of these powers, four of whom seem to be attributes of sovereignty, and eight of them virtues. Their names in the order of the new texts are respectively, Dominion, Wisdom, Victory, Persuasion, Purity, Truth, Faith, Patience, Uprightness, Goodness, Justice and Light, and they are probably the twelve “pilots” whom the Acta describe as being at the Ecpyrosis in the Moon-ship with their father, with Jesus, and with the other powers[[1135]]. But there is much plausibility in M. Cumont’s theory that this Third Legate or Srôsh is supposed until that event to inhabit the Sun, and that his 12 “daughters” are the signs of the Zodiac among whom he moves[[1136]]. According to Bar Khôni, it is the same Legate who is ordered by the Great Ban to create a new earth and to set the whole celestial machinery—the Sun and Moon-ships and the three wheels of fire, air, and water—in motion[[1137]]. Yet we hear nothing in any other document of any addition to the number of eight earths already created, and we can only therefore suppose that Bar Khôni’s phrase refers to the gradual purification of this world of ours by Srôsh.
Bar Khôni also makes the appearance of this last Legate responsible for the appearance of man upon the earth, as to which he recites a story which seems at first sight to be an elaboration of the Gnostic and Manichaean tradition preserved by the Christians and mentioned above. The Legate, he makes Manes say, was of both sexes, and on his appearance in the Sun-ship, both the male and female rulers of Darkness became so filled with desire that they began to give up the light which they had taken from the sons of the First Man. With this was mingled their own sin, half of which fell into the sea and there gave birth to a horrible monster like the King of Darkness. This was conquered and slain by Adamas of the Light, but that which fell upon the land fructified as the five kinds of trees[[1138]]. Moreover, the female demons, who were pregnant at the time, miscarried and their untimely births ate of the buds of the trees. Yet these females remembered the beauty of the Legate whom they had seen, and Asaqlun or Saclas[[1139]], son of the King of Darkness, persuaded them to give him their sons and daughters, in order that he might make from them an image of the Legate. This they did, when he ate the male children and his wife Namraël consumed the female. In consequence Namraël gave birth to a son and a daughter who were called Adam and Eve. Jesus was sent to Adam and found him sleeping a sleep of death, but awoke him, made him stand upright, and gave him to eat of the Tree of Life, while he separated him from his too seductive companion. This story is not confirmed by any of the new documents; and in the present state of our knowledge it is impossible to say whether it contains an old Asiatic tradition, of which the Biblical accounts of the protoplasts and of the Sons of God making love to the daughters of men are the only remnants which have till now come down to us, or whether—as is at least as likely—the whole story is a blend by the Manichaeans of Jewish, Mandaite, and Pagan legends. The main point in it for our consideration is its introduction of a Jesus who is certainly not the same as the Jesus patibilis whom St Augustine and the other Christian Fathers make Manes describe as born of the Living Spirit and the Earth, and as hanging on every tree. This other Jesus, who came to the earth in the time of Adam, is a fourth emissary or Saviour put forth by the second and third creations according to the Fihrist and called by Bar Khôni “Jesus the shining one.” In the Turfan texts he is, as has been said, perhaps equated with the Virgin of Light, and in the Tun-huang treatise he is spoken of as “Jesus the Victorious[[1140]].” Evidently he is conceived as one of the Burkhans or Buddhas who fight against the Powers of Darkness, and the Jesus patibilis is but another name for the fragments of light or “armour” of the First Man left on this earth. The borrowing of the name revered among Christians is but one of the compromises by which the Manichaeans hoped to draw those of other faiths into their net.
A like plasticity is shown in the organization of the Manichaean Church. The first disciples of Manes, to whom he gave special commandments, were, according to Christian tradition, only seven in number, in which if anywhere in the system we may see a reflexion of the seven Amshaspands of the Avesta[[1141]]. But later there seems to have been instituted a band of twelve Apostles in manifest imitation of the Apostles of Jesus, who perhaps corresponded to the Masters or highest degree that we have seen called the Sons of Gentleness. These were presided over by a Manichaean Pope who figured as the representative and Vicegerent of Manes himself. There were also seventy-two bishops answering to the seventy-two disciples of Christ, who are perhaps to be identified with the Sons of Knowledge. Then came the Presbyters or Sons of Intelligence whose functions were chiefly those of missionaries and who were perpetually, like Faustus, travelling for the propagation of the faith[[1142]]. This seems to have been the organization generally adopted for Christian countries, and we meet with it there up to a very late date. Yet there is no reason to suppose that it was necessarily copied by the Manichaeans of Central Asia or India, or that the Manichaeans always obeyed some central authority. What organization they did adopt outside Europe and Africa we shall probably have to wait to discover when more of the documents coming from Turkestan have been deciphered.
The extreme simplicity of the Manichaean ritual also made easy to them all such adaptations to the ways of their neighbours. Hating images with as much energy, perhaps, as Zoroaster himself, they had neither statues nor lights nor incense in their meeting-places, which must in the West have been as bare and as unadorned as a Scottish conventicle. The whole service seems to have consisted of hymns and prayers, in the first of which the mythology of the sect doubtless found expression, while the second mainly consisted of those praises of the Powers of Light, which praises were thought, as has been said, to have an actual and objective existence and thus to fulfil a considerable part in the scheme of redemption. Up to the present we have very few examples of the hymns. The Hymn of the Soul, of which Prof. Bevan has published an English translation, is probably Manichaean in origin[[1143]], and St Augustine tells of a “love song” in which the Father, meaning thereby probably Srôsh, the third legate[[1144]], is represented as presiding at a banquet crowned with flowers and bearing a sceptre, while twelve gods, three from each quarter of the globe, are grouped round him “clothed in flowers” singing praises and laying flowers at his feet. These are said to represent the seasons[[1145]]; and we hear also of myths doubtless expressed in song describing the great angel Splenditenens, whose care is the portions of Light still imprisoned in matter and who is always bewailing their captivity[[1146]]; and of his fellow angel Omophorus who, as has been said, bears the world on his shoulders like the classical Atlas[[1147]]. Doubtless, too, some of these hymns described that last conflagration, which seems to have occupied so great a place in the speculations of the early Manichaeans, when the justified faithful, secure in the two great ships which sail about on the ocean of the upper air, shall behold the world in flames and the last portion of the imprisoned Light mounting in the Column of Praises, while Satan and his hosts are confined for ever in the gross and dark matter which is henceforth to be their portion[[1148]]. Possibly the Turfan discoveries may yet recover for us some important fragments of this lost literature.
With regard to the prayers, we are a little better informed. “Free us by thy skill, for we suffer here oppression and torture and pollution, only that thou (the First Man?) mayest mourn unmolested in thy kingdom,” is one of those which St Augustine has preserved for us[[1149]]. So, too, the Mahommedan tradition has handed down a series of six doxologies or hymns of praise out of a total of twelve which seem to have been obligatory, perhaps on all Manichaeans, but certainly on the Perfect. The suppliant is, we are told, to stand upright, to wash in running water or something else, in which we may perhaps see either the origin or an imitation of the ceremonial ablutions of the Mussulman, then to turn towards the Great Light, to prostrate himself and to say:
“Blessed be our guide, the Paraclete, the Messenger of the Light. Blessed be his angels, his guards, and highly praised his shining troops.”
Then he is to rise and, prostrating himself again, to say: