Sect. XIV. “We have been ordered to keep each year seven Yimki[[1178]] [Days of Atonement?] and one month’s rigid fast[?]. We have also been ordered when meeting together in the House of Prayer to keep the Yimki and to observe the fast, to acknowledge in prayer with a whole mind to the Divine Burkhans the sins which we have committed during the year and which we know through our senses. O my God, if we have not kept the Yimki seemly; if we have not observed the month’s rigid fast perfectly and seemly; if we have failed to acknowledge in prayer the sins of the year which we know through our senses, and have thus failed in so many of our duties. O my God, to cleanse ourselves from sin, so pray we now: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (Our sins remit!)”
Sect. XV. “How many evil thoughts do we not think every day! How many deceitful and unseemly words do we not speak! How many unseemly deeds do we not do! Thus do we prepare torments for ourselves by crimes and frauds. Since we have walked body and soul in the love of the greedy and shameless Demon of Envy, and the Light of the Five Gods which we absorb in our food every day thereby goes to the Land of Evil. Wherefore, O my God, to cleanse ourselves from sin, so pray we now: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (Our sins remit!)”
Here follows a lacuna of four lines, after which the Confession resumes:
“O my God. We are full of defects and sins! We are thine adversaries and grieve thee by thoughts, words and deeds, for the sake of the greedy and shameless Demon of Envy. Gazing with our eyes, hearing with our ears, seizing with our hands, and trampling with our feet, we ever torture and impede the Light of the Five Gods, the dry and wet earth, the five kinds of animals, and the five kinds of plants and trees. So full are we of defects and sins! On account of the Ten Commandments, the seven kinds of Alms, the three seals, we are called Hearers; yet we cannot perform what these claim of us. If, wandering in sin, we have sinned against the Gods of Light, against the pure Law, against the Herald God[[1179]] and the Preacher, the Men of God [the Preachers, according to Le Coq], against the pure Elect. If we have not walked according to the letter and spirit of the spoken words of God. If we have grieved the hearts of the Gods. If we have been unable to keep the Days of Atonement, the rigid fast, to offer the Praises and the Blessings according to the Law and the Rite. If we have been found lacking and unprofitable, and have day by day and month by month committed sins and trespasses—to the Gods of Light, to the Majesty of the Law, to the pure Elect, to cleanse ourselves from sin, so pray we now: Manâstâr hîrzâ! (Our sin remit!)”
These last five sections of the Khuastuanift give us a glimpse of the religious observances of the Manichaeans which alters somewhat the picture of them which we should have formed from the account of St Augustine and other Christian writers. The seven kinds of alms referred to in Section XI, are not, as might be thought, the gifts to necessitous or helpless persons prescribed alike by the Christian and the Mahommedan religions. It is apparent both from the context and from other sources of information that they are the offerings of food made by the lay or lowest members of the Manichaean community to the Elect or Perfect, who are spoken of in the subsequent sections as being already a species of Gods. This practice was certainly known to St Augustine, and was not likely to sink into oblivion in a community in contact with Buddhists, among whom monks living upon food given in alms by the faithful were a common sight. But the reason assigned by St Augustine for the practice, which was before obscure, here receives full explanation. The particles of light diffused through matter, and therefore inhabiting the bodies of animals and plants, could only, in Manichaean opinion, be set free by passing into the bodies of the semi-divine Elect. Thus says St Augustine in his treatise against the Manichaean Perfect, Faustus[[1180]]:
“This foolish notion of making your disciples bring you food, that your teeth and stomach may be the means of relieving Christ who is bound up in it, is a consequence of your profane fancies. You declare that Christ is liberated in this way—not, however, entirely; for you hold that some tiny particles of no value still remain in the excrement, to be mixed up and compounded again in various material forms, and to be released and purified at any rate by the fire in which the world will be burned up, if not before.”
With the substitution of the “Light of the Fivefold God” for Christ—the use of this last name being probably either the gloss of St Augustine himself, or else the concession made by the Manichaean missionaries after their manner to the religious prepossessions of those among whom they hoped to gain converts—we have here the doctrine more plainly stated in the Khuastuanift. The Hearers are to labour perpetually, idleness being one of the Manichaean deadly sins, and to present the fruits of their labour in the shape of food to the Perfect. Not only will the particles of Light imprisoned in this last thus be conveyed to the Land of the Gods; but it will be prevented from going to the Land of Evil, which it would do if it were consumed by the bodies of the Hearers or, a fortiori, of those profane persons who belonged to other faiths than the Manichaean. Thus is explained the inhumanity of which many writers accuse the Manichaean community, which led them to refuse food to their neighbours in time of famine, alleging that all that they produced must be reserved for those of the Faith[[1181]].
This explains also the merit assigned to the observance of the many fasts enjoined in the concluding sections of the Khuastuanift. The fifty Vusanti fasts together with the month’s rigid fast to be kept by the Hearers would all have the effect of diminishing their consumption of food in the shape of animals and plants, which hinders the liberation of the particles of Light imprisoned therein. In the choice of the days set apart for these fasts we see another instance of the Manichaean practice as assimilating the outward observances of other religions. The fifty Vusanti fasts would give an average of very nearly one a week, and were probably kept on Sunday, the distinction between the Elect and the Hearers in this respect noted by the Mahommedan writer being probably due to some misconception. The month’s rigid fast possibly accorded with the Arab Ramadan and must have been very useful in preventing the Hearers from appearing singular when among Mahommedans; and the seven Yimki or Days of Atonement seem to have been copied from the observances of the Jews. So possibly was the ritual practice alluded to in the XIVth section of meeting together at certain times to confess their sins, and as this is here said to take place in the House of Prayer, it entirely disposes of the theory set up by earlier writers that the Manichaeans had no temples, synagogues, or churches of their own[[1182]]. The confession and prayer enjoined in Section XIII were doubtless to be repeated privately and in whatever place the Hearer found himself at the fortnightly periods there specified, and this Litany was very probably the Khuastuanift itself[[1183]].
What other ritual was performed in these Manichaean meeting-places is still doubtful. The Christian writers declare that the Manichaeans celebrated a sacrament resembling the Eucharist with the horrible accompaniments before alluded to in the case of the followers of Simon Magus[[1184]]. The same accusation was made, as has been many times said above, by nearly all the sects of the period against each other, and we have no means of determining its truth. It is however fairly certain from the silence observed on the subject by the Khuastuanift that no sacramental feast of any kind was either celebrated by or in the presence of the Hearers or general body of Manichaeans. If the Perfect or Elect partook of any such meal among themselves, it possibly consisted of bread and water only and was probably a survival of some custom traditional in Western Asia of which we have already seen the traces in the Mysteries of Mithras[[1185]]. The pronounced Docetism which led the Manichaeans to regard the body of the historical Jesus as a phantom shows that they could not have attributed to this meal any sacramental efficacy like that involved in the doctrines either of the Real Presence or of the Atonement.
The case is different with regard to pictures. The Manichaeans forbade the use of statues or probably of any representations of the higher spiritual powers, no doubt in recollection of the idea current among the Persians even in Herodotus’ time, that the gods had not the nature of men. Yet the Jewish and later the Mahommedan prohibition against making likenesses of anything had evidently no weight with them, and even before the recent discoveries there was a tradition that Manes himself was in the habit of using symbolical pictures called Ertenki-Mani as a means of propaganda[[1186]]. The truth of this is now amply confirmed by the German discoveries at Turfan, where Prof. von Le Coq found frescoes representing possibly Manes himself, together with paintings on silk showing the souls of the faithful dead in the Moon-ship[[1187]]. Sir Marc Stein seems to have secured similar relics at Tun-huang, and when these are more thoroughly examined it is possible that they may throw light upon many points of Manichaean symbolism yet obscure to us. The fact that the Manichaean meeting-houses were decorated with symbolical pictures seems thereby already established.