Mani showed himself a true Oriental in his contempt for women. He forbade his disciples to marry and advocated the slow extinction of the human race.
As for baptism and the other ceremonies instituted originally by the Jewish sect of which John the Baptist had been the exponent, Mani regarded them all with horror and instead of being submerged in water, his candidates for holy orders were initiated by the laying on of hands.
At the age of twenty-five, this strange man undertook to explain his ideas unto all mankind. First he visited India and China where he was fairly successful. Then he turned homeward to bring the blessings of his creed to his own neighbors.
But the Persian priests who began to find themselves deprived of much secret revenue by the success of these unworldly doctrines turned against him and asked that he be killed. In the beginning, Mani enjoyed the protection of the king, but when this sovereign died and was succeeded by some one else who had no interest whatsoever in religious questions, Mani was surrendered to the priestly class. They took him to the walls of the town and crucified him and flayed his corpse and publicly exposed his skin before the city gate as an example to all those who might feel inclined to take an interest in the heresies of the Ecbatanian prophet.
By this violent conflict with the authorities, the Manichaean church itself was broken up. But little bits of the prophet’s ideas, like so many spiritual meteors, were showered far and wide upon the landscape of Europe and Asia and for centuries afterwards continued to cause havoc among the simple and the poor who inadvertently had picked them up, had examined them and had found them singularly to their taste.
Exactly how and when Manichaeism entered Europe, I do not know.
Most likely it came by way of Asia Minor, the Black Sea and the Danube. Then it crossed the Alps and soon enjoyed immense popularity in Germany and France. There the followers of the new creed called themselves by the Oriental name of the Cathari, or “the people who lead a pure life,” and so widespread was the affliction that all over western Europe the word “Ketzer” or “Ketter” came to mean the same as “heretic.”
But please don’t think of the Cathari as members of a definite religious denomination. No effort was made to establish a new sect. The Manichaean ideas exercised great influence upon a large number of people who would have stoutly denied that they were anything but most devout sons of the Church. And that made this particular form of heresy so dangerous and so difficult of detection.