Manichaeanism also Manichaeism, a syncretistic religion founded by the Babylonian prophet Mani (A.D. 216–77), who claimed a revelation from God and saw himself as a member of a line that included the Buddha, Zoroaster, and Jesus. In dramatic myths, Manichaeanism posited the good kingdom of God, associated with light, and the evil kingdom of Satan, associated with darkness. Awareness of light caused greed, hate, and envy in the darkness; this provoked an attack of darkness on light. In response the Father sent Primal Man, who lost the fight so that light and darkness were mixed. The Primal Man appealed for help, and the Living Spirit came to win a battle, making heaven and earth out of the corpses of darkness and freeing some capured light. A Third Messenger was sent; in response the power of darkness created Adam and Eve, who contained the light that still remained under his sway. Then Jesus was sent to a still innocent Adam who nonetheless sinned, setting in motion the reproductive series that yields humanity.
This is the mythological background to the Manichaean account of the basic religious problem: the human soul is a bit of captured light, and the problem is to free the soul from darkness through asceticism and esoteric knowledge. Manichaeanism denies that Jesus was crucified, and Augustine, himself a sometime Manichaean, viewed the religion as a Docetic heresy that denies the incarnation of the second person of the Trinity in a real human body. The religion exhibits the pattern of escape from embodiment as a condition of salvation, also seen in Hinduism and Buddhism. See also AUGUSTINE , BUDDHISM , HINDUIS. K.E.Y.