Manichaean Sect Found in China

An Armidale researcher has helped unearth an active Manichaean sect in southeast China. During their third annual expedition to the Fujian Province of the People's Republic of China in April, University of New England religious history Professor Majella Franzmann and a team of Australian experts discovered evidence of a living Mani cult in a family's home in a small village near Jinjiang. The discovery is documented in a paper recently published in the international journal Rivista di storia e letteratura (Review of Religious History and Literature).

Manichaeism was an authentic Gnostic world religion. The record is often confused because medieval writers used the term Manichee as a synonym for heretic. The name Mani is mainly a title and term of respect rather than a personal name; this title was assumed by the founder himself and so completely replaced his personal name that the precise form of the latter is not known.

Mani was raised in a Jewish environment. In the years 220-240 he lived in a Jewish community in the south of Babylon, near present-day Bagdad in Iraq. He founded his own world church, which was inspired by Gnostic-Christian thought, in reaction to the strict nomistic circles in which he grew up. His church, which eventually spread to the Atlantic Ocean in the West and the Pacific Ocean in the East, existed for many centuries, with millions of adherents and even producing its own typical art. Manicheism may also have been an influence on the medieval Cathars; it is certain that Augustine, one of the greatest of Church Fathers, once belonged to Mani's church. It is mainly through Augustine that the gnosticism of Mani's teachings exerted a substantial influence on Western spiritual and intellectual history.

Source: Armidale Press