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Mithra in Manichaean
Werner Sundermann
MITHRA IN MANICHEISM. The
Iranian Manicheans adopted the name of the Zoroastrian god Mithra (Av.
Miƒra; Mid. Pers. Mihr) and used it to designate one of their
own deities. Unfortunately, the representation of Mithra as a different
god in languages has, for a long time, obscured the relation between the
Zoroastrian and the Manichean concepts of the deity.
The name appears in Middle
Persian as Mihr (myhr, which does not stem from the genuine
Old Persian form *miça-), in Parthian as Mihr (myhr)
and in Sogdian as Miæi (myæyy; Sundermann, 1979a,
p. 10, sub 3/11.2). The spellings mytr, mytrg, however, are
not variants of the name Mithra, they rather denote Maitreya.
The divine title of Mithra
in Middle Persian and Parthian Manichean texts is invariably yazad
(divinity), which differs from the Old Persian convention that regarded
Mithra as a baga- (q.v.), if a title was given to him at all. But
it is in perfect agreement with the Avestan way of addressing Mithra
as yazata- (only once called ba©a). In Manichean
Sogdian, however, the name and title of Mithra are regularly Miæi
£a©i, conforming to the Old Persian convention.
In Mani's ˆa@buhraga@n
and
in all later Middle Persian texts Mihrdenotes the Living Spirit,the subjugator
of the demons who had attacked the World of Light and captured the First
Man and his sons. He is also the builder of this world, and, when the world
comes to an end, the powerful vanquisher of the demonic concupiscentia
AÚz, the Hyle (Sundermann, 1978, pp. 489-93).
In Parthian and Sogdian
(Sundermann, 1979a, pp. 104, 109), however, Mihr/Miæiwas taken as
the sun and consequently identified with the Third Messenger. As the
sun god he is praised for his illuminative, light-giving deeds, for his
expulsion of darkness, for his regular and reliable revolution in the sky,
etc. As the Third Messenger he is a helper and redeemer of mankind, very
much like Jesus the Splendor. His cosmogonical work remains in the background,
as far as the hymns to Mihr are concerned.
The identification of the
Zoroastrian Mithra with different Manichean gods in Middle Persian and
Parthian has become the shibboleth that distinguishes between the
two terminological systems. The Sogdians developed a terminological system
of their pantheon that combined Middle Persian and Parthian components,
but, in the identification of Mithra, they followed the Parthian model
(Sundermann, 1979a, p. 104); thus it was probably in the texts in other
East Manichean languages that the divine names were drawn on the Sogdian
pattern or at least used in Sogdian form (for Old Turkish, cf. Tongerloo,
pp. 175-6, 177-78; for Chinese, cf. Bryder, pp. 101, 106-9, 121).
In Middle Persian the name
Mihr is used for the Third Messenger without exception. In Parthian,
however, as in Sogdian, there is a second identification of the Third Messenger
with the Zoroastrian god Nairiyo@saºha (Av. nairiio@-saºha-),called
in Parthian Narisaf Yazad (nrysfyzd), adopted in Sogdian
as nr÷y-s£ yz’, and rendered by the genuine Sogdian
form nryænx £©y (Sundermann, 1979a, p. 101, sub
3/11.1, pp. 105-6). The Third Messenger's name appears also in Parthian
translation as hrdyg fryætg, in Sogdian as ÷ætykw
pr÷y-æt÷k (Sundermann, 1979a, p. 100, sub 2/11.1;
see Table 1).
The difference of the terminology
between the Middle Persian and the Parthian Manichean theology has been
explained in different ways. Walter Bruno Henning, who for the first time
correctly solved the problem (as far as Mithra is concerned), maintained
that the Zoroastrian Mithra in 3rd-century Persia had so few elements in
common with the contemporary Parthian or Sogdian Mithra that identifications
with different Manichean deities seemed inevitable (Henning, 1934, cols.
6-8, with col. 7, n. 3). Mary Boyce's more precise explanation leads to
the same conclusion: It was among the Parthian Manicheans that Mithra as
a sun god surpassed the importance of Narisaf as the common Iranian image
of the Third Messenger; "among the Parthians the dominance of Mithra was
such that his identification with the Third Messenger led to cultic emphasis
on the Mithraic traits in the Manichaean god" (Boyce, p. 49). The Manichean
missionaries to Parthia consequently "abandoned" the earlier identification
of the Living Spirit with Mithra (Boyce, p. 48).
The theory that Parthian
and Sogdian Manicheans, in contrast to the Persians, called the Third Messenger
Mithra, simply because their Mithra was already a solar deity, was decidedly
disputed by Ilya Gershevitch, who justly pointed out that in Sogdian the
sun god is called Mithra only and exclusively in Manichean texts. Therefore,
the different identification of Mithra in Middle Persian on the one hand
and in Parthian and Sogdian on the other was simply the result of a different
interpretation of the nature of the Manichean gods, that is of the Living
Spirit and the Third Messenger, by Mani on the one hand and by his missionaries
to Parthia on the other (Gershevitch, pp. 69-74). The explanation
of the present author (Sundermann, 1979, pp. 107-9) is that Mani, the creator
of the Middle Persian terminological system, developed and completed his
system in the course of his missionary career. The creator of the Parthian
system, however, was most likely Ma@r Ammo@, Mani's apostle among the Parthians.
He adopted Mani's system at a very early and still imperfect state and
completed it on his own. Since Ammo@'s missionary field was far away from
Mani's, and since both were active in different linguistic areas, such
a supposition seems to be justified.
An outcome of this diverging
development was Ammo@'s identification of the Third Messenger with the
sun god Mihr, which was in agreement with the common popular Zoroastrian
belief of his time, while Mani's own identification of the Living Spirit
with Mihr was based on a better knowledge of Zoroastrian theology
which, in agreement with the Avesta, distinguished between the god Mithra
and the sun (Sundermann, 1978, p. 499; idem, 1979a, p. 115).
Did the identification
of two Manichean deities with the Zoroastrian god Mithra entail a certain
influence from the Zoroastrian on the Manichean side, at least in the Iranian
branch of Manicheism? A few characteristics of the Manichean gods that
point to borrowings form the Avestan Mihr Yaæt have been singled
out by Mary Boyce for Mithra as the Parthian Third Messenger (pp.
49, 52-54), and by the present author for the Middle Persian Living Spirit
(Sundermann, 1979b, pp. 777-87).
Bibliography: Peter
Bryder, The Chinese Transformation of Manichaeism: A Study of Chinese
Manichaean Terminology, [Löberöd,] Sweden, 1985. Mary Boyce,
"On Mithra in the Manichaean Pantheon," in Walter B. Henning and Ehsan
Yarshater, eds., A Locust's Leg: Studies in Honour of S. H. Taqizadeh,
London, 1962, pp. 44-54. Ilya Gershevitch, "Die Sonne das Beste," in John
R. Hinnells, ed., Mithraic Studies: Proceedings of the First
International Congress of Mithraic Studies, 2 vols., Manchester, 1975,
I, pp. 69-89. Walter Bruno Henning, "Zum zentralasiatischen Manichäismus,"
OLZ
37, 1934, coll. 1-11. Werner Sundermann, "Some more Remarks on Mithra in
the Manichaean Pantheon," in Jacques Duchesne-Guillemin, ed.,
Études
Mithriaques, Actes du 2e Congreàs International Te‚he‚ran, du
1er au 8 septembre 1975, Acta Iranica 17, Leiden, 1978, pp. 485-99. Idem,
"Namen von Göttern, Dämonen and Menschen in iranischen Versionen
des manichäischen Mythos," AoF 6, 1979a, pp. 95-133. Idem,
"The Five Sons of the Manichaean God Mithra," in Ugo Bianchi, ed.,
Mysteria
Mithrae: Proceedings of the International Seminar on the Religio-Historical
Character of Roman Mithraism, Leiden, 1979b, pp. 777-87. Alois van
Tongerloo, "Middle Iranian in Old Uygur: Remarks on Selected Specimens
in the Buddhist and Manichaean Texts," in Wojciech Skalmowski and Alois
Van Tongerloo, eds., Medioiranica: Proceedings of the International
Colloqium on Middle Iranian Studies, Orientalia Lovaniensia 48, Leuven,
1993.
(Werner Sundermann)
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