Incarnations of Mani

[Bruce Michael]

Highbrow House was furnished well,
With many a goblet fair,
So when they brought the Holy Grail,
There was never a space to spare.
Simple Cottage was clear and clean,
With room to store at will;
So there they laid the Holy Grail,
And there you'll find it still.

-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur really nailed it with this simple parabolic verse. Parsifal was indeed a simple man too. (I hadn't considered it before, but Sir Arthur was the more famous Conan before the Barbarian came on the scene- Arthur was more a Librarian than a Barbarian.

Here is one version of Mani's incarnations:

The young man of Nain, who Christ resurrected from the dead, then later in the ninth century as Parsifal.

Ravenscroft gives more incarnations, some of which I am not too sure about:

Jacob who wrestled with the Angel (sounds good)
Joshua who led the chosen people into the land that flowed with milk and
honey (I have heard of another indication for this.)
Cyrus, the sun king.

And lastly Rembrandt (I feel this is not right, though Rembrandt may have been inspired by him.)

Thoughts anyone?

-Br.Bruce

[Bruce Michael]

I don't think there's a site about the incarnations of Mani. But there is this:

Manichaeanism and Wolfram's Parzival
Manichaeanism and Wolfram's Parzival

I'm mostly interested in the Young Man of Nain and of course the Parsifal/Percival connection.

There's a lot to follow up on within Parzifal. One hint of Mancheanism in Parzifal is when his mother describes God to him:
"He is Light beyond all light;
His radiance is brighter than a summer's day."

A last word from Ravenscroft on the incarnation of Cyrus, the sun king:

"Even Cyrus (the anointed of the Lord as Jeremiah calls him) the gentle (as the inscriptions call him), with whom Jehovah had wrestled with for 21 days (as the prophet Daniel tells us) without subduing him, because the sun archangel Marduk [Michael] helped him- even Cyrus, who released the Jews from captivity in Babylon and sent them back to Jerusalem to build anew the destroyed temple, is called in the ancient inscriptions the "hero of Anschau". Anschau is the kingdom of the Grail, the celestial realm of the sun archangel Michael."

This paragraph was lifted out of Stein's book without recognition. I can't
find anything about Cyrus wrestling with Jehovah and Jeremiah calling him
anointed, so I wonder about the authenticity of the rest. It is Isaiah
(45:1) who calls him anointed, and it is Jacob who wrestles with the Angel.



-Br.Bruce

[Bruce Michael]

Friends,
How are you all?

Dr. Walter Stein's "The Ninth Century" must be the definitive book on the connection between the Grail stream and Mani.

Zarathustra prophesied that the Sun God, Ormuzd would incarnate on Earth:

The mightly promise-bearing Sun-Aether-Aura,
The God-Created, we worship in prayer
Which will pass over to the most victorius of Saviours and the others,
His Apostles.
Which brings forward the world,
Which causes it to conquer old age and death, corruption and decay,
Which assists it to Eternal life, to Eternal Prosperity, to free will
[to Lordship in will]

When the dead shall arise
When the living Conqueror of Death comes
And the world is brought forward through Will.

-quoted by Stein

The Sun is the Door.
"I am the Door"

"No man comes to the golden radiance of the world foundation (to the
Father) but by Me."

Here is one way to bring the Persian wisdom back into Christianity.

-Br.Bruce