#Manichaeanism
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alexymetalia.bsky.social
i decided to finish off some vodka pre-psychiatrist meeting but it was more than i anticipated. so now i’m tipsy.

i’m okay! tired from the workweek and maybe going to read some more research material about manichaeanism.

what about you????
October 18, 2025 at 2:28 AM
davidjorgonson.bsky.social
Manichaeanism (more or less)
October 4, 2025 at 8:11 PM
lalaeta.bsky.social
manichaeanism is so egg-coded
September 26, 2025 at 10:50 AM
jenkatwrites.bsky.social
this book is mostly fun but every few chapters there's a paragraph or two about the nature of history itself like "oh.... you thought we were having fun here? no it's time to be sad for a minute"
There is something dispiriting about the march of history. That web which never alters despite an infinite range of motifs and variations: the same struggle for power under ever-different masks; the vain triumphs, the declines and falls; the ever-recurring myths; the straining toward a future that, though it always eludes the grasp, never ceases to exert its pressure and make its demands; the turning wheel which changes yet does not change; the hopes always disappointed, the victories foredoomed to failure - whether the picture they paint of man expresses his greatness or his weakness, we shall never know. Both, probably - and both at the same time. Nothing is more futile than history, and yet history is man himself. Nothing is more accidental, nothing more necessary. Everything could probably have been otherwise. But everything is as it is, and forever. History is never about anything but the folly of men. People and states oscillate between peace and war, freedom and slavery, order and disorder. They tire easily. Even happiness soon grows wearisome. No sooner do they begin to enjoy the benefits of wise and just government than they demand more wisdom and a different kind of justice. Factions spring up. Everyone is on the lookout for new privileges. The equilibrium that was so hard to strike crumbles. Wild hopes are embraced. The system collapses. Everything has to be built up anew on the ruins of the past. But such an oversimplified political Manichaeanism never represents the real state of affairs. Peoples are fickle, but rulers are cruel. There is something intolerable about stability and order, something stimulating in the thrill of disorder. And the dignity of man consists in waiting and hoping and fighting for his hopes. Neglect, exploitation, denial of justice on the part of those in power drives those as yet powerless into revolt. The oppressed rise up, and to the thirst for novelty is added all the force of aspiration and legitimate resentment. Even just governments do not last - and governments are not often just. Perhaps it is impossible they should be - time passes and things change. Attrition and hope form the web of history, moving toward a happiness forever receding.
September 9, 2025 at 3:23 PM
neillperry.com
"Caro has used his material selectively, tendentiously, to confirm his Manichaeanism"
September 3, 2025 at 12:51 AM
santmat.bsky.social
From the Song of Mani: Rescued from Samsara: facebook.com/groups/gnost...

#Mani #Manichaean #Manichaeanism #Manichaeans #Gnostic #Gnosticism #Gnosis #TheOtherBible #GnosticBible #Spirituality
August 5, 2025 at 10:53 PM
davidjorgonson.bsky.social
Right, but that family of religions did hold its own and even spread widely for a while. Especially Manichaeanism, but that one was rarely a state religion. Which IMO is probably why it eventually lost out.
July 21, 2025 at 1:20 AM
shivambhatt.bsky.social
Can you imagine if Augustine had stuck with Manichaeanism?
July 17, 2025 at 2:13 PM
dov.bsky.social
Manichaeanism or btfo
starshine.bsky.social ☀️ Starshine @starshine.bsky.social · Jul 2
fav/most personally interesting to you dead religion/sect/practitioners, go.
July 2, 2025 at 12:57 PM
magistertempli.bsky.social
Christian Nationalism, by any other name, is still a hybrid of Manichaeanism and the Marcionite heresies, and smell just as bad
June 27, 2025 at 11:54 AM
basicchunnel.bsky.social
Worth reading in full, tbh. A great pairing / counterpoint to the great pacifist texts dn790007.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-...
Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different. The colonial world is a Manichaean world. The colonist is not content with physically limiting the space of the colonized, i.e., with the help of his agents of law and order. As if to illustrate the totalitarian nature of colonial exploitation, the colonist turns the colonized into a kind of quintessence of evil. Colonized society is not merely portrayed as a society without values. The colonist is not content with stating that the colonized world has lost its values or worse never possessed any. The "native" is declared impervious to ethics, representing not only the absence of values but also the negation of values. He is, dare we say it, the enemy of values. In other words, absolute evil. A corrosive element, destroying everything within his reach, a corrupting element, distorting everything which involves aesthetics or morals, an agent of malevolent powers, an unconscious and incurable instrument of blind forces. And Monsieur Meyer could say in all seriousness in the French National Assembly that we should not let the Republic be defiled by the penetration of the Algerian people. Values are, in fact, irreversibly poisoned and infected as soon as they come into contact with the colonized. The customs of the colonized, their traditions, their myths, especially their myths, are the very mark of this indigence and innate depravity. This is why we should place DDT, which destroys parasites, carriers of disease, on the same level as Christianity, which roots out heresy, natural impulses, and evil. The decline of yellow fever and the advances made by evangelizing form part of the same balance sheet. But triumphant reports by the missions in fact tell us how deep the seeds of alienation have been sown among the colonized… Sometimes this Manichaeanism reaches its logical conclusion and dehumanizes the colonized subject. In plain talk, he is reduced to the state of an animal. And consequently, when the colonist speaks of the colonized he uses zoological terms. Allusion is made to the slithery movements of the yellow race, the odors from the "native" quarters, to the hordes, the stink, the swarming, the seething, and the gesticulations. In his endeavors at description and finding the right word, the colonist refers constantly to the bestiary. The European seldom has a problem with figures of speech. But the colonized, who immediately grasp the intention of the colonist and the exact case being made against them, know instantly what he is thinking. This explosive population growth, those hysterical masses, those blank faces, those shapeless, obese bodies, this headless, tailless cohort, these children who seem not to belong to anyone, this indolence sprawling under the sun, this vegetating existence, all this is part of the colonial vocabulary. General de Gaulle speaks of "yellow multitudes," and Monsieur Mauriac of the black, brown, and yellow hordes that will soon invade our shores. The colonized know all that and roar with laughter every time they hear themselves called an animal by the other. For they know they are not animals. And at the very moment when they discover their humanity, they begin to sharpen their weapons to secure its victory. As soon as the colonized begin to strain at the leash and to pose a threat to the colonist, they are assigned a series of good souls who in the "Symposiums on Culture" spell out the specificity and richness of Western values. But every time the issue of Western values crops up, the colonized grow tense and their muscles seize up. During the period of decolonization the colonized are called upon to be reasonable… Such an occurrence normally goes unseen because, during decolonization, certain colonized intellectuals have established a dialogue with the bourgeoisie of the colonizing country. During this period the indigenous population is seen as a blurred mass. The few "native" personalities whom the colonialist bourgeois have chanced to encounter have had insufficient impact to alter their current perception and nuance their thinking. During the period of liberation, however, the colonialist bourgeoisie frantically seeks contact with the colonized "elite." It is with this elite that the famous dialogue on values is established. When the colonialist bourgeoisie realizes it is impossible to maintain its domination over the colonies it decides to wage a rearguard campaign in the fields of culture, values, and technology, etc. But what we should never forget is that the immense majority of colonized peoples are impervious to such issues. For a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity. But this dignity has nothing to do with "human" dignity. The colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal. All he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity; and no sermonizer on morals, no priest has ever stepped in to bear the blows in his place or share his bread. For the colonized, to be a moralist quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the colonist, breaking his spiral of violence, in a word ejecting him outright from the picture. The famous dictum which states that all men are equal will find its illustration in the colonies only when the colonized subject states he is equal to the colonist… Wherever an authentic liberation struggle has been fought, wherever the blood of the people has been shed and the armed phase has lasted long enough to encourage the intellectuals to withdraw to their rank and file base, there is an effective eradication of the superstructure borrowed by these intellectuals from the colonialist bourgeois circles. In its narcissistic monologue the colonialist bourgeoisie, by way of its academics, had implanted in the minds of the colonized that the essential values-meaning Western values —remain eternal despite all errors attributable to man. The colonized intellectual accepted the cogency of these ideas and there in the back of his mind stood a sentinel on duty guarding the Greco-Roman pedestal. But during the struggle for liberation, when the colonized intellectual touches base again with his people, this artificial sentinel is smashed to smithereens. All the Mediterranean values, the triumph of the individual, of enlightenment and Beauty turn into pale, lifeless trinkets. All those discourses appear a jumble of dead words. Those values which seemed to ennoble the soul prove worthless because they have nothing in common with the real-life struggle in which the people are engaged.
May 23, 2025 at 7:44 AM
dov.bsky.social
Not as good as when I conceived of Manichaeanism. Now that really took off for a bit
May 12, 2025 at 9:31 PM
samrosenfeld.bsky.social
Needless to say, the broader right-wing movement has transformed since GWB while only deepening its tendencies toward epistemic closure and Manichaeanism. And Trump 2.0 is surrounded *entirely* by enablers in the executive branch and (so far) his congressional party, in a way Bush never was.
April 29, 2025 at 3:50 AM
venividivicizo.bsky.social
Machinaeanism evolved from an Elcesaidist upbringing.

The prophet Mani originated theories that came to later be called "Manichaeanism" proper.

He is said to have hailed from Iraq - born to a Nepalese Shudra, and a Persian Brahmina (both Brahmaguptas) from Persepolis.
March 13, 2025 at 4:53 PM
I never argued anything except that:
(1) Augustine did not hold that anything was inherently evil; quite the opposite (evil=privation)
(2) Though he probably still held to traces of Manichaeanism in his view of the human person
(3) The doctrine of original sin need not be understood Augustine's way.
March 6, 2025 at 7:50 PM
classassocni.bsky.social
Perhaps #OnThisDay in 274, Mani founder of Manichaeanism was killed by Bahram I, either in prison, flayed alive or crucified
Mani (prophet) - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
March 2, 2025 at 11:55 AM
supak.com
IDK, I hear Manichaeanism is all the rage now.
December 8, 2024 at 12:09 PM
rhysneedham.bsky.social
As for Binyamin Netanyahu, I don't know if the ICC indictment is as relevant as pointing out his long history of inflammatory rhetoric - not just in the sense of journalese weasel words either. A history of apocalyptic hyperbole. Of deliberately disingenuous Manichaeanism. Of wholesale cynicism.
December 8, 2024 at 8:39 AM
simoninsuffolk.bsky.social
Currently revisiting Silk Roads at the British Museum. What remains of a silk image of Christ, c800, found as part of the Dunhuang Caves Hoard, China. Made locally, at a time when Manichaeanism was strong in this area.
November 29, 2024 at 4:05 PM
andreashopf.bsky.social
Reckwitz "The Society of Singularities" at work, plus a good dose of fashionable manichaeanism.
November 27, 2024 at 3:51 PM
robincdouglas.bsky.social
- Barack Obama is a Muslim. Muslims lie about their religion.

- The European monarchist theory that the French Revolution was staged by a conspiracy of Freemasons who traced their descent to ancient Manichaeanism (this became antisemitic later).

- Dan Brown's stuff about Jesus being married.
November 18, 2024 at 11:00 AM
dov.bsky.social
the cults of Mithras, or of Isis, or Manichaeanism, or even indeed good old standard issue Judaism were intriguing to that world because they didn't just try to answer "why does this exist" but also "how can we make that better"
September 9, 2024 at 4:11 PM
dov.bsky.social
Thinking of which, one of the reasons Manichaeanism died out may have been its complete lack of incentive for people to actually practice the religion.
dov.bsky.social Dunland National Party 🇺🇦🇱🇹🇵🇸🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 @dov.bsky.social · Sep 3
Non-ethnic religions can be broadly divided into three categories:

1) death is terrible, here's how to make it not terrible (Christianity, Islam)
2) death is terrible, but life is worse (Buddhism)
3) death is great, life is terrible (Manicheanism)
September 3, 2024 at 10:10 AM