#manichaean

[leroibobo]

cao'an (thatched hermitage) and its manichaean remnants in jinjiang, fujian, china. though cao'an is on its surface not too different from other buddist temples, it was also manichaean, and may still be manichaean in secret. it's also one of the last standing historical manichaean places of worship in the world. this place has quite the history, so i placed it under a read more:

manichaeism is a former world religion of babylonian origin, reaching as far west as the roman empire and as far east as han china at its greatest extent. it combines elements of several other prominent religions and philosophies - the most notable factor of this is that it reveres founder mani as the final prophet in a line consisting of zoroaster, the gautama buddha, and jesus christ. it went mostly extinct due to persecution of followers throughout its multi-continent laity. manichaean places of worship were either entirely destroyed or appropriated in other parts of the world. it lasted much longer in china (until ming dynasty times) and still exists in some parts of fujian and zhejiang. these believers prefer to remain private about their current practice. what outsiders know about the religion is solely through historical records; because of its comparative longevity in china, many of those records come from there.

manichaeans tended to draw more from the religious/philosophical influences on manichaeism that were most familiar to them. (for example, while manichaeism in jerusalem may have looked more abrahamic, manichaeism in istakhr may have looked more zoroastrian.) in china, manichaeism assimilated to both buddhism and taoism; in the former case, much of it was adapted to be stylistically buddhist, and mani received the title of "buddha of light" and a life story resembling the gautama buddha's.

cao'an was constructed during the song dynasty era (specifically in the 960s), when persecution against manichaeans had been ongoing from emperor wuzong of tang's suppression of all foreign religions. (the same policies had affected zoroastrians, eastern syriac christians, and buddhists, but continued for manichaeans after.) at this time, many manichaean temples had buddhist or taoist affiliations, or disguised themselves as buddhist or taoist only. it became officially buddhist after manichaeism was banned in 1368. since abandoned, it was revived for explicit buddhist usage for a short period in the early 20th century. it's preserved as a cultural monument today.

cao'an has managed to preserve remnants of its manichaean affiliations. one is that, instead of a nianfo phrase usually seen in chinese buddhist temples, an inscription on a nearby stone dating to the 15th century reminded worshippers of "purity, light, power, and wisdom". this mantra is an adaption of manichaean cosmology in chinese manichaeism. the original stone was destroyed during the cultural revolution but the phrase was re-inscribed on another after. another is a statue that seems to portray the buddha, but is thought to actually portray mani. unlike other portrayals of the buddha, this one has long, straight hair which is worn down, different facial features and hand/head postures, and, at one point, facial hair. (this was filed off in the early 20th century by a buddhist monk to make him look more like the buddha.) it's also consistent with other portrayals of mani in chinese manichaean art.

[tetrachromate]

gift art for @/alchemicalopu / psamtik on twitter of their sona Kavad converting mine to Manichaeism (meownichaeism), in the tarim basin sometime in the 10th century

[sethian123]

Manichaean Christmas Ornament: Cross of Light (represents the divine soul imprisoned in trees and in matter in general that Christ came down to save)

[renegade-hierophant]

Manichaean cosmogonic text, Sogdian language in Manichaean script, Khocho, 9-10th century CE.

[agreenroad]

THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS BOOK OF GIANTS DETAILS ANTE-DILUVIAL FALLEN SONS OF GOD/WATCHERS, TURNED INTO NEPHILIM, GIBBORIM, REPHAIM

The "Book of Giants" is contained in this work…Qumran and Apocalyptic bt Florentino Garcia Martinez📖 https://t.co/gtvsQdZL8dfree to borrow from the Internet Archive pic.twitter.com/sTCXq4fxHD— Steph Kent (@covertress) April 30, 2024 THE BOOK OF GIANTS USED TO BE IN THE BIBLE, BUT GOT PULLED OUT; WHY? Fallen Angel Demonology Explained in Obsessive Detail | Mr. Mythoshttps://t.co/LlaGQWT89fA…

[loneberry]

Discovered on the Wiki page for "Manichaean art": I find this cave painting of the tree of life and the tree of death to be beautiful and haunting, but I can't for the life of me find any additional information about the mural or the cave, nor any other images aside from this photograph from 1998. The Wikipedia description says: Mural inside one of the Sengim-aghiz Caves (German: Sängim; traditional Chinese: 勝金口, pinyin: Shèngjīnkǒu; "Sengim-aghiz" is also referred to as Sengim Gorge) in Chinese Turkestan, depicting the Manichaean subjects of the Tree of Life and the Tree of Death. I guess "Chinese Turkestan" is an outdated term for the southwestern part of Xinjiang. I've wanted to go to Xinjiang since 2008, when I lived in Kunming (Yunnan, China) and enjoyed hanging out in the Uyghur part of town eating laghman (لەڭمەن)--Uyghur noodles--which the Uyghur chefs would pull by hand, slapping the table with the dough (it was so hypnotic to watch).

My heart breaks thinking about what's happening to the Uyghur people. Despite what fake leftists (tankies) say, it is real. If you're against settler colonialism in Palestine or Turtle Island, then the only morally consistent position to take is to oppose what is being done to the Uyghur people by the (Han) Chinese.

Here is another image from the same cave, depicting a tree with the vine bearing grapes. From the Wiki description: The cave which contains the mural was perhaps used for meditation because of its small size. The vine motif is closely connected with Manichaeism, V. Arnold-Döben has collected the passages referring to the vine motif in Manichaean literature, and writes: "In going through the passages [where this motif occurs] it is striking that the motif appears almost exclusively in connection with Manichaean church. In imagery, the church is a vineyard … As the church has its leader or its head, its archegos, thus the vineyard or the vine is cared for by a gardener or tender." — Manfred Heuser & Hans-Joachim Klimkeit (1998), Studies in Manichaean Literature & Art, Leiden: Brill Publishers (p. 309).

Also beautiful: The Manichaean Diagram of the Universe

[eileenleahy]

soo much historical revisionism on the left it's mind-boggling. "the us suffrage movement was super racist bc all its leaders opposed black men's right to vote" i think you dont know anything about the suffrage movement? like i think youve only ever heard of susan b anthony and maybe elizabeth cady stanton

[absinthe-and-alabaster]

𐫣‎

guys new cat face just dropped

[6ebe]

Might tune in for new jeans terrorist themed comeback sounds fun 😋

[jamesgraybooksellerworld]

2 Books on Heretics from the Nicene fathers to the Reformers

  **************************************** ‘ERESIE’ I choose with my own human reason… The guilt of heresy is measured not so much by its subject-matter as by its formal principle, which is the same in all heresies: revolt against a Divinely constituted authority. Heresiology- could be the study of a historical imperative?  Through history there was/is always  a group charged with “heresy”…

[elgallinero]

Practice English

manichean meaning – Google Search — Read on www.google.com/search

[iisthepopeoffools]

just wanted to say that i saw your whole argument about land back in the replies (a month or so late lol), and that your reference to israel was on the nose. there's a deep irony in (some) people insisting that you have to be dumb or racist to think "giving land back" after it's been settled for roughly 400 years isn't simple.

anywho, that's all. i didn't want to say anything in the replies because i'm not trying to actually get into any arguments right now.

...

[heritageposts]

In his seminal The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon could be writing about Gaza when he said: “In all armed struggles, there exists what we might call the point of no return. Almost always it is marked off by a huge and all-inclusive repression which engulfs all sectors of the colonial people.” In Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, that point has arrived. From Gaza to the Red Sea, on all fronts the West is now unmasked as a lawless killing machine in terror of losing control. Genocide, starvation and war, defended with Olympic-level diplomatic double-speak, are its only answers to the fact that the Global South, and the nations of the Middle East (if not their leaders) no longer wish to live under US hegemony. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his preface to Fanon's work, wrote of western colonialism: “Our Machiavellianism has little purchase on this wide-awake world that has run our falsehoods to earth one after the other. The settler has only recourse to one thing: brute force… the native has only one choice, between servitude and supremacy.” Fanon was a revolutionary thinker and a practising psychiatrist of colonial racism and its psychic impact on the colonised, and the coloniser. He and Sartre were writing about France’s imminent defeat in Algeria after seven years of brutal war. [...] Western powers are involved in conflicts thousands of miles from home, as they were in Fanon's time in Algeria, Congo and Indochina. Today the western political class has united behind Ukraine and Israel, but for millions of people it is no longer clear that the wars are worth fighting.  As Yemen’s spokesman, Mohammed al-Bukhaiti, put it: “The war today is between Yemen which is struggling to stop the crimes of genocide, and the American and British coalition [who] support its perpetrators. Every party or individual in this world has two choices that have no thirds… who do you stand with as you watch these crimes?” Fanon, writing 63 years ago, agrees: “The colonial world is a Manichaean world… at times this Manichaeism goes to its logical conclusion and dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly, it turns him into an animal. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but the negation of values… he is the enemy of values, and in this sense he is the absolute evil. “The native knows all this, and laughs to himself every time he spots an allusion to the animal world in the other’s words. For he knows he is not an animal, and it is precisely at the moment he realises his humanity that he begins to sharpen the weapons with which he will secure victory.”

. . . full article on MEE (1 Feb 2024)

You can also find a free copy of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth on the Internet Archive (available as a PDF, EPUB etc.)

[persephryne]

Making Aegon a rapist was straight up bad and lazy writing.

Let me elaborate.

In the show, the first thing we learn about Aegon as an adult is that he is a rapist. We haven’t seen him yet but still we already know that he is an horrible despicable rapist, especially since Dyana is so young, which pretty much makes him a pedophile too. How could anyone root for a man like that ? And that’s where the problem begins.

Rhaenyra had already been established many times as the rightful heir to the throne in season 1. It has been made obvious that she would make a decent Queen too. In the meantime, it had already been shown that Aegon is not even a good person. He’s selfish, inconsiderate, a bully, and does not act like a prince at all. To put it plainly, he sucks big time and we as viewers already know it. Add what we saw in season 2, how reckless he gets, how he’s an alcoholic immature asshole, how he obviously knows nothing about strategics nor how to rule efficiently, or even how bad he is at high valyrian, and you can’t have anyone tell you in good faith that he would’ve been a better ruler than Rhaenyra.

However, had Aegon not been made a rapist, you would still feel for him even though he is not cut out to rule. Because he knows it too and tried to escape it and he was forced to attend his own coronation . Because this crown that he did not want does not fit him, even though he really tries to show that he is not as worthless as everyone seems to think and he just keeps failing. You would feel for him because the war ,that he has started when he was made an usurper by the people around him, has cost him his son’s life. Because the brother, who is partially responsible for his son’s death has now betrayed him and tried to kill him with dragonfire. Because the injuries he suffered make him look more and more like his father who never cared for him, never loved him and that he definitely hates. Which also probably why he tries so hard to make his mother proud of him and love him but he can’t and his main attempt has left him half-dead, half-burn. Not only that but his dragon, with whom he has the strongest bond known in Targaryen’s, history probably died during this futile attempt to prove himself. The only thing about his Targaryen’s heritage that he seems to care about has been destroyed all because he wanted to prove himself. Because he truly resents his Targaryen’s, his father’s heritage, it’s obvious, just as it is obvious that he didn’t want to marry his own sister but was forced to. It’s completely legitimate of him to want to distance himself as much as possible from everything that is Targaryen related. He is indeed more of an Hightower than a Targaryen, but can you really blame him for that ? Would you not try to fit somewhere else too, if you were in his place ? It’s all absolutely and undeniably tragic.

I wholeheartdely believe that, even if you would’ve root for Rheanyra to be Queen, you woud’ve probably still thought that Aegon, as bad as he is, did not deserves this much pain.

But because he is a rapist, well, he honestly does.

By not trusting the audience to see that Aegon is not a good person, nor a good a king, without having him comitting a literal crime, by making Aegon a rapist, the writers have annihilated any possibilities for an internal conflict regarding Aegon and Rhaenyra. The whole concept of « teams » just goes down the drain because of this lazy, manichaean, writing. And that, my friends, is bad writing at its peak.

[portraitsofsaints]

Saint Augustine of Hippo

Doctor of the Church

354 - 430 

Feast Day: August 28

Patronage: brewers, printers, theologians

St.  Augustine, Bishop of Hippo and Doctor of the Church, was the son of Saint Monica. He was raised a Christian, but lost his faith in youth and led a wild life. He lived with a woman from the age of 15 through 30 and fathered a son. After investigating and experimenting with several philosophies, he became a Manichaean but was converted by the prayers of his mother and the help of Saint Ambrose of Milan, who baptized him. He then spent the remainder of his life doing great things. His later thinking can be summed up in a line from his writings: "Our hearts were made for You, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in You."

Prints, plaques & holy cards available for purchase here: (website)

[odesofmeddea]

house of the dragon viewers who, mostly, are avid shippers of canonical incestuous uncle-niece marriage being so collectively repelled by the mother-son intercourse on-screen they cry and throw up begging for the harrenhal arc to end is so incredibly stupid, i'm not even sorry. daemon's arc this season is the best thing that could've happened to his individual narrative... he's the character who is not very vocal about, or easy with exteriorizing, his inner turmoils and anxieties. what harrenhal haunting does is forcefully dehisces those very intimate things out. although there's an obvious preternatural compulsion toward daemon's more malevolent impulses - as in the horrid compulsion issuing either from the place or the place and alys-entity's converged powers that might as expose and explore as pervert his resentment for rhaenyra and viserys and the simultaneous yearning to be unconditionally loved by them and by his mother into its extreme violent manifestations, - we still get to see way more human aspects of him becoming bare. things unuttered like guilt and sorrow, and regret no one believes him capable of - rhaenyra, laena, and little jaehaerys; fears, vulnerabilities, and the deep sense of emotional disorientation, trauma, and loss that the fandom's manichaean reading aggressively denies him. viserys' favoritism culminates in the decollation of rhaenyra that he himself is perturbed with not because he maniacally harbors harmful deadly intentions on her behalf but because there's an ugly wound that viserys, the family and patriarchal society as inevitability caused him and that alys' (or harrenhal's) influence is exacerbating through manipulation of his tattered psyche.

daemon dreaming his mother - whom he lost at too young age of three to actually establish any substantial proved relationships with - in this sexual role and womb-oriented denouement, in which he is only temporarily full of filial bliss before the ghast at consummation comes over him, is not some sui generis daemon-perversion but a part of his social and psychic character constitution and its study. alyssa's words might as well have been a self-consolatory projection he kept nurturing throughout his life: at least for his dead mother (whom he couldn't really know; dead being void, void being fillable) he was the most beloved, superior, and irreproachable one - the way that he wasn't for viserys and isn't always for rhaenyra, but wishes he was. viserys himself admitting to alyssa favoring toddler daemon most likely fortified this believe and necessity of that believe for daemon.

still, he is genuinely uncomfortable with every single apparition he's been subjected to face so far, and is not deriving a near sexual rapture (as does aemond at having aegon personally maimed) from seeing little rhaenyra accusing him of leaving her and stitching the head of the child he ordered to decapitate, nor rejoicing in the throne room after having her killed. he is not pouncing aroused (albeit he was, at first) on the figment of his bleeding mother to repeat the coitus - even if most of it is psychosexual, daemon is very obviously suffering from the horrors that are self, in situ, but are reflected through the doubles (rhaenyra, aemond) and the other (alys, alyssa).

it's breathtaking what they're doing with daemon this season. his line with alys is on par to the said. it's the best current new pairing in the show, with its own indefinite charm, albeit the pairing potentially being a sinister one. daemon is quite intimately drawn to alys despite the suppressed sense of something eerie in her omniscience. and i find it so interesting and captivating i almost wish it would never end... may daemon targaryen be haunted by his witch-fiend-friend forever!