Manichaeism

Mani was born in Mesopotamia in 216 and raised in a Jewish-Christian baptizing sect before breaking with it after what he described as revelations from his heavenly twin. He taught that reality is the battleground of two co-eternal principles, Light and Darkness, that particles of light are trapped in the material world, and that a strict ascetic discipline sets them free. Almost uniquely among founders of his era he wrote his own scriptures and had them translated deliberately, intending a faith that could absorb and supersede Christianity, Zoroastrianism and Buddhism at once. And for a time it worked, spreading from Persia across the Roman Empire and eastward along the Silk Road into Central Asia and China. His followers divided into the Elect, who kept the full discipline, and the Hearers, who supported them and lived ordinary lives. Augustine of Hippo was a Hearer for roughly nine years before his conversion, and spent much of his later career arguing against the teachers he had once sat under. Mani himself died in custody under the Persian king Bahram I in the 270s.