And yet the moods of that god are as fickle as the currents of this river, and as contradictory as the auguries of the seers who read the future in the twitching of lambs’ livers and the twinkling of the stars. For here, on this sweeping plain with its drafty steppes and fertile river valleys where the pictures once crystallized into writing, everything is full of signs that need deciphering and interpreting. They are tidings of fate, messages from the sky, that truly endless sky above the steppe, from which a voice now begins to speak: call it spirit, call it wind or breath! When an angel speaks, one must listen. And so, in a palm grove on the lower Euphrates, a child, barely any older than the boy Jesus among the temple elders, cranes his neck and hears what the voice has to tell him: “You are the apostle of the light, the last prophet, the successor to Seth, Noah, Enos, Enoch, Sem, Abraham, Zoroaster, Buddha, Jesus, Paul, and Elkesai—and the one who will complete all their teachings.” The revelation is like a boast. This angel is bragging. And what is the child doing? He is afraid and requests proof. So the angel does what angels do. He comforts the boy, sends signs and miracles, makes palm trees speak in the manner of men and vegetables cry like infants, and reveals to him one of those secrets which had hitherto been hidden from the world: that the fundamental drama of the universe was a battle between light and darkness, and this existence nothing but a transition between two eras.
Whoever wants to will understand. And the boy Mani wants to. He wants to take up the place assigned to him, to become the glorious culmination—to be the last in a line of great prophets. But since no one ever believed a child, he has to wait. What does a Chosen One do, whose time has not yet come? He prepares himself. He studies the teachings handed down from his predecessors. Great men, all of them, ascetics, prophets, semideities. They had all accomplished much, yet must have failed, since he was now appointed to finish their works.
Anyone can practice asceticism, renounce the world and resist the devil. Many have heard God’s word and more than a few have proclaimed it. Yet even those angelic tidings are blown away by the wind. Who is supposed to gather them up and one day proclaim their wisdom if time disperses them? Words become verbiage, and a vision becomes a mirage. That which shall become truth must be written down, says the angel. That which shall remain truth must be written down, thinks Mani. Only the written word will be proved right and will endure, will weigh as heavy as the material on which it is captured, a chunk of black basalt, a terracotta tablet, the flattened fibers of the papyrus plant or the stiff leaf of a palm.
Years pass. Understanding forges a path for itself, a veil is lifted, content reaches for form, craftsmanship for art, the verbal for the written. A remarkably clear shape crystallizes in Mani’s mind, a circle, as round as a compass drawing, as complete as his teachings, which reconcile the beginning with the end, cyclical thinking with linear.
Autumn is already well advanced when Mani’s time finally comes. The Euphrates lies there as ever in its winter bed, a feeble rivulet trickling along a groove in the wide, sandy river bed, making it easy to forget that it was its water that once supplied the seven terraces of the Hanging Gardens with the aid of endlessly rotating screw pumps.
And Mani sets off in a northerly direction, towards the town of his birth on the left bank of the Tigris, passes through the gate guarded by winged creatures of stone, mingles with the crowds streaming by, raises his voice and speaks the words that prophets have spoken since time immemorial: “You are the salt of the earth. The light of the world. He who follows me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life.”
People stop. The reason is unclear. Perhaps it is the heat that prompts them to seek a moment’s rest, or the strangely lopsided figure of Mani, so appealing and yet repellent that, even in passing, one cannot help noticing him and his stunted leg. But perhaps it is also his message, in the light of which all colors disappear and everything turns black or white: the soul good yet lost, the material world evil and corrupt—and man a ligature combining both, who yearns for salvation and purification. It is a contrast that creates clarity and promises purity, that darkens the world such as it is and at the same time presents the bright prospect of a remote but safe future which claims to be nothing other than the recreation of a lost, perfect prehistoric age. It is the good news in a country full of good news, the gospel at a time of gospels aplenty, the answer to many questions. Mani can read these questions in the faces, now, as the sun reaches its zenith and siesta time approaches. And since he knows that in this land, you are only heard if you are able to talk about the beginning, he starts to relate how everything began: in the beginning, before the world came into being, everything was good. A wind blew, gentle and fragrant, light radiated in every color, peace and contentment reigned. And the god who ruled over that realm was an eternal god, a good god, the father of greatness, the lord of light. For an eternity, peace prevailed in this paradise, and nobody was bothered by the smaller, tumultuous land of darkness in the south, where the princes of the individual provinces had waged war on each other for as long as anyone could remember. Indeed, the two powers lived side by side; the light shone for itself, the darkness raged against itself; the one fulfilled its own purpose, and the other likewise. Until one day—no one can say when exactly—the darkness attacked the light and both were drawn into the battle, the soul versus the material world, unlike versus unlike, and the second, middle era began, the great universal drama, the Today, Here and Now in which mankind is trapped.
Mani speaks the softly undulating Aramaic of the east, but his words are incisive and brook no contradiction: everything in this world, he repeats, is an amalgamation of good and bad, of light and darkness, of soul and matter, of two natures that are intrinsically separate, as life is from death. Therefore one must not feel at home in this world, nor even build a house, and must neither conceive children nor consume meat nor yield to carnal desire. All activity should be limited to what is strictly necessary, to keep contact with the material world to a minimum. For the plowing of the earth, the cutting of vegetables, the picking of fruit, yes even the crushing of a blade of grass underfoot damages the sparks of light they contain.
He pauses and listens to the effect of his words. A good speaker knows when to stop talking.
And so, before long, he withdraws to one of those caves in the semidesert that are the dwelling place of prophets, sits down on his left leg and puts his right leg, which refuses to obey him when walking and which he has had to drag behind him since he was little, out in front of him as a prop. On it he places a codex, unties the strings, opens the book, touches the reed pen to the blank sheet, and begins to write on the unlined page—a few lines of that immaculate script that he invented: it is dainty and delicate, and even a thousand years later what is left of it, though barely visible to the naked eye, will be razor-sharp and legible under the magnifying glass.
Mani turns the page, he applies the brush to the papyrus, he paints the teeming creatures of darkness and the creation of the world: the way the Lord of Light peels the skins off the slain demons and uses them to line the firmament, the way he forms the mountains from their fragile bones, the earth from their limp flesh, and the sun and moon from the sparks of light released in the battle, and he also paints the divine messenger who set this cosmos in motion and each heavenly body on its orbit. And then Mani turns over a new page and sketches the panorama of a disturbing truth: it was the Lord of Darkness who created the first human couple, modeled on the image of the divine messenger, from the pitiful remnants of the light—and implanted in them the deplorable urge to conjoin and multiply. The first human beings cling tightly to one another, two naked pale figures who conceive child after child, thereby dispersing the light into ever tinier particles and pushing the day of their homecoming to the kingdom of heaven ever further into the future.
Mani cuts the gold leaf into minute pieces, sticks them to the papyrus and keeps on applying opaque pigment until the page shines
brightly. Morning comes. Evening comes. Days and weeks go by. Mani does not cease painting: the vast revolving, never-flagging wheel of the cosmos which little by little drives all light from the world, the virtuously waxing and waning moon—a golden ceramic bowl in a night sky of lustrous lapis lazuli—in which the light is collected and cleansed of any traces of earthly grime before returning home on brightly shimmering ferries via the Milky Way, having escaped the cycle of birth, a light-bearing soul that is allowed to cease existing.
Finally, he reaches for the squirrel-hair brush and goes over the folds of the messenger’s robe one more time, the eyebrows of the Mother of Life, the contours of the gold-gleaming armor of Primeval Man, the goaty grimaces of the demons. Even the beard hair of the Lord of Darkness and the claws of his scaly feet he paints with the diligence of an artist who loves all his variously shaped creatures equally and even forgets that evil was never good, was neither related to good nor its offspring, was not some fallen angel or rogue Titan, and that there was no accounting for its wickedness. In Mani’s miniature it is a self-savaging monster with a dragon’s body, a lion’s head, an eagle’s wings, and a whale’s tail, which since the dawn of time has been ravaging its own kingdom—a battlefield obscured by clouds of ashes, poisoned by the foul stench of carrion, full of dead tree stumps and seething scarlet abysses with chrome-yellow smoke rising out of their depths. Mani’s doctrines may be black and white, but his books dazzle with color. Whoever possesses such books has no need of temples or churches. They are themselves places of contemplation, of wisdom, of worship: magnificent codices, the weighty tomes bound in unsplit leather, the counterspaces delicately inlaid with thin slivers of tortoiseshell and ivory, in convenient duodecimo format, their covers clad in gold leaf and trimmed with precious stones, but also books as tiny as a charm that can be hidden within a closed fist. The ink made from pomegranate and lampblack has a uniform raven sheen to it on the chalk-whitened papyrus, on pale silk, soft leather, or gleaming parchment. Only the titles are decorated to the point of illegibility, twined around with flamboyant floral rosettes and edged with dots of crimson, the color of redemption and destruction, the color of the world conflagration. Scarlet glows the fire which has blazed for one thousand four hundred and sixty-eight years, which has set the cosmos alight and will not cease burning until its heat has freed the last particle of light and consumed the entire universe. And the glorious images of the future shine brightly, a heavenly world of light in opaque white and gold leaf, in which good and evil are separated again, all parts of the darkness submerged, conquered and engulfed, a lump buried alive, and all parts of the light raised up, purified in the moon, cleansed by the rotation of the stars. Whoever wants to may believe it. Many want to.
Zoroaster had numerous pupils, Buddha five companions, Jesus twelve disciples—but Mani had seven books which carry his teachings out into the world in many tongues, uniting what was split apart by the building of the Tower, and dividing like no man before him: into those who follow him and those who curse him. They call him Mana, vessel of good or vessel of evil, and they call him Manna, bread of heaven or opium of villains; they call him Mani, the winged savior, or Manes, the monster with the lame leg, Mani, the enlightened one, who set out to redeem the world, or Manie, the insane one, who set out to corrupt that same world—Mani, the balm, Mani, the plague.
And as the time of his martyrdom draws near, Mani speaks to his people: “Heed my books! And write down the words of wisdom I have spoken from time to time so that they are not lost to you.”
They are ablaze. Pure gold flows from the fire that devours them. Yet it is not a world conflagration, not a flaming cosmos that consumes the sacred writings of the Manichaeans, but the pyres of their enemies. No objection is tolerated, and every doubt punished. For with the believers come the godless, with the pious come the heretics, and with any true teaching comes the swiftly inflamed zeal of those true believers who separate right from wrong as strictly as Mani separated light from darkness. The fire is not choosy, even though they say that the flames consume only what is untrue.
What else burns along with the holy scripts of the Manichaeans? Calculations of the end of the world and innumerable books of magic, evocations of the devil and countless conflicting philosophies of being, thousands of copies of the Talmud, the collected works of Ovid, treatises on the Holy Trinity and the mortality of the soul, on the infinitude of space and the true magnitude of the universe, on the shape of the Earth and its position in the configuration of the stars. The interrogations last for days, the pyres burn for centuries. The fire warms the hearts of the omniscient, it heats the baths of Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome, until the eye can no longer deceive the mind, and books start to be informed by nature. How immense does the truth have to be for its light to outshine the darkness of all the errors surrounding it? Every time a new telescope is invented which brings the far-off ominously close, the boundary has to be moved, horizons enlarged: celestial spheres turn into orbits, circles into ellipses, patches of fog into globular clusters, spiral nebulae and galaxies, six planets into seven, eight, nine—and then eight again, and mysteries into forms of matter whose genesis is no less eccentric than Mani’s cosmology—suns that maintain planets on their orbits, black holes that rend and swallow up stars, fogs that radiate light that in the distant future will be received by no one. No matter how many numbers and formulas describe the cosmos, no matter what knowledge illuminates its nature: as long as time still exists—and who could doubt it?—then every explanation remains no more than storytelling, the familiar tale of attraction and repulsion, of beginning and ending, of coming into being and passing away, of chance and necessity. The universe is growing, expanding, forcing the galaxies apart; it is almost as if it were fleeing from the theories that attempt to capture it. And the notion of this flight, of this rampant growth into the anchorless void seems more terrible than that of a shrinking, a contraction back to the ancient raw point where it all began, where all power and mass, all time and all space fused, coalesced, a dot at first, then a lump, buried alive: an explosion, a dilating space, a hot, pressurized state, expanding, cooling, until atoms are formed, light and matter separate and create the visible world—as improbable as that may be: suns, clouds of molecules, dust, cosmic worms. Asking about the beginning is asking about the end. Whether everything will expand and accelerate, or will one day go into reverse and contract back into itself, caught up in loops that know neither birth nor decay. After all, what do we know! Only this much is as good as certain: there will be an end to the world, possibly a temporary one, but still the most appalling thing imaginable: the sun will swell to gigantic proportions, swallowing up Mercury and Venus, and the whole of Earth’s sky will be nothing but sun. And its immense heat will evaporate all the water of the oceans, melt the rock, rupture the Earth’s crust, turn its insides out, until cold descends, the end of time.
But for now the sun hangs large as a ball in the glorious deep-blue sky above a land with a history going back many millennia, one that considers itself as old as humanity itself and knows only a pair of opposites: the murderous desert of sand or stone and the life-giving water of the River Nile, which, every summer, used to flood its valley for a hundred days, transform its alluvial land into a huge lake and leave behind it that greasy, earthy-black sludge that rendered the soil so fertile. But since its floodwaters have been dammed up behind massive walls and forced into a labyrinth of thousands upon thousands of channels contained by dikes and dams and leveled out by weirs to provide year-round irrigation for the fields that are expanding ever further into the desert and wring two harvests out of even the sandiest soil, the beneficial Nile flooding no longer occurs. And the ancient Fellahin people native to the area, who since ancient times have worked the earth with strong-boned oxen and wooden plows, have no choice now but to send the children into the desert, to the dumps of abandoned settlements, to hunt for sebakh, the nitrogen-rich fertilizer produced by the decompositi
on of the sunbaked mud bricks that formed the walls of ancient towns.
It is a particularly hot day in 1929 when three teenagers roaming around the sanded-up, semisubmerged ruins not far from Medinet Madi discover in a vault a rotten wooden box that, on exposure to sunlight, immediately falls apart revealing a number of disintegrating bundles of papyri. Water has permeated the sheets to the extent that, despite having resisted countless generations of worms and populations of ants, they have been eaten away not by living creatures but by the finest salt crystals, so that the men who, not long after, hold the codices in their hands in the room of an antique dealer initially hesitate to pay good money for these black-edged, stuck-together book blocks. Even the restorer who eventually examines one of the musty packages doubts whether its age-old secrets can ever be coaxed out of it.
Only after months of work does he succeed, with the aid of an inclined plane and tiny tweezers, in unsticking individual sheets, which are so wafer-thin and fragile that a sneeze would be enough to reduce them immediately to dust. Call it chance or destiny! While in Berlin manuscript experts hunch with their mirrors and magnifying glasses over the silky-sheened remnants of an evidently sacred scripture pressed flat under panes of glass, in a Californian observatory on a mountaintop not far from Los Angeles, the physicist Fritz Zwicky points a 200-inch reflecting telescope at an area of sky within the Coma Berenices constellation. And as he observes the movements of the blurry fog patches, which reveal themselves to be separate galaxies, and compares them with his calculations, he is hit by a realization.
An Inventory of Losses Page 14