We continue with the last comparative installment of the oven stories. So far, we introduced the series and reviewed ovens in material culture. Then, we discussed five oven stories:Rabbi Tzadok and the Matronitha; Rabbi Hiyya bar Ashei and the fake courtesan Herutha; The Ukvas and the Panhandler; Shorty Singed-Shins; and Rabbi Prida’s Grandpa’s Wife and the Skull of King Jehoiakim. We examined the gender implications of the oven stories. We then turned to what makes these stories peculiar by reviewing rabbinic perspectives on self-mortification, followed by comparative perspectives from Christianity and Zoroastrianism.
Today we review Manichaeism, which was neglected as a Talmud comparator until the last decade, which brought considerable attention to the interaction between the two systems. Manichaeism is not a living religion, so what we know comes to us from Manichaean writings about cosmogony and other subjects; the religion flourished in the Babylonian empire, between the 3rd and 8th centuries. We cannot discount it as relevant to our stories.
A big part of why Manichaeism is important is the aggressive proselytizing element of the religion. Before being imprisoned and executed by Zoroastrian priests, Mani, the founding prophet, traveled far spreading his beliefs, and the religion spread quickly throughout the Roman empire. Christians were threatened, too, and authored several famous apologia against the Manichaeans. Manichaeism even spread to China (some of the important texts were preserved in Chinese) and had a wildly successful, but brief, time there. This means the rabbis are likely to have been exposed to it.
In his book chapter on Manichaean asceticism, Jason Beduhn reminds us that, like other religions we reviewed, Manichaeism was not a monolith and had varied forms and practices. We also do not have current practitioners, so our knowledge of the religion comes from Manichaean scripture, often comparing the Coptic and Chinese versions of the texts. In brief, Manichaeism, as Michael Tardieu explains, is a dualist religion, in which the powerful force of good is opposed by the evil power. Importantly for our purposes, human individual is a battleground between these powers.
This idea is manifested in a Manichaean text studied by Beduhn, called “The Battle for the Body,” the gist of which is:
The forces of evil create the human body from a mixture of light and darkness, but so order it that the darkness rules over and oppresses the light, keeping it enslaved to ignorance and passions. This congenital debility is the condition into which each one of us is born, and the tale of evil's formation of such body prisons is an openended myth in which we are all characters. The "Battle for the Body" recounts the ongoing efforts of divine forces, working in cooperation with the awakened self within us and the Manichaean community, to reverse this infernal control of the body, and to implant a divine dominion within the specifically Manichaean body, governed by ascetic discipline and positive attitudes. The use of the present tense by the various versions of this account-or, in the case of Coptic, the habitual tense-signifies the regular, ongoing nature of these events as the personal story of every believer from generation to generation.
After examining the relative cohesion between different versions in which this text was preserved, Beduhn concludes:
In the narrative, the Mind of Light acts out a kind of internal landscape architecture, uprooting, cutting, forming, resurfacing, enhancing the interior spaces of the body into the liberated and liberating machine so central to Manichaean ritual practice. The codes of behavior are the manifest, enacted correlates of this mythology-or dare we call it a physiology?-of internal states that were considered the roots of manifest behavior. The one reinforces the other: the codes are justified by being linked to the internal battle for the body: at the same time, the truth of this invisible battle is demonstrated by the empirical manifestations of bodily order with which the codes are concerned.
This explains why Manichaeism emphasized ascetic practices. They had a proto-monastic class, the Elect, who engaged in complicated ablutions and purification rituals that included fasting, celibacy, vegetarianism, and the avoidance of harming plants (proto-Jain?). They were not entirely isolated and would interact with, and be hosted by, laypeople, so their practices would be known; indeed, many Christian scholars believe that their ascetic practices were developed from the Manichaean ones.
These practices included fire, but as something to be protected from harm, not a vehicle for self-harm. The Elect’s “Seal of the Hand” specifically forbade injury to water, fire, trees, and living things, because Manichaean cosmology held that particles of divine Light were trapped throughout the material world, including in fire itself, and any violent or destructive use of it ushered in suffering, rather than liberation. Unlike Zoroastrianism which, as we saw, treated fire as a wholly pure, sacred element, Manichaeism regarded actual fire and water as a mixture of light and darkness, not wholly pure, which made it something to handle carefully.
If anything, where fire does show up in Manichaeism, it’s in eschatological doctrines, not in actual practice. There is a doctrine that, at the end of the world, there will be a final “great fire” that will last for a long time and purge the remaining trapped light from matter, before finally separating light and darkness. I wasn’t able to find any practices in which they enact this in any way, so the idea of crawling into a lit oven did not come from here.
I want to look at Roman practices next, and then we’ll talk about the broader symbology of the fires of the oven.