The Manichaeistic World View and its Mystical Features

A world view is one of the most important components of any religion and intellectual system. How a school of thought views and explains the world is indicative of many of its explicit and implicit dimensions. Manichaeism involves a mystical and complex world view, which immensely exhibits its mystical view of the world. This is a mixture of Gnostic world view with a Persian structure. The Manichaeistic world view is partly characterized by an eternal dualism of the good and the evil, and three rounds of creation. Prominent mystical views of this world view, as presented in an Ancient Persian intellectual system, include aversion of the material world, the belief in the imprisonment of the spirit in matter despite its divine origin, the devilish (ahrīman) nature of the world, efforts for emancipation from repeated rounds of birth, and finally, the return of divine lights to their origin.