INTRODUCTION

whose recitation was likewise regarded as itself aiding the soul's passage.1 The Manichaean funeral literature represents a different system of belief, according to which gnosis (spiritual knowledge) had to bear fruit within this life. Virtue, it was taught by Mani, depended on an understanding of the principles of Light and Darkness; but this understanding, although it saved the enlightened from sin, could not compensate—before or after death—for sin committed. Good actions, not words, secured a passage heavenwards for the soul:

They wait not for a defense, to teach how to answer, on this day, but he that has a good deed, let him put his trust in his deeds.2

The ascent was not, therefore, an ordeal, but a triumph, which no living man could help or hinder. The Manichaean funeral hymns could not, accordingly, be regarded as potent in themselves to help the dead.

Doctrinal differences have not, however, affected the formal likeness of the Manichaean funeral literature to the Mandaean; nor have they abolished from it vestiges of what are still realities in the Mandaean liturgy—the enemies that flock round even the virtuous soul, and the watchposts of the hostile planets along its heavenward way.3

A dramatic form is found also in the two Parthian hymn-cycles. The similarities in form and content between them and the short funeral psalms are immediately evident. Dissimilarities exist also, some of which may be attributed merely to the difference in scale of the works. The most striking of them, however, is a divergence in attitude toward the soul. In the majority of the funeral psalms, the souls are treated as ethical entities, conscious of the existence they have just left and of their moral achievements within it, and still attached to their "brethren" and "parents of the flesh," whom they exhort not to mourn.4 In the handām (member/limb) texts, the soul is an innocent and passive member of the exiled Light, and humanity is overwhelmed by an impersonal grandeur. Youth and age, family and friends have no place there. The soul is "out of humanity's reach, and must finish (its) journey alone" amid the falling of worlds and shattering of nature's laws.

The contrast is sufficiently marked to appear at first a counterpoise to the many resemblances between the two sets of texts. Yet

1. See W. Brandt, Mandäische Religion, p. 82; Anz, op. cit., p. 73, n. 1.
2. Ps. Bk. (Manichaean Psalm Book), 81^28-30.
3. See below, p. 97 v. 6 with n. 1.
4. See, for example, Ps. Bk. 88^16-17; 58^16-18.