Research Restatement: The angels of Chinese Manichaeism

Sure I'll add that to my new new age religion

It’s been said that explaining something is a good way to make sure you’ve learned and understand it yourself. Which why I will try having some posts that restate what I learned from different academic sources I’ve been able to find. And I’m going to take a step outside my usual Tezcatlipoca focus to talk about figures you may know already, the archangels. But this isn’t the archangels as you know them.

Defining Scope

The paper I read and am summarizing is ‘Near Eastern Angels in Chinese Manichaean Texts’ by Gábor Kósa. I was made aware of it due to a brief discussion online of archangels and syncretism involving them. The article is concerned with two key discoveries, the first was of two manuscripts in the Xiapu province in 2008, and a more recent (as of the publication in 2018) find of a text in a village “150 km to the west of Xiapu province.”

Within Xiapu the paper names three villages that have a popular religion based around Lin Deng, a Manichaean missionary and miracle worker from the Song dynasty (chronologically).

The deification was based on him being a miracle worker rather than a missionary, but his missionary status meant that reverence of him also brought in clear Manichaean elements. But, the author brings this up to stress that the people of these villages aren’t strictly Manichaean, even if their practices and mythology are heavily derived from it.

Archangel or heavenly king? Yes.

That Manichaean derived mythology is where the angels come in. The list of archangels given by the discovered sources is consistent and so is the order in which they are named (with a small number of exceptions): Raphael, Michael, Gabriel, Sariel.

It is noted by Kósa that the placement of Sariel as the fourth archangel is unusual, especially with how the other three are biblical while Sariel isn’t. The name Sariel appears in apocrypha however, one of which names as him the angel who wrestled Jacob, who will come up later.

The fact that drew me to this article is that the archangels are here also known as the four heavenly kings, or four foreign heavenly kings. The four heavenly kings is a Buddhist term used for the guardians of the four directions, and that link continues with each archangel assigned to a direction and continent of Buddhist cosmology.

[Screenshot of chart taken from PDF form of the article, placed here for educational purposes.]

Amongst the archangels/heavenly kings, the ordering of their names may reflect some sort of hierarchy. Raphael is always listed first and is the only angel with dedicated hymns. I noticed one listing of archangels cited does refer to Michael as ‘Michael the great,’ but he’s still the second to be listed, not the headliner.

On the subject of hierarchies, the four archangels report to a figure known as Rex Honoris, King of the Ten Firmaments. Their duty is to quell the uprisings of demons. This was where I felt my lack of prior knowledge the most, the firmaments/layers and Rex Honoris weren’t given much explanation so I couldn’t grasp them fully, likely because they were a step past the scope of the article.

Great generals and light envoys

A fifth major angel is also present, Jacob, yes that Jacob, the one who wrestled an angel. Jacob as an angel can be traced back to various Jewish apocrypha and can also be found in a variety of Manichaean sources from different regions, indicating he was a popular figure.

This popularity is likely because he was identified with the leader of the community or community itself, a protective figure with military prowess. A few different titles for Jacob can be seen in the sources, which include ‘great general’ and ‘marshal.’ He gained the Chinese name Yejufu, sometimes shortened to Jufu.

Notably he appears alongside the archangels/heavenly kings functioning as essentially a fifth member or leader of the group. His presence there represents the center, which is considered a cardinal direction/point itself.

There’s also a less well defined sixth figure who appears alongside the archangels and Jacob, light envoy Mo Qinjiao. He shared Jacob’s association with the center, and I have now covered everything that can be said for sure about Mo Qinjiao. Kósa speculates that with the focus on the archangels and Jacob’s martial powers that he could have those same traits with how he appeared alongside them.

The term light envoy is described as being used to refer to any angel who isn’t a heavenly king, and at times humans. My own observation based on the sources shown is that at the same time some sources mention ‘the light envoy’ as a figure and the title appears to be affixed to Mo Qinjiao specifically in a way it isn’t to other angels. Even without that something clearly makes him special amongst the Manichaean angels.

One fascinating inclusion in the article is charts that directly show the connections between angels and directions. They are drawn in a way where characters are linked to different words in order to complete them. The following is an attempt from the article to represent the function of the chart in English.

[Screenshot of chart taken from PDF form of the article, placed here for educational purposes.]

Here is where even more poorly defined angels and light envoys enter the picture. An angel known as Arsus appears in the hymn to Raphael with similar qualities, an association with the north and pureness. Kósa describes the relationship between the two angels as ‘hierarchal’ and offers the interpretation that Arsus is some sort of ‘constant attendant to Raphael.’

The name Arsus appears again in another list of angel names, coming after the archangels and Jacob. Kósa offers up what he himself calls an ‘unverifiable hypothesis’ that the section beginning with Arsus is meant to parallel the archangels and Jacob by listing their attendants/equivalent light envoy.

So working on that assumption would pair Marsus with Michael, Narsus with Gabriel, Nastikus with Sariel, and Mo Qinjiao with Jacob as the leaders of each quartet. This would result in a change to how the name Mo Qinjiao is read, so Kósa is hesitant on that aspect.

Digression and closing

As a side note before wrapping this up, at one point a list of spiritual beings in one of the texts is quoted, and while not commented on, Saint George appears there under the name Yihuojisi. I just found that interesting, I’m aware that he’s been syncretized with the Orisa Ogun so I suppose it’s not shocking that he also found his way into Manichaeism.

Back to the main point, Kósa’s concluding argument is that ultimately these angels maintained their Iranian origins through hymns that were phonetically transcribed while also adapting to Chinese culture by taking on roles such as that of the four heavenly kings.

I advise reading the article itself if any of this information interests you, especially if it’s information you intend to make use of in someway. My focus was on representing all the information that interested me personally and I felt I could understand, not necessarily giving a complete overview, though I have done my best to preserve the nuances of that information.

As one example of something I didn’t touch on as much as I could, there’s quite a bit in the article that requires the ability to read Chinese (which I lack) to appreciate, like discussions of how the writing of certain names changed.

What made this such a fascinating read for me is that while most readers may associate names like Michael and Jacob with a western Christian setting, they were also able to fully adapt into a Chinese Manichaean context. It shows how versatile religious and mythical figures can be.