A brief history of religion

Study the Scythians to help navigate the missing history of religion. Their religion was documented by Herodotus, the father of Western history.

Scythians believed god sent them three golden objects: a golden cup, a golden plough, and a golden battle ax.

The cup was too hot too touch, but one day a boy was able to pick it up. His offspring became the royal Scythians, in charge of appointing the Enares, who ran the ceremonies. The family with the plough was put in charge of planting hemp and other crops in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains. During the summer, they moved their herds up the mountain fields to graze, and returned to the banks of the Black Sea during the winter. I could write a long time about their customs, even though they had no written language and everything we know comes from Persia or from Greece, in other words, their enemies. The Scythians built and controlled the Silk Road, which meant they were also involved in the slave, drug and spice trades. Silk didn’t appear until millennia later.

When the straits of Bosphorus were first breached, possibly due to a meteor strike, sea water flooded into the Black Sea burying all the towns and villages on the shore, as well as several islands. The survivors move away, some to Turkey, some to Persia, some to Afghanistan. They develop flood myths.

Meanwhile, in Bactria a new avatar emerges, Zoroaster, who is using the Scythian sacraments, and popularizes drinking hot milk mixed with cannabis, which turns out to be the most effective delivery system, both for medicinal and inspirational purposes. Zoroaster is a barefoot holy man, not a warrior like Heracles, the previous avatar. He carries a magic stick instead of a magic sword. He saves the tribe through feats of magic, not through feats of strength.

The first Zoroastrian king of Persia (Cyrus the Great) defeats the corrupt Babylonian empire and replaces it with a more enlightened form of government. He frees the Jews enslaved by Babylon and says, “Take this money and go back to Jerusalem and rebuild your temple and write down the history of your tribe.”

Naturally, they create a new avatar to update Abraham, named Moses, who is a composite of Zoroaster and Cyrus. Like Zoroaster, Moses goes to the top of “smokey” mountain and comes back with god’s rules after conversing with a burning bush. Like Cyrus, Moses was a foundling whose real identity was kept hidden.

Alexander the Great’s father becomes the first to defeat the Scythians in battle, opening the way for his son to march across the Silk Road and conquer Bactria. Meanwhile a new avatar emerged in India and became popular in Bactria. His name was Buddha. The great pantheons of Indian, Greek, Egyptian and Persian gods had been rejected by Zoroaster, who created the first monotheistic religion, but Buddha creates the first “no gods” religion in which your fate is ruled by karma, not by whims of some god.

Alexander embraces Buddhism before he dies and for centuries afterwards the entire Middle East becomes Buddhist with a Greek flavor. Judea borders the Greco-Buddhist empire, and soon the most advanced Jews are working on a new avatar, inspired by Buddha. Stories and scrolls are written to celebrate this new movement, which is vegetarian and seeks to stop the slaughter of birds and animals inside the temple.

This is a small, tiny movement, but one that troubles Rome, so they send one of their citizens to persecute these new Christians causing trouble in the temple, interfering with the slaughter of animals and birds, which makes a lot of profit (and Rome gets a cut).

The persecutor is unable to wipe out the movement, so he joins it and becomes its biggest influencer after the movement’s leader, James, is thrown off a tower and murdered. Thus ends any talk of vegetarianism.

Two hundred years later, a boy is born of a Christian father and Zoroastrian mother in Persia, and develops unique theories on religion at a young age, amazing the Magi while only 12. He successfully merges all religion to end war, and becomes a hunted man in return. He is such a vegetarian he won’t eat roots, only freely fallen fruits, nuts and vegetables. Lured out of safe haven in India he is skinned alive and decapitated for the crime of trying to end war. His murder makes him famous worldwide and the mercenary army of Rome begins flocking to his religion in droves, reading the bible he wrote by himself in his own unique calligraphy. He was the greatest portrait painter of his time. His temples spread over the world, until it got so big, Rome got worried again.

That’s when Constantine embraces a small cult designed to give comfort to the poor, and transforms it into an imperial juggernaut to take over the world. Many elements of Mani’s life are incorporated into the story of Jesus.

Not a single temple, bible, nor painting of Mani’s survives the great Inquisition, although pockets survive in modified form, like the Cathars in France. Eventually the Pope will order them all slaughtered to stop the spread of Mani’s dualism.

Mani had been healing the blind and lame, not with magic, but with the original oil of Moses, a mixture of cannabis resin suspended in olive oil with some spices, and a tad of opium and ephedra if available.

Rome disappears Mani and disappears cannabis at the same time. The Scythian holy grail, which was about the substance inside the cup, is transformed into the Christian Eucharist.

The Zoroastrian Magi were responsible for a great awakening in science and spirituality. My theory is this was fueled by Improvisational Ritual Theater. The Magi rituals were greatly influenced by the Scythian Enarree, who were a hubridization of gay draq queens and asthetic priests, and the Scythian ideas about energy flowed like a mighty river through everything that followed, and this river can be rafted by following the spread of OM/Amen, which spread the core principles of the Scythian culture, including the fumigation of cannabis to divine the will of the gods.

Sadly, when a great reformer arose who sought to elevate the Magi religion by blending it with Buddhism and Christianity, the Magi conspired to have him killed. Mani was wiped off the face of the earth even though he was the most popular religious leader after Buddha, and was considered the incarnation of Buddha in China and India.

Mani was jailed until he expired, and then decapitated, and all his followers who didn’t recant and join some other religion were put to the sword to prevent the flow of his ideas. A thousand films about the fictional Jesus, but not one movie about Mani, who was the real Jesus.

This genocide repeated centuries later when the Pope of Rome launched the.first Crusade, one that lasted almost a century because they had to keep going back to kill every sprout.

The genocidal extermination of the Cathars was fueled by two things: The Crusaders were allowed to seize all property and assets by the families they killed, and they didn’t even have to be Cathars, they only had to live in a village that contained some Cathars. So a great migration from Italy into Southern France took place. The kicker in the Pope’s plan, however, was that if you joined the Crusade to kill and steal land, you were given direct and immediate entry into heaven upon your death, no stopping in Purgatory.

This was an offer that could not be refused for many impoverished warriors in Italy, and it minted many rich barons almost overnight.

The Enaree became known many centuries later as the Perfecti. They were vegans, could hold no property, swear no oaths, and could not have sex.

Strange the inner circle of the Cathars also became known as the Perfecti, and only strange because this fact occurs nowhere in our history books. Women as well as men could become Perfecti through a oath-taking ceremony. All others could eat cheese and meat, marry and have families. The others were expected to take care of the Perfecti, providing free food and shelter in exchange for song, poetry and art.

Most everything we know about Mani is wrong because everything real was destroyed and what survived was the propaganda of Augustine the Hippo, who spent nine years as a follower of Mani and then suddenly switched sides to the Vatican.  When this sort of propaganda is installed as the only source of truth through a genocide that stretched for millennia, it is usually a sign that something very important was being erased.

But erasing Mani didn’t work because it created the Bogomils in the Balkans, and then the Cathars in France. The remnants of the culture survives only in the myth of the holy grail, the central myth going back to the Enarree. A golden cup fell from the sky and only the true king could pick it up because it was hotter than a red-hot stove. And if my work ever gets popular the world might see another emergence of the Enarree and improvisational theater as the best way to do ceremonies with zero dogma attached beyond don’t hurt anybody.

There is an astronomical disparity between the two: while there are millions of depictions of Jesus spanning two millennia of global history, there are less than 100 known surviving historical artworks explicitly depicting the prophet Mani.

Mani was an artist himself and explicitly used a “Book of Pictures” (Arzhang) to teach his faith. However, centuries of brutal, systematic persecution by the Roman Empire, the Sasanian Persian Empire, Islamic caliphates, and Chinese imperial dynasties successfully wiped out almost all Manichaean art.

Historical records indicate Mani was not crucified; he died in 274/277 CE from exhaustion and heavy chaining after 26 days in a Sasanian prison. While Manichaeans poetically referred to his death as his “crucifixion” to parallel Jesus’ story, his followers preferred to depict him in glory as the “Buddha of Light” rather than showing him being tortured.

The Only Surviving Statue: The Statue of Mani at Cao’an Temple (Fujian, China): Carved around 1339 CE into a living cliff face inside the Cao’an Temple, this is the only known intact historical statue of Mani in existence. To escape imperial persecution, the local Chinese Manichaeans disguised the statue as a Buddhist monument, rendering Mani as the “Buddha of Light” (Moni Guangfo). Instead of having the traditional curly hair of a standard Buddha, this granite statue features unique Manichaean identifiers: straight hair draped over his shoulders, a distinct beard, and palms facing upward resting on his lap.

Surviving Paintings and Drawings (Approx. 25–35 Pieces): The remaining visual representations of Mani are scattered across rare manuscript fragments, hanging scrolls, and cosmological diagrams:

1. The Southern Chinese Silk Paintings (approx. 8 scrolls): Discovered in the 21st century, these rare 12th-to-15th-century hanging scrolls were preserved in Japanese temples and private collections. They include: An explicit, standalone Icon of Mani depicting him seated on a lotus throne. Narrative scrolls depicting his life, such as Mani’s Parents, The Birth of Mani, and Episodes from Mani’s Missionary Work.

The Manichaean Diagram of the Universe (1 scroll): A massive 14th-century Chinese painting depicting the complex layers of Manichaean cosmology. It includes a specific portrait detail commonly referred to as “Mani as Observer” or “Mani as the Buddha of Light”.

3. Turpan Manuscript Illusions and Wall Paintings (approx. 10–20 fragments): Recovered from the ruins of Gaochang (modern Xinjiang, China) by early 20th-century expeditions, these 8th-to-9th-century illuminated fragments are now preserved largely in the Berlin Asian Art Museum. Several include tiny miniature paintings of Mani wearing white robes and a unique tall tiara, surrounded by his Perfecti.

4. Non-Manichaean Miniature Art (Fewer than 5): A small handful of later Islamic and Persian Shahnameh (Book of Kings) manuscript illustrations depicting Mani, usually focusing on his legendary reputation as a master painter or his execution by the Sasanian state.