Mani

Born in Mesopotamia to a Jewish-Christian baptizing sect, he broke with it at twenty-four, declared himself the seal of the prophets, and founded the only Gnostic religion that became a world religion — carried by his own missionaries from Roman Africa (where it caught the young Augustine for nine years) to the Uyghur steppe and into China, where a Manichaean temple still stands. His cosmos: Light and Dark, two eternal principles, tangled in a catastrophe; particles of light imprisoned in matter; and the entire work of religion is the liberation of the light-particles — released by eating certain foods, sung out by the Elect, ferried moonward on ships of light. He was flayed or died in chains under Bahram I. Set this beside Lurianic nitzotzot — sparks of the shattered light held in kelipot, shells, and raised by eating with intention — and the resemblance stops being general and becomes uncomfortably specific. Fourteen hundred years and no demonstrated channel: the strongest unexplained rhyme in this entire annex.