The Manichaeans

Mani's church: Elect and Hearers, a strict discipline around food and light, missionary from the start, and organised for translation into every language it met. It ran from Roman Africa to China and survived in Fujian into the seventeenth century.

The one current that operated at civilisational scale — and therefore the one whose cosmology of imprisoned light was actually in circulation across Eurasia for over a thousand years, which is the only remotely plausible route toward any later resemblance.