Living Spirit

The Living Spirit (Syriac Rūḥā Ḥayyā; Middle Persian Mihryazd) is the great demiurge and rescuer of Manichaeism, evoked by the Father of Greatness in the Second Creation. Descending to the frontier of Darkness, he calls down to the fallen Primal Man, and the answering cry of the Call and the Answer — themselves personified as deities — draws the captive light-hero back up to the Realm of Light. The Living Spirit then subdues the defeated archons and, together with the Mother of Life and his own five sons, builds the structured universe: the ten heavens stretched from the demons' flayed skins, the eight earths heaped from their bodies, and the sun, moon and stars set as vessels to ferry the rescued light upward. In Middle Persian sources he is identified with the god Mihr (Mithra); the same Iranian name Mihr, however, designates the Third Messenger in Parthian and Sogdian, a noted ambiguity in the terminology.

Parentage

• Father of Greatness

Domains

• demiurgic creation
• rescue of the light

Powers

• to raise the fallen Primal Man back to the Realm of Light
• to build the heavens and earths from the bodies of the conquered demons

Epithets

• Mihryazd
• Rūḥā Ḥayyā

Relations

• subordinate to: Father of Greatness
• ally: Primal Man

Sources

• Werner Sundermann, 'Manicheism ii. The Manichean Pantheon', Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed., 2009)
• Werner Sundermann, 'Mithra iii. In Manicheism', Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed., 2002)
• Iain Gardner and Samuel N. C. Lieu (eds.), Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)