Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis: Beyond Light and Darkness

Mattias Brand, Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis: Beyond Light and Darkness, Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 102 (Leiden: Brill, 2019). ISBN 9789004510296.

Reviewed by Evan Axel Andersson, University of California, Santa Barbara, eandersson@ucsb.edu.

Manichaeans were often understood through the polemics of their doctrinal enemies or, less often, through the writings of their thought leaders. These texts reveal a religion that perceived two principles, light and life, from which the soul derived, and darkness and death, from which matter and the flesh derived. However, the intricacies of cosmology was a knowledge largely reserved for Manichaeaism’s ascetic leadership, the elect—the lay catechumens seem to have been largely uninterested in these aspects of the religion.There have rarely been opportunities for scholars to engage with this lay Manichaeism, that is, as practiced by the Manichaean laity. In the 1990s, this began to change as new caches of papyrus documents were discovered in the Dakhleh Oasis town of Ismant el-Kharab, ancient Kellis. Among these documents were liturgical texts as well as many private letter collections that have granted us a better view into the daily lives of the people of this oasis community. These insights have challenged the assumptions we have made based on specialist discourses about Manichaeism. Thus, an analysis of these letters proves an invaluable opportunity to understand what living in a Manichaean community might have been like.

This is the task that Mattias Brand takes up in Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis. His goals for this study are twofold: Firstly, the book is a cultural-historical analysis of the community at Kellis through the lens of what Brand calls “everyday groupness.” This theoretical approach is intended to bridge the gap between the micro-scale of the quotidian turn and the macro-scale of a broader historical analysis. To do this, the author focuses on what kind of group associations appear to be active in the daily religious lives of the Kellis Manichaeans, with the goal of better assessing whether Manichaeism was as exclusive as scholars suppose. Brand is asking, in essence, when the Manichaean community of Kellis conceived of themselves as Manichaeans and when they did not.

Secondly, Brand levels a critique of the prominent narrative within the field of late antiquity which asserts that religious dynamics were moving increasingly towards mutually exclusive faith communities. This was certainly a discourse that was at play in late antiquity, but the evidence from the Kellis documents (as well as outside Kellis, in this reviewer’s estimation) demand that we pause before imposing this discursive frame upon the lived religious practice of late antiquity. The book’s subtitle—“Beyond Light and Darkness”—is a clever nod both to the two principles of Manichaean cosmology as well as the dualism of the aforementioned theory of religious change: from a localizing system to a group-oriented one. Brand argues that within Manichaeism, which self-identifies as exclusive in its groupness, we encounter daily practices that sometimes ignore such claims to exclusivity. In essence, Brand takes the concept of situational identities and applies it to the problem of groupism in late antique religion.

The first two chapters introduce the reader to the familial and extra-familial social dynamics and networks at play in this study, as well as the “untidy” character of the Kellis Manichaeans’ everyday groupness. Chapter 1, “Makarios’s Family,” familiarizes the reader with the papyrus letter archive and other archaeological evidence found in the fourth-century CE houses 1–3 of area A in Kellis. In addition to being the find spot for a sizable letter archive, these houses also held a trove of Manichean literature, indicating the family’s Manichean identity. The private letters found here show the anxieties and stresses of a family of well-to-do textile merchants as they managed a business across geographical distances. Its members often invoked Manichaean identity and liturgy in their communications with one another, demonstrating the importance of religious groupness within the familial context.

Chapter 2, “Pamour’s Connections,” continues this line of inquiry by investigating the extra-familial social context of the family. The household was steeped in the practices and languages of traditional Egyptian and Greek religion, used horoscopes and amulets, and lived in the same house block as a priest of the god Tutu. Its members also read more general Christian literature, like the New Testament. There was no religious persecution in the city of Kellis, and indeed, Pamour was well regarded in the community and even touted his connections to the local Roman administration on occasion. The identities at play in these dealings were firmly local ones and were not specific to the family’s Manichaean religious identity.

The next five chapters move the reader through several key arenas of daily life, interrogating the Kellis evidence for any sense of when Manichaean groupness was active. Chapter 3, “Orion’s Language,” considers terms of self-designation and what these might say about when and how the Kellis Manichaeans made use of one group identity over another. Brand suggests that for the Kellis catechumens, the primary terms of self-designation concerned kinship and locality. Even the elect, who were more prone to make use of Manichaean language in writing, wrote with fundraising strategies in mind that sought to bind elect to catechumens with putative kinship, complicating a straightforward analysis.

Chapter 4, “Tehat’s Gifts,” asks if alms, and gifts in general, acted to mark religious boundaries, testing Augustine’s claim that Manichaeans only ever performed charity for one another. Brand argues that the giving of gifts is far more ambiguous, largely because the act of almsgiving to Manichaean elect by catechumens was largely at a distance, that is, the elect traveled while the Kellis catechumens were embedded in a village life. These gifts fade into the background among a variety of gift-giving interactions that can be detected in the Kellis papyri. Thus, the gifts of Manichaeans are not readily legible as a religious practice, rather they seem to have operated in networks of support that were common to ancient village life.

Chapter 5, “The Deacon’s Practice,” considers the evidence for Manichaean clerical hierarchies and ritual gatherings in Kellis. The author argues that gatherings of the Manichaeans would have had a congregational “group style” reinforcing Manichaean groupism. This was accomplished firstly by the singing of hymns which would encourage congregants to see themselves as Manichaeans and secondly by the readings of transregional texts and practices that placed them within the larger Manichaean world. However, frequent travel and other extenuating circumstances would have made these moments rare, and Brand thus concludes that this congregational group style was not the dominant mode of Manichaeanness in Kellis.

Chapter 6, “Matthaios’ Grief,” examines death rituals and asks how the Kellis Manichaeans might have understood their Manichaeanness in these moments. The presence of the Seven Stages hymn and the Ascension psalm in Kellis point towards the liturgy performed at such rituals. Within these ceremonies, the Manichaean self-identity of the deceased is activated posthumously in the presence of the rest of the congregation as they sing. This ritual is the only aspect of mortuary practice that hints at Manichaean identity, as there is striking similarity in burial practices across Kellis. This suggests that religious persuasion had a negligible effect on how one was buried. Instead, local trends and familial customs decided mortuary practice. Thus, the Kellis Manichaeans would have followed local traditions while also engaging in a developed series of rituals at the deathbed, which fostered a sense of groupness among the gathered.

Chapter 7, “Ision’s Books,” considers the significance of books to the Manichaean community. Manichaean catechumens were active in broad scribal circles and while they sought copies of Manichaean literature from as far away as Syria, they also copied a variety of books from more general Christian texts, classical literature, horoscopes, and amulets. The diversity of texts points to a diversity of activities. It is well known that ancient books were expensive not because of the materials needed to create them but because they required skilled and intense labor. For this reason, Brand argues that any given text suggests a use in daily life. Thus, Manichaeans were reading Manichaean, general Christian, and classical Greek literature regularly. Based upon this intermixture, Brand argues that there was no differentiation between texts from different traditions; instead, all could be assimilated to a Manichaean worldview by their readers. The diversity of literary traditions along with the depth of interest in markedly Manichaean texts suggest scribal activity could activate Manichaean groupness but did not always do so.

Brand’s study is an excellent illustration of how a focus on everyday life can complicate our macro-historical models. This complicating character is what Brand dubs “Untidy History.” While the presence of differentiated religious groups can be felt in some aspects of daily life, it is unnoticeable in others, flying in the face of the neat boundaries zealously carved and maintained in the texts of religious authorities. This is not to say that there is no discernible pattern that can be detected here; it is simply far more nuanced and situational than theories of primary-secondary or locative-utopian religion let on.

This book also raises questions about what new avenues one could take in the study of daily life and its interaction with ritual—especially so-called magical practices like the use of amulets and horoscopes—and religious groupness. A major concern facing those working on late antique religion, especially in Egypt, is the question of what socio-historical significance is suggested by the mixed religious repertoires of signs, idioms, and texts in late antique lived religion. Consider the recent work of Joseph Sanzo in Ritual Boundaries, where he argues that late antique individuals from diverse social classes actively sought religious differentiation through ritual acts and objects.¹ Strikingly, Sanzo constructs a conflict model (that Brand eschews) at work among non-elite ritual practitioners. Similar reading lists and ritual practices between different communities, including the use of amulets, might not be a sign of a live-and-let-live attitude but potentially point to intense competition, as evinced in Heidi Marx’s Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority and Elizabeth Digeser’s A Threat to Public Piety.²

Brand often suggests that these mixed ritual and textual repertoires do not necessarily indicate activated Manichaean groupness, although there is that possibility. Brand notes that Christian literature could have been read through a Manichaean lens—just as Christians would have read the Septuagint through a Christian lens. However, the use of amulets and horoscopes and their roles in ritual differentiation is little discussed. Further work may be necessary to determine how the families of Makarios and Pamour in houses 1–3 thought about religious others in their own ritual practices. Are strategies of boundary construction at work in subtle ways? If not, this could be yet another instance where macro-studies fall flat in describing the religious realities on the ground.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Brand’s meticulous work in compiling tables of papyrus items and appendices of textual and prosopographical information. The study is a work of detailed scholarship and researchers will be thankful for the thorough and thoughtful footnotes that point to relevant scholarship, discussions, and original Greek and Coptic texts. Additionally, the book is well-illustrated with several maps, charts, diagrams, and photographs, many in color. 

Brand’s study will without doubt stand as an example of what can be achieved when one directs their scholarly attention towards pairing the papyri with the archaeology, the micro with the macro, the concern for the quotidian with the textual. Brand sets a roadmap, with excellent theoretical rigor, for future studies and a warning to scholars who may lean too heavily upon conflict models of late antique religion: conflict was certainly real, and at times extreme, but it sat side-by-side with a lived experience where religious groupness played less of a factor. As such I recommend all those interested in Manichaeism, late antique religious dynamics, and Egyptian daily life to read Religion and the Everyday Life of Manichaeans in Kellis. 

Table of Contents

Introduction: Religion and Everyday Groupness (1–39)
1. Makarios’s Family: Manichaeans at Home in the Oasis (40–90)
2. Pamour’s Connections: Religion beyond a Conflict Model (91–124)
3. Orion’s Language: Manichaean Self-Designation in the Kellis Papyri (125–65)
4. Tehat’s Gifts: Everyday Community Boundaries (166–96)
5. The Deacon’s Practice: Manichaean Gatherings with Prayer (197–229)
6. Matthaios’s Grief: Manichaean Death Rituals (230–59)
7. Ision’s Books: Scribal Culture and Access to Manichaean Texts (260–90)
Conclusion: Untidy History: Manichaeanness in Everyday Life (291–304)
Appendix 1: Outline of Published Documents from Kellis (305–31)
Appendix 2: Prosopography of Makarios’s and Pamour’s Relatives (332–43)

Notes

1. Joseph E. Sanzo, Ritual Boundaries: Magic and Differentiation in Late Antique Christianity, Christianity in Late Antiquity 14 (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023).

2. Heidi Marx-Wolf, Spiritual Taxonomies and Ritual Authority: Platonists, Priests, and Gnostics in the Third Century C.E., Divinations: Rereading Late Ancient Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Elizabeth DePalma Digeser, A Threat to Public Piety: Christians, Platonists, and the Great Persecution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012).

Discussion 

1. The strong theoretical approach of this book is exciting given how boldly you use it. What challenges did you encounter in deploying the “everyday groupness” approach and what benefits might derive from “grasping the nettle” of theory?

I am happy to hear your enthusiasm! My “everyday groupness” approach is designed to meet the twin challenges of groupism and reduction to particularity. First, historians of religion should not take transregional coherent groups for granted unless they are explicitly attested in the sources. Second, we should avoid restricting our analysis to the sole level of a single place and/or individual. Everyday groupness, in its interweaving of Lived Religion approaches and contemporary sociological insights, aims to balance a focus on particular actions with overarching questions about the social and cultural strategies of those we call “Manichaeans.” Anyone working with such a structured focus on everyday life faces the familiar challenge of a lack of source material, since lived religion and individual choice are not always entirely within our reach. However, the main advantage of engaging theory through the framework of everyday groupness lies in the potential comparability of human strategies of meaning making and group formation. My reflections on talking, choosing, performing and consuming (p. 293) provide a comparative framework for analyzing the social actions of other types of groupings and identities.

2. How much potential do you suspect there is for applying this study’s theoretical and methodological approaches to other communities? Can we begin to amass a body of studies that sketch the everyday groupness of other Mediterranean religious groups? Of groups outside of this period and this region? Or is Kellis unique in its ability to be analyzed in this manner, especially considering its wealth of documentary and material evidence with provenience?

Uniqueness is not a scholarly category. Kellis offers sources that are unavailable elsewhere, but there are many structural parallels in fourth-century Egypt, in late antiquity, and in the wider history of religion. These parallels clearly demonstrate the situatedness of religious behavior. While I recognize the challenge of gathering additional Manichaean source materials to support similar approaches, there is substantial evidence supporting the everyday religiosity of those we refer to as ancient Christians (see the Blake Leyerle’s Christians at Home), gnostics (forthcoming by Michael A. Williams), and individuals and families in other regions and periods (like in those Reformation-period houses analyzed by Tara Hamling). Historians of religion must detect the why and how of such mundane religious choices without homogenizing them in “-isms” and related categories (“domestic religion”).

3. What new directions do you believe this research opens up for the field of late antique religion? Personally, I find the study invites scholars working with “magic” to consider the everyday groupness of ritual practitioners, but I am curious what you see as the next step in this line of research.

The study of late antique religion has moved away from the traditional subtitles listing Christians, Jews, and pagans. Instead, the focus is now on strategies of individuals, families, ritual specialists, and literary elites in creating, establishing, and sustaining (visions of) religious lives. Jae H. Han has effectively juxtaposed Manichaean ritual and textual strategies with a variety of contemporaries, challenging our preconceived notions of “historical context.” With Han and others, I argue that we must compare social and culturally specific strategies of groupness, even if we are skeptical about the historicity of these religious “groups.” We should not get lost in the world of words but remain focused on people and the reality of their groupings on the ground. Scholarship on magic, in particular, must navigate ritual and textual remains of everyday groupness and the narrative impulse of capital-M Magic. If my book offers some historical context and critical impetus to such scholarships, it may truly be called a “success.”