All this Gnostic teaching was summed up in the gospel of the Persian Mani, who, when but a young man of twenty-six, seems first to have proclaimed in the streets and bazaars of Seleucia-Ctesiphon his supposed message on Sunday, 20 March, 242, the coronation festival of Shapur I. He did not meet with immediate success in his own country, but here and there his ideas took deep root. In 276-277, however, he was seized and crucified by the grandson of Shapur, Bahram I, his disciples being relentlessly pursued. Whenever Manichees were discovered they were brought to swift justice, executed, held up to universal hatred and contempt. They were considered by Moslems as not merely Unbelievers, the followers of a false impostor, but unnatural and unsocial, a menace to the State. It was for no light cause that the Manichee was loathed and abhorred both by faithful Christian and by those who proclaimed Mohammed as the true prophet of Allah. But later Manichæism spread in every direction to an extraordinary degree, which may perhaps be accounted for by the fact that it is in some sense a synthesis of the Gnostic philosophies, the theory of two eternal principles, good and evil, being especially emphasized. Moreover, the historical Jesus, “the Jewish Messias, whom the Jews crucified,” was “a devil, who was justly punished for interfering in the work of the Æon Jesus,” who was neither born nor suffered death. As time went on, the elaborate cosmogony of Mani disappeared, but the idea that the Christ must be repudiated remained. And logically, then, worship is due to the enemy of Christ, and a sub-sect, the Messalians or Euchites, taught that divine honours must be paid to Satan, who is further to be propitiated by means of every possible outrage done to Christ. This, of course, is plain and simple Satanism openly avowed. Carpocrates even went so far as to aggravate the teaching of the Cainites, for he made the performance of every species of sin forbidden in the Old Testament a solemn duty, since this was the completest mode of showing defiance to the Evil Creator and Ruler of the World. This doctrine was wholly that of mediæval witches, and is flaunted by modern Satanists. Although the Manichees affected the greatest purity, it is quite certain that not unchastity but the act of generation alone was opposed to their views; secretly they practised the most hideous obscenities.[51] The Messalians in particular, vaunted a treatise _Asceticus_, which was condemned by the Third General Council of Ephesus (431) as “that filthy book of this heresy,” and in Armenia, in the fifth century, special edicts were passed to restrain their immoralities, so that their very name became the equivalent for “lewdness.” The Messalians survived unto the Middle Ages as Bogomiles.