We have to add a few words about the antithesis of light and darkness that is so constant a feature in this account. Its symbolism meets us everywhere in gnostic literature, but for reasons we shall discuss later its most emphatic and doctrinally important use is to be found in what we shall call the Iranian strain of Gnosticism, which is also one component of Mandaean thought. Most of the following examples are taken from this area and therefore imply the Iranian version of gnostic dualism. Irrespective of the theoretical context, however, the symbolism reflects a universal gnostic attitude. The first alien Life is the “King of Light,” whose world is “a world of splendor and of light without darkness,” “a world of mildness without rebellion, a world of righteousness without turbulence, a world of eternal life without decay and death, a world of goodness without evil. . . . A pure world unmixed with ill” (G 10). Opposed to it is the “world of darkness, utterly full of evil, . . . full of devouring fire . . . full of falsehood and deceit. . . . A world of turbulence without steadfastness, a world of darkness without light . . . a world of death without eternal life, a world in which the good things perish and plans come to naught” (G 14). Mani, who most completely adopted the Iranian version of dualism, commences his doctrine of origins, as reported in the Fihrist, an Arabic source, as follows: “Two beings were at the beginning of the world, the one Light, the other Darkness.” On this assumption the existing world, “this” world, is a mixture of light and darkness, yet with a preponderance of darkness: its main substance is darkness, its foreign admixture, light. In the given state of things, the duality of darkness and light coincides with that of “this world” and “the other world,” since darkness has embodied its whole essence and power in this world, which now therefore is the world of darkness.8 The equation “world (cosmos) = darkness” is in fact independent of and more basic than the particular theory of origins just exemplified, and as an expression of the given condition admits of widely divergent types of derivation, as we shall see later. The equation as such is symbolically valid for Gnosticism in general. In the Hermetic Corpus we find the exhortation, “Turn ye away from the dark light” (C.H. I. 28), where the paradoxical combination drives home the point that even the light so called in this world is in truth darkness. “For the cosmos is the fulness of evil, God the fulness of good” (C.H. VI. 4); and as “darkness” and “evil,” so is “death” a symbol of the world as such. “He who is born of the mother is brought forth into death and the cosmos: he who is reborn of Christ is transported into life and the Eight [i.e., removed from the power of the Seven]” (Exc. Theod. 80. 1). Thus we understand the Hermetic statement quoted in Macrobius   (In somn. Scip. I. 11) that the soul “through as many deaths as she passes spheres descends to what on earth is called life.” [Hans Jonas  ]