The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy by Yuri Stoyanov.
London: Yale Nota Bene, Yale Univ. Press, 2000, 476 + xiii pp., ISBN 0-300-08253-3 (pbk)

Stoyanov begins his discussion with an excellent summary of the different implications of the term, 'dualism'. Apart from a bizarre oversight on the editor's part, allowing 'Deckart' to stand for 'Descartes', the discussion provides a stimulating introduction to the issue at hand. He makes the critical point that a properly dualistic religion is one in which there are two coexisting principles of good and evil rather than a single God overseeing a field in which the forces of the two may be engaged in mortal combat.

Indeed, it might be said that this dualism of good and evil grows out of the earliest impulses to levy a moral code on mankind. The primal religious state of man is to feel at the mercy of arbitrary forces, whether governed by capricious gods to be placated or. as with the ancient Greeks and their doctine of ananke and moira, subject to an implacable destiny. It is only with the impact of Persian religion and Zoroaster's initiative that the concept of a moral or ethical code enters human consciousness.

Stoyanov begins his chapter on Mithra with a critical analysis of the Roman writer Plutarch's slanted view of the cult that had developed in the name of this deity. In this chapter in particular, as in the book as a whole, the author demonstrates the way the virus of dualism poisoned not only the Mazdean faith, whose clergy misguidedly spawned it, but also other religious movements that came into contact with it.

Where both Zoroaster and Christ had launched their teachings in the spirit of love and Divine Unity, their followers proved to be the worst enemies of their respective faiths by twisting their doctrines into vehicles for strife, hatred, prejudice and torture, appealing to humankind's most atavistic motivations.

Stoyanov fills in the gaps that the conventional teaching of Western religious history has left out, explaining why such a hateful aberration has occurred in what at the outset purported to be the very house of love.

As Stoyanov's own evidence indicates, there is much more to the so-called 'dualist heresies", than the term borrowed from their Christian detractors would indicate.

As to whether the so-called 'Gnostic' cults were fundamentally or predominantly dualist. is a complex question. There is no doubt that when the prophet Mani arose in the third century CE, he espoused a thoroughgoing and incontrovertible dualism, starkly opposing the 'evil' of the material world, created by a demiurge, to the 'good' of the spiritual domain, the handiwork of the 'good God'.

The difficulty with Stoyanov lies not in his presentation but with the implications of his thesis. He is all too ready-albeit more by implication than deliberate intention-to accept the demonization of the sects opposed by the heresiologists. lumping them all together, the benign and the noxious, in one all-embracing condemnation.

It is unfortunate that Stoyanov did not provide the fresh breeze of an unprejudiced viewpoint in his otherwise brilliant, wide-ranging, thorough and fascinating study.

The book is divided into six sections, each divided into a number of chapters, all in chronological succession, charting the course of development of the so-called dualist religions, many of which, far from painting the negative picture of the world for which the Church condemned them, followed in the spirit of Zoroaster in welcoming the world as a place of spiritual growth, leading to ultimate salvation. Stoyanov's epilogue on the 'War of Labels' deals with this matter to a certain extent-Overall. the work is a tremendous achievement in the accumulation and assessment of source material. It is well furnished with maps and copious notes, along with a very fine bibliography, modestly called 'select' but actually quite comprehensive, and a good index. Both as an academic work and as an accessibly readable text, it is highly recommended-given the aforementioned limitations. It may be hoped that Stoyanov will continue his unique research and trace it right back to the source in Zoroaster's teachings, which have served as a positive force without which the doctrines of Christianity, Islam and the Pythagorean moral revolution in Greece could never have develped.