Within Manichaean teaching, salvation was understood as the gradual liberation of divine Light from its imprisonment in matter and darkness. Human beings were seen as composites of a spiritual, luminous soul and a material, dark body, the result of a primordial conflict between the realms of Light and Darkness. To be saved was to free the soul’s light-particles from this mixture so that they might return to their original, transcendent source. This process required gnosis, a deep recognition of one’s true nature as belonging to the realm of Light, rather than to the world of corruptible matter. Ethical and ascetic discipline served this insight, preventing further entanglement of Light in the material order and actively assisting its release.

Manichaean practice distinguished between the Elect and the Hearers, each playing a different role in this drama of liberation. The Elect, bound to rigorous purity—celibacy, strict diet, non-violence, and ritual observances—were regarded as living instruments for freeing Light from the world, even through such everyday acts as carefully regulated eating. Hearers, while less strictly bound, supported the Elect and observed a moderated discipline, hoping over time to advance spiritually. In this way, the community as a whole participated in a vast, cosmic work: the gradual separation of Light from Darkness and the restoration of the divine order.

The fate of the soul after death was thought to mirror the degree of purification achieved in life. Souls that had been largely purified—especially those of the Elect who had lived in great purity—ascended after death through the higher realms toward the domain of Light, ultimately joining the divine world and no longer returning to material existence. Souls that were only partially purified underwent judgment and might enter further cycles of transmigration, being reborn into new bodies so that remaining Light could be refined. Those heavily burdened by attachment to darkness and ignorance remained bound to the material cosmos, continuing in further incarnations or imprisonment in matter until their Light could be more fully released.

All of this was set within a vast eschatological vision in which the scattered Light, liberated through countless lives and practices, would eventually be gathered back to the Father of Greatness. When this process reached its fulfillment, the worlds of Light and Darkness would be definitively separated, and the redeemed Light would dwell eternally in the transcendent realm. Darkness and the residue of unrecovered matter would remain confined and cut off from the divine. Salvation, therefore, was never merely an individual affair, but part of a cosmic restoration in which every soul’s journey contributed to the final disentangling of Light from the bonds of the material world.