THE OTHER GOD – Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy Yuri Stoyanov, Yale University Press, 2001. Paperback, 476pp, £8.99. ISBN: 0 300 08253 3

Erect a totem to the absolute Good, under the eye of a single beneficent sun, and you immediately produce a shadow. This image encapsulates the central problem of religious systems that regard a supreme divine Being as being responsible for all creation. How do you account for the shadow, the evil, the corruption, the cancer, the just plain bad?
    Stoyanov’s learned text strives to give an account of those religious movements and movements within religions which have explained the shadowy and terrible aspects of existence by removing responsibility from the god of Good and placing it solely on the metaphysical shoulders of powers whose will – however temporally circumscribed – is to supervise evil.
    The movements under consideration are as follows : the eventual relegation of the god Seth from primary status in ancient Egyptian religion to the dark side; the duality in Zoroastrian religion between the maker of the Good Religion, Ohrmazd, and the fount of strife, Ahriman; the growth in Judaism of the figure of the Satan from ‘Adversary’ (prosecuting counsel in the heavenly court) to full blown "prince of this world", permitted to exercise power over the children of earth for a millennial season, and on to the cosmoclastic Gnostics (so-called) who envisioned all creation to be negative, whose world challenging and Nature-denying gospel may have informed the beliefs of the Bogomils of the Balkans and the ‘Cathars’ of medieval Languedoc and elsewhere.
    An academic account of all these movements in 294 pages (there are 125 pages of Notes) is a tall order, but Stoyanov, stuffed with knowledge (and arguably too much knowledge for the space available) nonetheless brings the cup home without spilling too much. His account is most at home in the Balkans.
    Stoyanov is at pains to assert that contrary to some romancing, ‘Dualist’ religions or sects (the word derives from Thomas Hyde, as late as 1700) should not be seen as scions of an ideological genealogy, but as manifestations of a tendency in religious consciousness which will – given the nature of human life and the structure of the human mind – undoubtedly recur.
    The natural conclusion to be reached here is that human beings, when tied to the strict totem of the Good, are naturally heretical.
    Tobias Churton