The founder of the Manichean religion was the apostle Mani (216-76 C.E.), who was raised in Southern Mesopotamia in a Jewish-Christian baptist sect called the "Elkesaites." From age 12, Mani began to have visions. Eventually, his visionary experiences led to his being expelled from the sect, and he then founded his own religion, sending out missions to Iran, India, Syria and Egypt. Late in his life, he fell out of royal favor and was sent to prison, where he died. He wrote detailed scriptures so that his doctrines would be preserved forever, even going so far as to invent a new script to write them in, but over time nearly all of these scriptures have been lost. Because of this it is near impossible to reconstruct the original theology. What we do know is that he drew on other world religions to interpret himself as the culminating revelatory intermediary for Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Buddhism. We also know that the Manichean religion taught an extremely complicated system of gnostic dualism centered around a cosmological myth about the war between the originally pristine realms of light and darkness. The physical universe was created as a trick to liberate the captive sparks of light in living beings from the realm of darkness. Manichaeism influenced the Cathar religion.