manichaeism: a religion founded by Manes in the third century; a synthesis of Zoroastrian dualism between light and dark and Babylonian folklore and Buddhist ethics and superficial elements of Christianity; spread widely in the Roman Empire but had largely died out by 1000
religion: a strong belief in a supernatural power or powers that control human destiny
subject: (grammar) one of the two main constituents of a sentence; the grammatical constituent about which something is predicated