Ascetic Gnostic sects

Manichaeism (; in ; ) was a major world religion founded in the third century CE by the Parthian Iranian prophet Mani (216–274) in the Sasanian Empire. It taught an elaborate dualistic cosmology describing the struggle between a good spiritual world of light, and an evil material world of darkness. Through an ongoing process in human history, light is gradually removed from the world of matter and returned to the world of the divine.

Bogomilism (; ; ) was a Christian neo-Gnostic, dualist sect founded in the First Bulgarian Empire by the priest Bogomil during the reign of Tsar Peter I in the 10th century. It most likely arose in the region of Kutmichevitsa, today part of the region of Macedonia.

The Encratites ("self-controlled") were an ascetic 2nd-century sect of Christians who forbade marriage and counselled abstinence from meat. Eusebius says that Tatian was the author of this heresy. It has been supposed that it was these Gnostic Encratites who were chastised in the epistle of 1 Timothy (4:1–4).