Mandaeism

"The Mandaean is uniquely set apart from ‘the believer’ through Gnosis — the direct knowledge of the ethereal world. His or her ‘belief’ is conversely based on experience and examination of their connection and union with the heavenly forces."

"The sheer variety of genres of Mandaean literature is astonishing for a Gnostic religion, and the Nag Hammadi Library from Egypt pales in comparison. It is possible that the Mandaeans invented Gnosticism. Whatever the case, their non-Christian character probably rescued them from being declared heretical and the literature has survived along with the people."

"When the parson, later Professor of Theology, who once prepared me and others for confirmation, suggested that I should read theology and become a clergyman, I agreed. Nothing have I regretted so much as that. By degrees the strong powers of imagination of the founders of religion together with the monstrous gullibility of their adherents, even and not least in Christendom, made me more and more confused. Finally, the mere thought of the ordination vow and an ecclesiastical career disgusted me. At last I exchanged my study of the Christian pieces of fiction for an inquiry into another wealth of exuberant imaginativeness, perhaps the most abundant of all, that of the writings of a religious community without any founder, and could not then foresee that I should be interested in the problems of these writings all my life."

"Mandaic literature, as it reaches us today, therefore, may represent a range of closely related local movements that existed in the south of late Sasanian and early Arab Iraq, distilled, studied, authorized, and preserved in a continuous tradition that has been as strong or as fragile at any given time as the priesthood. It is an amazing survival. But what comes down to us is Mandaean only by virtue of a long and changing process of defining and redefining the criteria of Mandaean ritual, authority, membership, and purity. We are unlikely ever to know many individual details of this process. What has been preserved as Mandaeism probably represents a synthesis of various local origins. The Mandaean religion does preserve many valuable ancient artefacts, but it can never have been a static and unchanging tradition. One must study their materials with this fact foremost in mind."

"In conclusion, we must acknowledge that the texts before us are the product of a living and evolving tradition, composed, redacted, transmitted, and continuously interpreted and re-interpreted, across countless unknown generations. Much like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, what we call “Mandaeism” is at all times and in all places the dynamic expression of individuals and communities of practice—including, one might add, the community of scholars who study them. All our efforts at analyzing religions rely as much upon the texts before us as upon our own “imaginative acts of comparison and generalization,” and if I have dwelled more upon the latter than the former in these concluding remarks, it is only because a healthy degree of skepticism towards and self-awareness of these analytical acts should be the foremost object of any historian of these religions. Texts such as the Book of John are not isolated epigraphic remains, any more than Mandaeans are fossils, and therefore any approach that attempts to collapse the former into a single chronotope or privilege a specific social, religious, and historical moment out of the entire span of Mandaean history is inherently defective. Such approaches are as misguided and limited as the application of palaeontological methodology to living wildlife communities would be."

"It would not be much of an exaggeration to claim that scholars of Late Antiquity in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East have consigned Mandaeans to an oubliette for much of the past century, on the grounds that they are too cryptic, too late, too weird, and far too disassociated from the other peoples who have primarily served as the subjects for their own research. I hope to have demonstrated we have done ourselves and our subjects a disservice by failing to integrate a rich and valuable source into our own narratives of the history of these times and places, which are therefore even more deficient and incomplete for this oversight. Mandaic is certainly not part of the standard repertoire of scholars working upon Late Antiquity, and not even of those working upon the Sasanian Empire, and while it is probably unreasonable to expect that it might someday join Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Persian among the other languages within that repertoire, I am nonetheless convinced that Mandaean texts such as this one [the Book of Kings] will prove indispensable for elucidating some of the mysteries that attend the study of this period and region."

"To this day, Mandaeism remains a kind of blank canvas upon which we project our own interests, even as we struggle to determine whether they are relevant to the questions we ask of them. In keeping with the truism that we seldom see things as they are but rather as we are. we are seldom disappointed in this regard. Assyriologists often perceive them as survivals of the ancient Mesopotamian cults, Iranists frequently characterize them as an Iranian religion in Semitic dress, and Jews, Christians, Muslims, and their scholars generally discover aspects of themselves within them. If Mandaeans have one superpower, it is their remarkable capacity to reflect the subjectivity of their scholarly interlocutors back upon us. Thus, the copious literature on Mandaeans can simultaneously reflect their status as ancient Mesopotamian pagans, Johannine Baptists, pre-, proto-, and post-Manichaeans, Jewish-Christian Nazoreans, post-Islamic Sabians, and of course Gnostics, however we may define them."

"From the start, these preconceptions and expectations have set in motion a perennial cycle of fascination and disappointment with Mandaeans, whose scholarly representations sometimes bear little relation to them. Most of the scholarship on Mandaeans analyses their history and literature exclusively as an adjunct to those of other communities, and generally after it has been broken down into its constituent parts by means of philology. The consequence is that Mandaeism is something like the elephant in the parable of the blind men and an elephant, but only after it has been butchered, processed, and repurposed for the benefit of a broader consumer base: here are some piano keys carved from its teeth, there is a handbag stitched together from its skin, here is a hairbrush made from the hair of its tail, there is a drum covered with the skin of its ear, here is a rubbish bin made from its foot. More than anything else, this cycle of fascination and disappointment is driven by the manifest futility of trying to reconstruct anything like an elephant from the products of these processes."

"Mandaeism, of course, is not merely a scholarly construct, cobbled together from a few spare texts discovered in an archive somewhere, but the body of practices and the belief system of some tens of thousands of souls across Iraq, Iran, and a global diaspora, a living faith community—with all that that entails in its fractal complexity. Therefore, Mandaeans and Mandaean texts alike often tax our abilities to discuss them in a nuanced manner that does justice to this complexity, particularly in light of the fact that nearly all of us who address their textual production do so solely in relation to the works of these other adjacent communities, at wildly different times and in different places, from the first millennium BCE to the early centuries of the Islamic era, and from Palestine to Iran."