Mandaeism

"Praised be Thou, my Lord, with a pure heart, (mšabit marai b-liba dakia)"

"When the fruit (was still) in the fruit,"

"Manda ḏ-Hiia went to Yuhana the Baptist and spoke to him:"

"Thereupon Šilmai, the master of the house, arose, went before Yathrun, the perfect man. He said to him:"

"I am the Life Who was from aforetime; (ana hu hiia ḏ-hun mn l-aqadmia)"

"Who brought me out of the house of the Life? (mn bit hiia man atian)"

"Naked they brought me into the world (arṭil l-alma atalḥ),"

"Again I feel the need and responsibility to defend our principal religious manuscript, the Ginza Rba, the Great Treasure of all Mandaeans. If you want the truth, the Ginza Rba is the backbone of our community. Without it the Mandaeans could never have survived the centuries-long atrocities, fanaticism and extremism of other nations; without it, I am sure, they would soon disappear in the near future. We should not forget that their successful resistance in the past was due to it. If you read the colophon of sheykh Salah Jabbar at the end of this book, you will see that there was a good tradition among the priesthood, namely: to look upon the Ganzibra amongst them, who has succeeded in copying a scroll of the Ginza Rba to the last word with his right hand (nasaka ḏ-kulhun ginzia b-iaminḥ), as a steadfast and reliable religious man. So they valued his knowledge and appreciated his work to a great extent and placed a crown of honour upon his head."

"The Crown is composed of four mysteries, which are the Wellspring and Datepalm, Fecundation, Glory and Light. It is constructed of seven mysteries which are the ears, the five hasfia of the head, and the hair, for it (the Crown?) dominateth three hundred and sixty mysteries — which are the Body, of its Right and its Left. And all took shape within them and settled therein and developed into a thousand mysteries."

"Now as to these two mysteries of ziwa and nhura (radiant light and diffused light):"

"The worlds of darkness and the worlds of light are Body and Counterpart,"

"So, when the Soul came from worlds of light and fell into the body,"

"Behold and learn that betwixt Darkness and Light"

"The body is a small universe, manifesting from the big universe, where the spirit (ruha) and soul (neshma) flow from the Creator and make the human who live in his prison (the physical body) in this world, until they get liberated through the knowledge of life."

"I went to the jordan, but not I alone,"

"I rose up from the jordan"

"Good is the Good for the good,"

"Šilmai hath baptised us with his baptism,"

"Her Sunday, her kušṭa and her alms"

"It is the voice of Manda d’Heyyi (qala ḏ-manda ḏ-hiia)"

"I saw my father, I saw him,"

"A treasure am I—Life’s Treasure! (simat ana, simat hiia)"

"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."

"The Mandaeans of Iraq are in terrible distress and therefore many of them left their towns and escaped because food had almost disappeared. There is no security and [civil war] skirmishing continues, leading to massacres and slaughter. The Iraqi ruler is called Saddam Hussein. Due to him, many Mandaeans have departed Iraq to settle in Australia, America and Europe. O ye ganzibras, disciples and Mandaeans. Some Iraqi disciples have [already] changed the faith (i.e., rituals and tradition) because they no longer baptize in the river."

"Sheikh Salah ... traveled there [to Australia] twice to perform rituals for the emigrated Mandaeans and to ready himself for his move. The sheikh’s travels astonished me. The risk! On his first air segment, Sheikh Salah ate nothing but stopped over in Malaysia to rest, eat, and purify himself. Coming from Ahwaz, he had entered the Tehran airport carrying two bottles of water from the river Karun, only to have one bottle rendered useless by a customs official who suspected liquor. The presence of Mandaean leaders, with their white clothes and dignified long beards, made a deep impression on the airport personnel, who whisked them through the electronic controls."

"Sh. Abdullah’s sons were not priests and did not aim for that office. One of them worked for the national Iran Oil Company. Twenty-three years later, on my second trip to the Mandaeans in Ahwaz, the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili told me that Sh. Abdullah — who had long since died — had appeared to him in a dream, asking why his son had tied up all the sheikh’s books and texts with rope and put them in a box. There, hidden and subject to decay, the texts were weeping. Sh. Choheili had then told the man’s sister about his dream, asking her to inquire on the matter with her brother. A suggestion was put forth: the next time I come visiting, I ought to bring money to pay the son, so that I could inspect the books to see if they are still all right."

"Sh. Abdullah’s sons were not priests and did not aim for that office. One of them worked for the national Iran Oil Company. Twenty-three years later, on my second trip to the Mandaeans in Ahwaz, the yalufa Sh. Salem Choheili told me that Sh. Abdullah — who had long since died — had appeared to him in a dream, asking why his son had tied up all the sheikh’s books and texts with rope and put them in a box. There, hidden and subject to decay, the texts were weeping. Sh. Choheili had then told the man’s sister about his dream, asking her to inquire on the matter with her brother. A suggestion was put forth: the next time I come visiting, I ought to bring money to pay the son, so that I could inspect the books to see if they are still all right."

"I begin to sense Sh. Salem’s status, the respect he enjoys in the community. Several days later, in fact, I ask him why he didn’t become a priest. He answers, “Then, I could not work with someone like you.” I understand his mediating role; he does not have to abide by the priestly, strict rules for interaction with outsiders."

"Indeed, modern methods, modern ways, nationalistic education, cinemas, cars, and all that make up the new Iraq, threaten the existence of this already dwindling community. In Government schools, boys conform to a pattern in dress, manners, and thought. Mandaean boys (including those of priestly caste) take to European dress and wear the sidāraḥ cap, and, when they return to their homes, neglect and slight the precepts of the priests. In the stress of school, or later business or office life, ceremonial ablutions are seldom performed, while sons of priests cut their hair and shave, and so become ineligible for priesthood (see Chapter IX). One by one, as priestly perquisites diminish and incomes lessen, the calling becomes unpopulär. If these conditions persist, the priesthood will gradually die out, and without priests to baptize, marry, and bury them, the Mandaeans as a sect must disappear. There is a further drain on the community in the shape of apostates. Ṣubbiyah girls marry outside the faith and adopt their husbands’ creeds, and youths forsake a religion so incompatible with worldly advantage and town life. In big towns the publicity of the river-side makes the prescribed ablutions and baptisms all but impossible."

"According to the last census (April 1932) the number of Ṣubba in Iraq is given as 4,805. I incline to think this an understatement, which will be revised when we get the results of the new census recently taken by the Iraqi Government. Under the mandate, communities like those at Amarah and Qal‘at Salih took on a new prosperity, and independent Iraq promises protection and tolerance. The danger to the flock lies within the fold rather than from wolves without."

"When I was about 7 years old, I remember Lady Drower’s visit to our village (Liṭlaṭa) in Kalaatsalah in the south of Iraq. All the people in the village celebrated and welcomed Lady Drower. And as a child we sat around her chair, which was woven of palm leaves. I remember seeing Lady Drower in the Mandaean temple, she was a beautiful, slim woman in her white dress and white hat. We saw her as an angel and studied her every move. She visited my uncle [Sheikh Negm bar Zahroon] from time to time."