"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."