Mandaeism is the religion of the Mandaeans, a community of southern Iraq and south-western Iran whose rituals turn on flowing water and whose greatest teacher is John the Baptist, known to them as Yahya Yuhana and to the Qur’an as Yaḥyā ibn Zakariyyā (يحيى بن زكريا, John son of Zechariah). Perhaps sixty to seventy thousand Mandaeans remain, most of them now in diaspora. It is the smallest of the four traditions treated here, and the oldest surviving Gnostic religion in the world.
Origins
Mandaean tradition traces the religion to Adam, who is held to have received the first revelation. The community’s own account of its history, preserved in a scroll copied and recopied by its priests, describes a departure from Jerusalem: sixty thousand Nasoraeans, it says, entered the Median hills, where they were free of foreign rule and built the cult huts they call bimandia, under a king the text names Ardban, the Artabanus of the Parthian line.1 Copyists’ colophons in the scriptures allow scholars to trace an unbroken chain of transmission to the second or third century, one of the longest attested for any religious literature. Scholars divide over whether the origins lie in Palestine, as the community’s own histories say, or in Mesopotamia itself.
Belief
The core doctrine is called nāṣerutā, and it is knowledge in the strict sense: the scrolls that carry it are handed to priests at ordination and withheld from laypeople and outsiders, which is why the community long resisted showing them to scholars.2 At its centre stands Adam Kasia, the hidden or secret Adam, the archetype of humanity of which each person is a counterpart, and whose gradual purification the rites enact.3
Mandaeism is monotheist and Gnostic together. God is called Hayyi Rabbi, the Great Life, the source of the World of Light, and the created world stands between that world and the World of Darkness. The soul belongs to the world of light and is exiled in the body; salvation lies in the knowledge, nāṣerutā, transmitted through ritual and priesthood, by which the soul returns to its origin. Messengers of light, chief among them Manda d-Hayyi, descend to teach that knowledge.
The prophets
The prophetic line runs Adam, Abel, Seth, Enosh, Noah, Shem and Aram, and it closes with John the Baptist, whom Mandaeans regard as the greatest and the last. These are figures of the Hebrew Bible, and they place the community in the same prophetic lineage from which the other three traditions draw.
The community parts from the others at Abraham. Mandaean teaching does not accept Abraham, Moses, Jesus or Muhammad as prophets, and reads Jesus as one who altered what John had taught him. Some Mandaean texts describe Abraham and Jesus as having once been priests of the community who broke from it. The site notes this plainly: Mandaeans belong to the Abrahamic family by descent, history and the prophets they share, and they do not accept the figure the family is named after.
The Sabians of the Qur’an
The Qur’an names the Ṣābiʾūn (الصابئون, the Sabians) three times, in each case beside the Jews and the Christians as communities that receive God’s reward if they believe in God and the last day and do right.4 The identity of that community has been discussed by Muslim scholars since the earliest period.
The community’s own scroll records the meeting. It tells how one Anush son of Danqa came before the Arab ruler and explained the faith of his people, with the result that the Muslims were not permitted to harm the Nasoraeans living under that government.5 In the form the account takes elsewhere, Anush presented the Ginza Rabba to the Muslim authorities and named John the Baptist as the chief prophet of his community. The Mandaeans were recognised as the Sabians of the Qur’an, and so as ahl al-kitāb (أهل الكتاب, people of the book), a standing that carried protection, the right to their own law, and the survival of the community under Muslim rule for fourteen centuries. That identification has held to the present day, and it is the reason a small Gnostic community of late antiquity still exists.
Mandaean practice shows why the identification was accepted so readily. The community has a profession of faith, almsgiving, fasting, prayer at set times of day, washing before prayer, a day of judgement, and an opening formula answering to the basmalah. The differences are as plain: baptism in flowing water is repeated throughout life, the priesthood is hereditary, and the cosmology is dualist in a way that Islam is not.
Scripture
| Name | In Mandaic | What it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Ginza Rabba | The Great Treasure | The principal scripture, in two parts: the Right Ginza on theology, creation and history, the Left Ginza on the soul’s ascent |
| Qolasta | The Collection | The canonical prayer book, used in baptism and the rites for the dead |
| The Book of John | Drasha d-Yahya | The teachings of John the Baptist, including his exchanges with Jesus |
| The Thousand and Twelve Questions | Alf Trisar Shuialia | A priestly commentary on ritual |
The scriptures are written in Mandaic, an eastern Aramaic dialect close to the Aramaic of the Babylonian Talmud, and preserved in its own script. The language survives in liturgy and, among some families in Iran, in speech.
Practice
- The mandi, the sacred enclosure holding the pool and the cult hut, where the rites are performed.6
- Masbuta, baptism in flowing water, repeated on Sundays and at festivals, and required at marriage and after childbirth. Still water will not serve: the rite needs a river, called yardna after the Jordan.
- Prayer three times a day, facing north, the direction of the World of Light.
- The darfash, the banner of olive wood and white silk that stands beside the water at every rite. The symbol at the head of this page is that banner, and it is the emblem of the community.
- A hereditary priesthood, whose ranks run from the tarmida, the priest, to the ganzibra, the head priest, and whose members alone may copy the scriptures and conduct the rites.7
- Strict pacifism: Mandaean law forbids killing and the carrying of weapons.
The community today
The Mandaeans lived for centuries in the marshes and river towns of southern Iraq and Khuzestan in Iran. War, the draining of the marshes and the violence that followed 2003 scattered them, and the majority now live in Australia, Sweden, the United States and elsewhere. A community that numbered tens of thousands in Iraq alone is now counted in the low tens of thousands worldwide, which places it among the most endangered religious traditions in the world.
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Notes
- E. S. Drower, ed. and tr., The Haran Gawaita and the Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1953), p. 3. ↩
- E. S. Drower, The Secret Adam: A Study of Nasoraean Gnosis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), pp. ix-x. ↩
- Ibid., pp. 21-33. ↩
- Qur’an 2:62; 5:69; 22:17. ↩
- E. S. Drower, ed. and tr., The Haran Gawaita and the Baptism of Hibil-Ziwa (Vatican City: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, 1953), pp. 15-16. ↩
- E. S. Drower, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937), p. xiv. ↩
- Ibid., pp. xiii-xiv. ↩