In the West, Manicheism taught reverence for Jesus and was a serious competitor to early Christianity. A Manichee called Sebastianus almost became the emperor of Rome in the middle of the fourth century: if he had, world history would have been very different. Instead, Manicheism largely disappeared in the lands of the empire, as Christianity became the state religion of Rome and Roman authorities began to stamp out rival faiths. It survived longer among the Muslims, and Manichees even worked in the center of government—until the eighth-century caliph al-Mahdi decided that its adherents had become too powerful, and crucified large numbers of them. The Muslim scholar Ibn al-Nadim, who left the account of Mani’s life on which the above is based, knew a few Manichees in Baghdad in the tenth century, but they do not seem to have survived much longer than that under Islamic rule.
Manicheism nevertheless left a lasting mark on European civilization. There is some evidence that Christians felt the need to imitate the unsurpassed austerity of Mani’s holy men and women. Inspired by their belief that matter was permeated with evil and was a prison for the soul, the Manichee elect tried to thwart all bodily impulses—and Christian hermits followed suit, denying themselves sleep, eating only grass and fruit, and sometimes castrating themselves. Christian monasticism was particularly strong in Egypt, where Manichee monasteries had already been established. St. Augustine, a strong believer in original sin and an advocate of chastity, had been a Manichee and felt the need to combat its appeal. In short, modern Christian asceticism and monasticism may still owe a debt to Mani.
The Mandaeans are neither Manichees nor Mughtasila. Unlike both of those groups, they reject Jesus and believe that marrying and having children are moral obligations. But in other ways they have many things in common with the Manichees. They reject Abraham and believe that the body is a prison for the soul. They believe in an angel of light, Hibil Ziwa, who is always contending with darkness. Mandaeans believe themselves to be sparks of the cosmic light that have detached themselves from it and become trapped in a material home. When liberated by death from their bodily prisons, these sparks of light can ascend back to the great light from which they once came. So at a funeral, a Mandaean priest may address the soul of a dead man as follows: “You have left corruption behind and the stinking body in which you found yourself, the abode of the wicked, the place which is all sin, the World of Darkness, of hatred, envy, and strife, the abode in which the planets live, bringing sorrows and infirmities.” And the Mandaeans believe that the manner in which a priest eats a sacred meal at the funeral of a deceased member of the faith can make a difference to that person’s fate in the afterlife. All of these are ideas and practices that would have been familiar to the followers of that other Iraqi religion, Manicheism. The Mandaeans therefore are a link not only to the ancient history of the Middle East but to the history of Christianity as well.
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The Mandaeans probably number fewer than a hundred thousand in the whole world, and until 2003 most of them lived in Iraq. Not all of them are religious, as I discovered when I had my second encounter with a Mandaean—this time in a café in Manhattan, in 2009. Nadia Gattan was visiting the United States from Britain, which had given her asylum. Though she had left Iraq, she remained, as she put it, “hard-core Iraqi. We’re matter-of-fact people, not interested in glamour. I’m emotional, passionate, not like Europeans.” Brought up in a left-wing family in the Baghdad suburbs, Nadia saw herself as Iraqi first and Mandaean second. Her friends came from many different religions, and her parents were not especially observant. “I was taught nothing about religion,” she went on, “only moral rules: not to lie, not to steal, always to remember that I was a woman.”
The Mandaean holy books were not available for Nadia to read, as they were kept by priests in a chapel called the mandi. Her family did not pray, and in their home in Baghdad, which she described to me, it would have taken a sharp eye to spot anything that marked them as different from other middle-class, secular Iraqi families. It was an absence, not a presence, that would meet the eye at first. The walls were not decorated with the sacred writing of the Koran, nor any photograph of the great Ka’aba of Mecca with thousands of white-clad pilgrims circling it, nor (as the Shi’a Muslims tend to have) a portrait of Imam Hussein. On a closer look, a privileged visitor might have seen more evidence of Mandaeanism. A discreet picture of the darfesh hung on the wall of the living room. The family’s white baptismal robes and girdles, used for sacred immersions in the water of the Tigris River, were stored in a cupboard kept free from all impurity, ready for the rare occasions when they would be needed.
Nadia was brought up in Baghdad, but her family had only moved there in the 1970s. Before then they had lived in a small town in the south of Iraq called Suq ash-Shuyukh (literally, “the elders’ market”). Nadia’s father had been a teacher there, with a small gold shop as a side business. And it was when the family went back there for Mandaean festivals that Nadia really experienced her religion properly, spending time with her devout grandparents. In an old photo that Nadia showed me, I saw her grandfather: surrounded by children dressed in Western-style clothes, he was an old man with a long beard and a red-and-white keffiyeh. He ate meat only if it had been taken from an unblemished male animal that had been slaughtered while facing north and then bled dry, and only his wife was allowed to prepare it. She was next to him in the photograph: an equally devout woman, dressed all in black and wearing a veil over her hair. He was a blacksmith and she practiced traditional medicine, treating the eye diseases that local farmers would get during the rice harvest. When she visited these grandparents, Nadia was told that if she was menstruating, she had to sit at a separate table. This was the strict enforcement of a rule shared by both ancient Babylonians and Jews (in Babylon a man who touched a menstruating woman was impure for six days). With Nadia it came to an end. She refused, and eventually her grandparents stopped complaining that she was violating the rules.
This couple had arrived in Suq ash-Shuyukh in 1949. Before that they had lived out in the Iraqi Marshes, the vast maze of small islands, reedbeds, and shallow rivulets that bordered the town on its eastern side. The majority of the population consisted of fiercely independent Muslim tribes. The British traveler Wilfrid Thesiger lived there in the 1950s and described it as a “world complete in itself,” with minimal interference from the outside. He was fascinated by the tribes, among whom he found a curious mix of tolerance (accepting tomboy women who slept with other women, for example) and rigidity (the laws governing cleanliness were so strict that a man might see his son bleed to death and not touch him for fear of making himself ritually unclean).
Wilfrid Thesiger took this picture in 1950 of Arabs from the Iraqi Marshes using the belem, a type of boat dating back to Sumerian times, to move through the marshes, which were so isolated that he called them “a world in itself.” Photo courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum
Thesiger only briefly mentions the Mandaeans who lived alongside the Muslims in the marshes. He comments on their long beards, red-and-white checked head cloths, silver work, and habit of keeping ducks, which to local Muslims were unclean animals. Who knows: Thesiger might have met Nadia’s mother’s father, who worked for the leaders of the tribes fixing weapons for their hunting trips. “He could disassemble a gun and put it back together,” Nadia told me. Her father’s father made small, simple boats that the local people used for transport, as it was easier to move around the marshes on water than on land. These boats were called belem, a word with Sumerian roots.
One of the Mandaean festivals is called the White Days and commemorates the five days during which Mandaeans believe the world was created. During Nadia’s childhood this festival was in April (the Mandaean religious calendar contains no leap years, so its festivals move very slightly from one solar year to the next), and Nadia’s parents took her and her brother back to their hometown to celebrate with their extended family. Nadia described to me the tow
n’s small houses, some the same shade of brown as the fields and the rivers, others made of reeds. The town’s Mandaeans all lived together in one district. The children played in the road and went from one house to another to ask for food or sweets. If they were lucky, they might be given the Mandaean specialty, wild mallard duck stuffed with cinnamon and cardamom, chopped onions, nuts, and sultanas, and boiled with dried limes and turmeric. To keep the children in line, the adults warned them that if they misbehaved, the wild horsemen of the desert would seize them and carry them off.
The White Days are a joyful festival, but the Mandaean New Year is a feast day with a more frightening side to it. Evil is said to walk the earth for thirty-six hours in the form of a female spirit called Ruha. In line with tradition, Nadia’s parents tried to make her stay indoors at this time, but without success. “I didn’t take it seriously,” she told me. “But I was told Ruha might take the form of a wasp, a bee, a tree, or a bird and would try to harm me. Or I might be hit by a car. It was an unlucky time to be outside.” Even in her secular household, this particular taboo still had some force.
A Mandaean man pictured by Wilfrid Thesiger in the Iraqi Marshes, applying pitch to a boat—just as Nadia’s grandfather once did. Photo courtesy Pitt Rivers Museum
In addition to a happy festival and a frightening one, the Mandaeans have a sad one, too. On the same day that Shi’a Muslims mark Ashura—the day of mourning for the death of the Prophet’s grandson Hussein and their own failure to come to his aid—the Mandaeans mourn as well, preparing a special meal of pearl barley soup, called abul harith. Sometimes they even join the Shi’a processions. They have various explanations for what exactly it is that they are remembering that day—“It’s in memory of a very stressful time,” was all that Nadia knew—but some Mandaeans believe that it commemorates the drowning of Pharaoh’s soldiers in the Red Sea. While Jews regard this incident as cause for celebration, the Mandaeans—for some reason that they themselves do not know—have come to empathize with the Egyptians. (Such days of mourning were once common across the Middle East. The Babylonians used to berate themselves once a year over their abandonment of the body of a pagan prophet, an act that they believed had caused the Great Flood.)
Nadia and her family also turned up with the rest of the community to give moral support to Mandaean men who were trying to enter the priesthood. The initiation ceremony is an arduous process. An aspirant must spend seven days in a reed hut without food or sleep. This is when he needs the support of the community: some of them stand outside the hut beating drums and chanting to make sure he stays awake, and women ululate. A ganzibra, the equivalent of a Mandaean bishop, stays with the aspirant and carves twenty-one words of power with his olivewood staff on the earthen floor of the hut: they are too secret to be said out loud, and when they have been learned the ganzibra sweeps over the dust to ensure that nobody else can read them. To complete the initiation the aspirant must eat a ritual meal, following an intricate and precise set of instructions. From then on, he must grow his beard long and keep strict rules of purity.
Nadia (far right) prepares for her baptism in Baghdad in 1991. She is veiled because of the holiness of the occasion, and carries a myrtle sprig. Behind the group, a picture shows a baptism being performed. Photo courtesy Nadia Gattan
But there is a higher level of holiness and knowledge, available only to those who, like Sheikh Sattar, had been appointed to the rank of ganzibra. This is an appointment that in the Mandaean tradition no living man can confer. A messenger must be sent into the afterlife to seek permission for it. The would-be ganzibra finds a person on the verge of death and stows a bottle of holy oil in the pocket of the garment adorned with gold and silver that dying Mandaeans are obliged to wear. “I have brought it to you,” the priest must say, “and you bear it to Abatur.” The ritual is complete after the messenger dies and his soul reaches Abatur, the judge of the dead, from whom he receives confirmation of the aspiring ganzibra’s request.
Only men can enter the Mandaean priesthood, and only men can marry non-Mandaeans and still pass on the religion to their children. A woman who marries out is debarred from baptism and cannot have her children baptized. Nadia thought that this inequality between the sexes was not the original spirit of Mandaeanism. For corroboration she looked back to the Mandaean scriptures: instead of Eve being made from Adam’s rib, as is told in the Book of Genesis, the Mandaean version says that both were made together. “I am sure there was a time,” she told me, “when Mandaean women could be priests, not just men.” She was right: in the Drasa da Yehia, a Jewish woman converts to Mandaeanism and becomes a priest. (Similarly, in ancient Babylon women could serve as priests. For that matter, women occasionally achieved secular positions of power in the ancient Middle East. The ancient Persian navy had a female admiral—Artemisia, back in the fifth century bc—and in the third century ad Palmyra had a powerful queen, Zenobia.)
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The most important Mandaean ceremony of all is baptism. One view of the Mandaeans has it that they adopted this practice from Jewish followers of John the Baptist fleeing eastward from Roman persecution; another has it that immersion in the waters of the river Tigris might have been an ancient practice in Iraq itself, as it was in Egypt. Certainly the traditions attached to the ceremony are distinctively Mandaean. As priests had done for the children of Iraq in pre-Christian times, a priest read the stars when Nadia was born and used them to devise a horoscope for her. And when she reached the age of seventeen, another priest in Baghdad used that horoscope to choose a secret name for her, called a milwasha. As she crouched in the waters of the Tigris, a girdle around her waist, a ring of myrtle leaves on her finger, and a white garment enveloping her head and body, he immersed her in the water three times, signed her forehead with water three times, made her swallow the river water three times, crowned her with myrtle, prayed over her, and named her. “It will be my name in religion,” she told me, “for as long as I live and beyond.”
Four aspects of that ceremony would have been familiar to any Babylonian of the first millennium bc. The first was the language in which it was performed. I got to see this language when I went to examine Mandaean holy books kept at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. Because of the books’ fragility, it took some persuasion before the staff would allow me to look through one of them. As I turned its pages I reflected that the Mandaean scribe who had copied it out with great care in the seventeenth century, spacing his lines out and crafting each calligraphic stroke, would have been horrified to see me reading it. Only Mandaean initiates into the priesthood were meant to be shown these texts.
The scribe would have been still more appalled by the volume’s leather cover, embossed with a fleur-de-lis, which the French royal librarian had put on the book when it entered the collection of King Louis XVI. Mandaean priests never used animal products such as leather to bind their books—a relic, some scholars say, of a time when their religion used to forbid meat altogether. They used calico as a binding material, or they engraved the pages on wood or even etched them onto lead with acid. The sharp-angled words that sloped from right to left across the page, black ink on the thick fibrous paper, were in a strange script: to my untutored eye it was similar to Arabic but with some extra letters and fewer of the dots that mark the Arabic alphabet. This was a specifically Mandaean dialect of Aramaic, the language of Iraq before Arabic.
Early Muslim writers, knowing that Aramaic had preceded their own language, Arabic, assumed that Aramaic was as old as the world itself and that Adam had spoken it after the Fall. In fact, when Babylon first emerged four thousand years ago, its official language was Sumerian, which was gradually displaced by a language called Akkadian—we can tell that for some time Akkadian was regarded as something like slang, because a four-thousand-year-old comic poem complains about what happened when the poet, as a boy, was caught speaking Akkadian at school (as well as breaking every other rule): “Th
e door monitor said, ‘Why did you go out without my say-so?’ He beat me. The jug monitor, ‘Why did you take water without my say-so?’ He beat me. The Sumerian monitor, ‘You spoke in Akkadian!’ He beat me.” Only in the last centuries of Babylon’s existence did Aramaic become the city’s everyday language. A form of Aramaic is also spoken by Mandaeans in Iran, and a closely related language, with a distinct but similar script, is still in use among Christians in northern Iraq.
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Nadia’s religious name was given to her after her priest’s careful study of the stars—the second Mandaean inheritance from the Babylonians, who were dedicated astronomers. It was the Babylonians who first divided the sky into the twelve signs of the zodiac, choosing twelve to match the number of cycles of the moon in every year. Such diligent watchers of the skies saw early on—certainly by 1500 bc—that some stars behaved differently than others. They were brighter and moved through the sky in a different way. The observers called these lu-bat, meaning “wandering sheep.” The term was translated into Greek as aster planetes, meaning “wandering star,” which in turn gave us our word planet.
Babylonian astronomers identified five planets—Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (not Uranus and Neptune, which were invisible to the naked eye). They put the sun and moon in this group as well—making seven—and named each one after a god, such as Marduk, Ishtar, and Nebu. They then invented the week as a period of seven days, one for every planet god. (Rather neatly, seven days made up a quarter of a moon cycle, too.) We have inherited from the Babylonians the habit of naming the planets and the days of the week after gods: Mercury, Venus, Pluto; Saturday for Saturn, Thursday for Thor, Sunday and Monday for the sun and moon. For the Babylonians, one day in seven was an evil day, when activity should be avoided—which may have been the origin of the Sabbath day adopted by Judaism.
Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: Journeys Into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East Page 5
