A Plea
for the Mandaeans
|
Let there
be light, let there be light! Let there be the light of the Great First
Life!
|
Ginza Rba
|
The
ancient historian Josephus (37 – 96/100
AD.) introduces John the Baptist as
“a good man, who commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to
righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so
receive
baptism; not only for washing away their sins, but for the purification
of the
body; since the soul is already purified by righteousness,” and he continues: “Herod
Antipas feared
the great influence John had over the people, even that he might raise
a
rebellion, for the crowds seemed ready to do anything he should advise.
So
Herod thought to prevent any mischief John might cause before it would
be too
late. John was imprisoned in the fortress of Macherus and put to death” (Josephus, Antiquities VIII, 5:2). According to
the evangelist Luke, the formula spoken on such a baptism was the
announcement: “You are my Son, today I have begotten you” (Lk.
3:22), possibly the exact words when the Baptist held
somebody’s head under water.
John
the Baptist’s followers
are still among us. The existence of the Mandaeans, as well as the
tradition of
their holy books – the Ginza
and the Qolasta – can
be traced back to the 2nd century AD. in
uninterrupted continuity according to the colophons of the copyists.
All this
time, the Mandaeans have remained fiercely independent. They reject
Jesus as a
false prophet, and with him Abraham, Moses and, of course, Mohammed.
John the Baptist is venerated merely as a teacher. For a Mandaean, God
revealed himself to Adam, the first of men, and since then we know all
we need to know.
The
Mandaeans believe in a supreme entity from which the entire creation
has poured out, first into an elaborate hierarchy of guiding and
sometimes misguiding agents like the demiurge and the archons. In the
process the world has assumed a dual aspect: light and darkness, left
and right, the polarity of the sexes. Immaterial archetypes provide the
metaphysical cookie-cutter to lick matter into shape; an idea borrowed
from Plato. The stars in the sky are places of detention and refuge in
the hereafter. The human soul is a spark split from the supreme spirit
that has lost its way in the material world. In order to aid the soul’s
rebirth and return to the source of origin, the faithful is introduced
to the “mysteries,” the Mandaean sacraments. Obviously there is very
little, if anything at all, in these teachings that resembles what we
know about orthodox Judaism. This should be no surprise.
In
73 AD. the Romans besieged
Masada, the last fortress of Jewish insurgents. In the night before
the final
assault, the leader of the defenders, Eleazar ben Yair, delivered a
moral
boosting speech, something that a modern Mandaean would
immediately
recognize. Eleazar said: “Since ancient times, our forefathers have
corroborated the same doctrine [that]
death restores the soul to liberty, and carries it away to a place of
purity,
where misery can’t touch it. Because a soul incarcerated in a mortal
body
participates in its miseries, and really, to speak the truth, it is
dead as well,
for the union of what is divine to what is mortal is disagreeable” (Josephus, Wars VII, 323 ff.).
The
present events in Iraq have decimated the Mandaean community from over
60,000 to less than 7,000, most of them have fled the country. In Iraq
there is violence against the people who still remain in the country;
Islamic extremists attack the Mandaean women for not wearing a veil. In
Iran the persecution has taken on a more subtle form. The Gozinesh laws
from 1985 make the access to employment and education a subject of
rigorous ideological screening and discriminate against religious and
ethnic groups that are not officially recognized or refuse devotion to
the tenets of Islam. I live in a part of the world where it is no
longer a privilege but our right to “think as we please, and say
what we think” (Tacitus). Since I’ve put it on line, the
silence following this appeal is deafening. Have we forgotten our own
past when the fanatics burned first the books and then the people just
for begging to differ? The bad old habits seem green as ever, but we
pass our time with finding excuses for the perpetrator. Of course,
Mandaeans don’t own oil wells.
©
– 12/29/2008 – by michael sympson, 750 words all rights reserved
