Having started to develop a feature for one reason it is characteristic of sexual selection to make a virtue of necessity and use it for another.

Who Lies Sleeping?

The Mandaeans, Followers of John the Baptist 2

Mandæan Beliefs
Enosh Utra, the Good Man
Astronomical Connexions
Cathars

Abstract

Sabians, baptizers, identified with the Mandæans, believed “there is no God but God”, like the band of Galileans and later the Christians. Mandæans say Jesus is a false messiah, but the true one was Enosh-Uthra, the “good man”, John the Baptist, who came in the days of Pilate, healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead. So, John does the same miracles as Jesus, contrary to the fourth gospel—“John did no miracle”. In Christian tradition, miracles are reserved for Jesus and baptism for John, though Christ did baptize. In Mandæan tradition, John does both, and looks much like the gospel Jesus. It makes sense. As successive Essene Nesiim, John and Jesus had similar characteristics particularly healing Jewish apostates, and so were mixed up. Enosh-Uthra taught a dualism of truth and error, light and darkness, and life and fiery death, Essene teaching. After unmasking Christ, who was crucified, He ascended to the Abode of Truth, but will return at the End.

Mandæan Beliefs

Mandæan sacred books are written in a strange Aramaic dialect, which uses some of the Hebrew consonants as vowels. They include the Ginza (Book of Adam), written from both ends, the Book of John, a later account of the activities and message of John the Baptist, the Book of the Zodiac, a collection of magical and astrological texts and the Baptism of Abel the Brilliant describing the purification of the heavenly saviour of the Mandæans. The earliest, the Ginza, the oldest Mandæan book dates from the end of the seventh century AD as we know because the Arab empire is described as only 71 years old.

Mandæan cosmology does sound Gnostic. God is the King of Light who dwells in the uppermost world. The lower worlds including the earth is the home of an evil female spirit called Ruha who gave birth to countless spiritual beings, some good and some evil, but notably the Twelve, identified with the Zodiac, and the Seven, identified with the seven planets. So, between God and this world there are gradations of aeons called Utras, the most elevated of which is Abel the Brilliant. The Ginza explains that an emanation of God, Abathur, gave birth to Ptahil the creator of the world. The earth is a dark place, created out of Ruha’s black waters but the waters would not solidify until they were mixed with a little light provided by Abel the Brilliant, who therefore existed at the creation. Abel also supplied Adam’s soul from the Treasury of Life.

Ruha is easily seen as Ruach, the breath of God in Genesis and the basis of the Holy Spirit. In Aramaic it means “wind” but the Mandæans cannot use it in that sense because they have attributed to it a profound quality of evil. It is a feminine noun, so can easily have been seen as a feminine principle, and logically, its place in the Catholic Trinity is the place for a Goddess (Father, Mother, Son).

The evil rulers, the Archons, of the earthly realm and the lower heavens, obstruct the ascent of the soul through the heavenly spheres to reunion with the supreme God. The body is a tomb (soma sema) and the material world is a prison. All of the visible world is corrupt and will ultimately be destroyed. Only the Righteous can save their souls by always being moral, practising the prescribed ritual observances and acquiring revealed knowledge.

Abel the Brilliant, the Mandæan Saviour, son of Manda d’Hayye (who is one of the great emanations of the Godhead), once dwelled on earth, where he triumphed over the Archons who try to keep the soul imprisoned. He can thus assist the soul in its ascent through the heavenly spheres toward its final reunion with the Supreme God.

Manda d’Hayye is not merely knowledge but is “Knowledge of Salvation”, a phrase which occurs in the song of Zacharias in Luke (Lk 1:77), which we have surmised is Essene. Essene thought has the same concept or gets close to it, the scrolls speaking of the “Knowledge of God” and “His Salvation”.

The Manda d’Hayye and the light-giving powers seek to direct men and women to good actions. The planets and the spirit of physical life incite them to error through Judaism, Christianity, Islam and other “false religions”. Those who lead a good life pass after death to a world of light, others undergo torture, but even the most evil will be purified in a great baptism at the end of the world—the equivalent of the Persian and Essene baptism with fire on the Day of God’s Vengeance.

The Mandæans have a form of Eucharist. Most religious occasions were marked with the partaking of a “bit of bread” (pehta, the same word as pitta) and a draught of consecrated water. This will have been the original Christian tradition, the “New Wine” of the Essenes most often being water. Punctilious ritual was observed at birth, marriage and particularly death, when the dying were consoled and ritual had to be exact if the soul was to ascend successfully. Their ranks of clergy also closely match that of the Essenes and early Christians. They have ranks of treasurer (bishop), deacon and disciple.

They repudiate idolatry, but circumcision and celibacy are also forbidden, significant changes from Essenism, but we have no more reason to think that the Mandæans inevitably preserved the traditions of their originators any more than Christians did. They regard marriage and procreation as important moral obligations, strong beliefs of traditional Judaism, and abhor sexual license, matching Judaism and particularly Essenism. Divorce is not recognised, matching Essenism, but a man may have as many wives as he desires, an obvious adaptation from Islam. Nevertheless, women are permitted to own property. They practise a moral code of charity and goodwill.

Experts considered that the hostility of the Mandæans to Jesus simply reflected a hostility to the Eastern Church because Jesus is sometimes called “the Byzantine” in Mandæan books. This might be so, but we have to ask whether it actually goes right back to the origins of gentile Christianity and Paul.

Gentile Christianity was founded before Paul among the Hellenised Jews of Palestine who were dispersed at the very start of the story by Hebraic Jews—Jews who rejected the ways and manners of the Greeks and regarded Hellenisation as apostasy. Paul naturally favoured this faction and, though the Hellenised Jews did not try to convert gentiles, Paul did. The Hebraic Christians and the Hebraic followers of John (both called Nazarenes or Nasoraeans) would have regarded this as quite unacceptable. The gospels tell us that the Jerusalem Church rejected Paul’s innovations, and the Mandæan works seem to say that the followers of John also rejected them.

Enosh Uthra, the Good Man

Mandæans consider the Jesus of the Christians as a false messiah but they accepted that there was a true messiah whom they called Enosh-Uthra. The word Uthra which literally means “wealth” seems here to mean “good” or “divine” because Enosh Uthra is the “divine” man or the “good man”. He came into the world in the days of Pilate, the king of the world, healed the sick and gave sight to the blind, and raised the dead. In this tradition, John does the same miracles as Jesus, contrary to the fourth gospel (Jn 10:41) that tells us “John did no miracle”. In Christian tradition, miracles are reserved for Jesus, in Mandæan tradition, for John. He taught a dualistic philosophy of truth and error, light and darkness, and life and death by burning fire which consumes all wrong—the very teaching of the Essene brotherhood. He ordained 365 prophets to teach, and sent them out from Jerusalem. Eventually, he ascended to the Abode of Truth and will return at the End. Like the Essenes and the Persians, the Mandæans were particular about Truth.

Before Enosh-Uthra ascended to the Abode of Truth, he unmasked the Greek Christ who confessed that he was one of the Seven, the deceiving planets—he was Mercury! Having confessed, he was seized by the Jews and crucified. It seems the Mandæans partly, at least, identify the Christian Jesus with Paul, the apostle. Paul was declared to be Mercury in Acts of the Apostles. Thus for the Mandæans, Enosh-Uthra, John the Baptist, apparently an incarnation of Abel the Brilliant, looks rather like the Jesus of the gospels but the Byzantine Christ looks like Paul. It makes sense. If John and Jesus were successive Nasis out trying to heal the Simple of Ephraim, Jewish apostates, they will have had similar general characteristics, and their individual details might have been confused to some degree. Christians, for example, have tried to pretend that Jesus did not baptise when he plainly did. Confirming it is the fact that Mandæans do not have a clear distinction between Jews and Christians, a fact which harks back to the very earliest days of Christianity when the followers of Jesus were still Jews.

In the Mandæan John-Book we meet the priest Zachariah and his aged wife Elizabeth except that her name has been corrupted to Enishbai (to reflect Enosh?). No Christian will believe that this is not taken from the first chapter of Luke, but if Luke was merely reflecting a small part of Essene history, the identity is due to their common origin. After John had spent 42 years baptising in the Jordan, the Christian Jesus (called here Nbou—Nabu, Nebo, Mercury, Hermes) sought baptism from him, but the spirit Enosh-Uthra did not require baptism (in fact, he will have been baptised by Zachariah who was his predecessor). Again, Mandæan tradition might support the idea that Jesus succeeded John as the Nasi, because John had no choice but to baptise Jesus—a voice from heaven ordered him. Why should God have ordered John to baptise an evil spirit? It is an ineffectual way of explaining the plain fact that John did baptise Jesus, but that in the Mandæan view Jesus turned out to be a wrong un.

Though John, like Jesus, was not really a miracle worker, like Jesus he performed healings—metaphorical ones in bringing apostate Jews back to God—and his own disciples, like Jesus’s, became convinced he was the Messiah after his death. The fourth century Clementine Recognitions 1:60 state that John’s disciples claimed that their master had been greater than Jesus and that John was the true messiah. Rivalry between John’s followers and those of Jesus was apparent even in the New Testament. Luke 3:15 confirms that John was thought a messiah:

The people were in expectation, and all men mused in their hearts of John, whether he were the Christ, or not.

Mandæan tradition has it that John arrived in Jerusalem and exposed Jesus as an imposter, an incident that might be reflected in the New Testament when John in prison no longer believes that Jesus is the Messiah and sends a message asking whether he is the one or whether another is to be expected. This must have reflected John’s disappointment in Jesus Barabbas’s preparations for an uprising. Later Jesus failed and was crucified thus becoming a false prophet. John’s disciples will then have accused Jesus of being an imposter and claimed that John had exposed him.

John the Baptist was known by the Mandæans as “Enosh”, the reborn grandson of Adam. Enosh in Hebrew means “Man”, as does Adam, so we have the curiosity that John the Baptist was the Man and Jesus was the Son of Man! This might have been a Jewish joke. If John the Baptist played the role of the priest at Jesus’s baptism as seems likely then it would have been his voice announcing his “beloved son” as the coronation liturgy required. Thus we have the irreverent titles: the “Man” and the “Son” of “Man” or, in Aramaic pronunciation, “nash” and “bar nash”.

Did John the Baptist live longer than Jesus? The latest year of Jesus’s death is 33 AD. The Tetrarch Philip died in 34 AD on the day that John interpreted a dream for him. Herod Antipas killed John and later was defeated in battle in 36 AD by Aretas, king of the Petraean (Nabataean) Arabians, an event considered to have been retribution for John’s murder. John must therefore have been killed within a year of 35 AD, the very year that Simon Magus, a disciple of John, led a rebellion on Mount Gerizim in Samaria. Antipas was probably more absorbed by John’s potential for inflaming rebellion than he was by Salome’s dance or John’s criticism of his marital arrangements.

Astronomical Connexions

In Greek, John’s name is Ioannes, the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Johanan. Curiously, Ioannes resembles the Greek for the Pagan god, Ea (Iah), the God of the House of Water—sweet refreshing water, not briny sea water—which is Oannes. More curiously, Oannes pronounced in Aramaic would come out close to Enosh!

Now Oannes was a saviour god of the Babylonians—the god who saved mankind from the flood by warning the Babylonian Noah about it, allowing him to build an ark. Either the early Christians have given the Baptist an appropriate name of the gods with whom educated Greeks were familiar, or the Jews had already made these associations.

Johanan is always given as meaning “the Grace of God” but it is a name which appears only in scriptural books written after the “return” from Babylonian “exile”, notably Chronicles. It seems that the name “Johanan” actually was a popular name among the Persian colonists. Johanan therefore is Oannes in Hebrew and the meaning “Grace of God” was devised for it later. Thus John the Baptist was given the name Johanan precisely because his duty was that of the god, Oannes. He had to save mankind by warning of the coming judgement to allow the righteous to repent and survive into God’s Kingdom.

The god, Oannes, is remembered in the constellation Capricorn. The constellation depicts a creature with the body of a fish and the foreparts of a goat. That is precisely how Oannes was depicted when he was not shown as a man with water running from his shoulders. John the Baptist was associated with 6 January when the sun was in the midst of the constellation of Capricorn, and this became the traditional date of the baptism of Jesus—his ritual rebirth as a son of God. Later, when the ritual rebirth had been forgotten in favour of a miraculous real birth, the epiphany (the occasion when a god shows himself) or actual birth of Jesus was allocated this date. Later still it was changed again to the traditional date of the winter solstice.

The Pagans thought of Capricorn as when the sun god emerged reborn from the waters of Oannes. Since the Essenes revered the sun as the majesty of God, lived by a solar calendar, and were interested in astrology, it is likely that their rituals involved the enactment of astrological myths. Thus their baptisms of important princes and priests might have been arranged on days of appropriate astrological significance. The baptism of Jesus by John possibly really occurred on this date in Capricorn—and so did the earlier baptism of John by Zechariah.

Cathars

The Mandæans had a status in their religion, just as the Cathars did, called “the Perfect”. It is rarely observed upon, that the beliefs of the Cathars were remarkably similar to those of the Mandæans—and they were regarded as a Christian heresy. Both had the same origins and one grew in the east and the other in the west, thus developing differences. But the eastern variety spread to the west around the ninth century, causing the corrupt western Church at Rome to have hysterics and begins a long period of persecution of opponents.

Mrs Drower was told about the “shalmono” and the rite of making of a “Perfect”, whereby the Sabaean may reach a state of holiness akin to that of the dweller in the Mandæan Abode of the Blessed. It requires the applicant to renounce worldly desires and the delights of the flesh, while living among men, and amongst his family, without being able to partake of the joys of family life. The Mandæans frown on celibacy but this shalmono has to forgo any further sexual relationship with his wife. There is first a ceremony of renunciation. The applicant goes to the bishop, who questions him closely about how seriousness he is, and impresses upon him that the step is irreversible. If the applicant is still firm, after seven days' preparation with the bishop, he spends seven days and seven nights separated. Every day the bishop and priests come to him, and daily he is sustained with only three small sacramental pittas, and a little dove meat. The bishop then invites the “shalmono” to a feast, at the end of which, all bar a last mouthful of food, the priests present all arise and solemnly recite the funereal Prayer for the Dead as if for a dead man. The committed Mandæan is already a spirit, the ceremony the practical equivalent of the Cathar consolamentum. It ends with the consumption of the last mouthful of food.

Thereafter, the shalomo continues his trade but otherwise renounces life, living in deprivation and self-mortification. He will not give an order or express a wish. He does everything for himself or does without. He refuses to indulge himself with cigarettes, wine, coffee, tea, any drug, or sex. As noted, he is thereafter celibate. Whatever happened, however personally tragic, he must show emotion, yet must always seem happy. “If a fire were to burn his house, destroy his goods and suffocate his wife and children he must show or feel no trace of emotion”. The shalmono is plainly the equivalent of the Cathar “Perfect”, separated from the mass of the faithful. The Mandæans are a people distinct from their neighbours, making no converts keeping themselves to themselves.

See the pages on Heresy, Inquisition and Witchcraft.