Humanists Take on the World

DUSTIN’ OFF THE DEGREE - The MandeansA few weeks ago I mentioned a religious group that is effectively the church of John the Baptist. I mistakenly referred to them as the Ebionites, which were a Jewish Christian group that rejected Paul and viewed James the brother of Jesus and preferred James the brother of Jesus. They were also big fans of the John the Baptist, but not the group I was thinking about. The Ebionites disappeared by around 300 CE, but they’ll come up again when we talk about Jews for Jesus.It’s been nearly 11 years since I dropped out of the seminary so it’s not surprising that much of my knowledge of obscure religious oddities has faded along with my knowledge of classical Greek.The group I was thinking of is the Mandeans. They started sometime in the first three centuries of the common era, but the historical record of them is pretty scant with many of the best early sources coming from Islamic writers and the Hadith. They are generally thought to be the Sabians that are counted by Muslims as a People of the Book.They are a Semitic Gnostic group. What’s odd here is that most of what we know of Gnosticism is that it was a Hellenistic Greek phenomena drawing very heavily on neo-Platonic dualism, however that same kind of dualism and secret knowledge, the Greek gnosis or Aramaic manda.According to the Mandeans they are the continuation of the religion of Noah and they revere Adam, Abel, Seth, Enoch, Noah, Shem, Aram, and John the Baptist, especially John the Baptist, as their prophets. According to one 13th century Dominican Catholic observers they detest Abraham because of circumcision.They believe in marriage, procreation, and family and don’t practice celibacy or asceticism, this is in stark contrast with standard Gnosticism, but is likely part of why they have outlasted the Gnostics by more than a millennia and a half. Like the Gnostic they believe the world is a prison and governed by the planetary archons.Their dualism also takes an interesting form, while Gnostics typically had the spiritual pure opposite the evil material, Mandeans have a cosmic father and mother, light and dark, right and left. They believe in a supreme formless Entity who delegated the creation of spiritual, etheric, and material worlds and beings to creators. The cosmos is the creation of the Archetypal Man which was created so that it could be populated by beings created in his form.Souls come from the Entity and are in exile and captives on this world, but eventually they will return to the Entity. Planets and stars influence our lives and are also a place where souls are detained. There are also savior spirits that will assist souls on the journey to the worlds of light.Their sacraments are centered on purification, with washing, as a core part of it, hence at least in part their reverence of John the Baptist. The goal of the sacraments is to purify the soul so that they can be freed of the material world and reborn in the spiritual world.They reject the Torah and the Christian Bible, but have many scriptures where they have recorded things that have learned from the manda or gnosis, the secret knowledge of the spirit world.While this may all seem quite strange, it’s actually quite logical. The Gnostics believe that Yahweh is an evil Archon and most believe that Jesus isn’t much better. They tended to view mainstream Christians as slaves of the evil material world and that they needed freed from. Latching on to John the Baptist also makes since considering that with the poor hygiene and rampant disease of the era, any focus on bathing and cleanliness would result in improved health. To accept John, while rejecting Jesus is also logical if you view Jesus and the Christians as usurpers who tried to steal and corrupt John’s message.Historically their population has generally been centered around modern day Iraq and Iran. The Iranian population probably didn’t faSupport the show