Mandaean

Mandaean cosmology divides sharply, and the division is between light and matter rather than between good gods and bad ones.

At the source is the Great Life, from whom emanate the uthras, beings of light who populate the World of Light. Emanation rather than generation is the mechanism: nothing here is born, and there is no succession of divine generations because there is no reproduction among them.

The material world is not the work of the Great Life. It is made by a lower figure, Ptahil, in a work that goes wrong, with the involvement of powers belonging to the world of darkness. This places Mandaeism among the traditions in which the creator of the physical world is emphatically not the supreme being, and it is the structural feature that most distinguishes it from the Abrahamic arrangement it otherwise resembles in outline.

The human soul belongs to the World of Light and is in the material world as an exile. The purpose of religious life is its return, and the ritual apparatus of the tradition, above all repeated baptism in flowing water, serves that return.

The roster is fixed by the scriptures. There is no absorption of foreign deities and no mechanism by which a human being enters the divine world as a member of it.

Mandaeism is a living religion, the only surviving tradition of its kind, and its community is small and dispersed.

Mandaeism is the only religion of late antique Mesopotamia to have survived continuously into the present with its own scriptures, its own script and its own priesthood, and that survival is the central fact about its attestation.

The Ginza Rabba is the principal book, divided into a right side concerned with cosmology, ethics and history and a left side concerned with the soul's ascent, read at funerals. The Qulasta is the collection of liturgical prayers and hymns used in baptism and in the rites for the dead. The Book of John contains discourses attributed to John the Baptist, who holds a central position in the tradition.

The language is a form of Eastern Aramaic, written in a distinctive script, and it is the only Aramaic dialect whose religious literature was transmitted by its own community without interruption.

Alongside the books sits a body of material with no religious authority but great historical value: incantation bowls from Mesopotamia, inscribed in Mandaic, which place the language and some of its formulae firmly in late antiquity and provide dated evidence outside the manuscript tradition.

Western scholarship began in earnest in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and was for a period preoccupied with what Mandaeism might reveal about the origins of Christianity, which distorted the questions asked of it.

The community has faced severe disruption in Iraq and Iran since 2003, and much of it is now in diaspora.