Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/493

Rh MAND^ANS 469 the Uthre&quot;, hence usually called their father (Abd d Uthrd, Abathur). His usual epithet is &quot; the Ancient &quot; ( Atfka) ; and he is also called &quot; the deeply hidden and guarded.&quot; He stands on the borderland between the here and the hereafter, like the mysterious Trpecr/^Jr^s rptVos or senex te.rtius of Mani, whose becoming visible will betoken the end of the world. Abathur sits on the furthest verge of the world of light that lies towards the lower regions, and weighs in his balance the deeds of the departed spirits who ascend to him. Beneath him was originally nothing but a huge void with muddy black water at the bottom, in which his image was reflected, becoming ultimately solidified into P tahil, his son, who now partakes of the nature of matter. The demiurge of the Mandseans, and correspond ing to the laldabaoth of the Ophites, he at the instance of his father frames the earth and men, according to some passages in conjunction with the seven bad planetary spirits. He created Adam and Eve, but was unable to make them stand upright, whereupon Hibil, Shithil, and Anush were sent by the First Life to infuse into their forms spirit from Muna rabba himself. Hibil, at the instance of the supreme God, also taught men about the world of light and the aeons, and especially gave them to know that not P tahil but another was their creator and supreme God, who as &quot; the great king of light, without number, without limit,&quot; stands far above him. At the same time he enjoined the protoplasts to marry and people the world. P tahil had now lost his power over men, and was driven by his father out of the world of light into a place beneath it, whence he shall at the day of judgment be raised, and after receiving baptism be made king of the Uthre&quot; with divine honours. The underworld is made up of four vestibules and three hells properly so-called. The vestibules have each two rulers, Zartay and Zartanay, Hag and Mag, Gaf and Gafan, Anatau and Kin. In the highest hell rules alone the grisly king Sh dum, &quot;the warrior&quot;; in the story immediately beneath is Giv, &quot; the great 1 ; and in the lowest is Krun or Karkurn, the oldest and most powerful of all, c &amp;gt;mmonly called &quot;the great mountain of flesh&quot; (Turd rabba d besra), but also &quot; the first-born of darkness.&quot; In the vestibules dirty water is still to be met with, but the hells are full of scorching consuming fire, except K run s domain, where is nought but dust, ashes, and vacancy. Into these regions descended Hibil the brilliant, in the power of Miina rabba, just as in the Manichyean mythology the &quot; primal man,&quot; armed with the elements of the k nlg of light, descends to a contest with the primal devil. Hibil lingers, gradually unfolding his power, in each of the vestibules, and finally passing from hell to hell reaches Karkuin. Hibil allows himself to be half swallowed by the monster, but is unhurt, and compels his antagonist to recognize the superiority of Mana rabba, the God of light, and to divulge his profoundest secret, the hidden name of darkness. Armed with this he returns through the suc cessive hells, compelling the disclosure of every secret, depriving the rulers of their power, and barring the doors of the several regions. From the fourth vestibule he brought the female devil Ruha, daughter of Kin, and set her over the whole four. This Ruha, the mother of false hood and lies, of poisoning and fornication, is an anti- Christian parody of the Ruhd d Kudsha (Holy Spirit) of the Syriac Church. She is the mother of Ur, the personified fire of hell, who in anger and pride made a violent onset on the world of light (compare the similar occurrence in the ManichaRan mythology), but was mastered by Hibil and thrown in chains down to the &quot; black water,&quot; and imprisoned within seven iron and seven golden walls. By Ur, Ruha, while P tahil was engaged in his work of creation, became mother of three sets of seven, twelve, and five sons respectively; all were translated by P tahil to the heavenly firmament (like the Archons of Mani), the first group forming the planets and the next the signs of the zodiac, while the third is as yet undeter mined. Of the names of the planets Estera (Istar, Venus, also called Ruha d Kudsha, &quot; holy spirit &quot;), Enba (Nebo, Mercury), Sin (moon), Ke&quot;wdn (Saturn), Bil (Jupiter), and Nirig (Nirgal, Mars) reveal their Babylonian origin ; II or II 11, the sun, is also known as Kadush and Adunay (the Adonai of the Old Testament); as lord of the planetary spirits his place is in the midst of them; they are the source of all temptation and evil amongst men. The houses of the planets, as well as the earth and a second world immediately to the north of it, rest upon anvils laid by Hibil on the belly of Ur. In the Mandrean representation the sky is an ocean of water, pure and clear, but of more than adamantine solidity, upon which the stars and planets sail. Its transparency allows us to see even to the pole star, who is the central sun around whom all the heavenly bodies move. Wearing a jewelled crown, he stands before Abathur s door at the gate of the world of light ; the Mandaeans accordingly invariably pray with their faces turned northward. The earth is conceived of as a round disk, slightly sloping towards the south, surrounded on three sides by the sea but on the north by a High mountain of turquoises ; behind this is the abode of the blest, a sort of inferior paradise, inhabited by the Egyptians drowned along with Pharaoh in the Red Ssa, whom the Mandseans look upon as their ancestors, Pharaoh himself having been their first high priest and king. The total duration of the earth they fix at four hundred and eighty thousand years, divided into seven epochs, in each of which one of the planets rules. The Sidrd Rabid knows of three total destructions of the human race by fire and water, pestilence and sword, a single pair alone surviving in each case. In the Maudaean view the Old Testament saints are false prophets; such are Abraham, who arose six thousand years after Nu (Noah) during the reign of the Sun, Misha (Moses), in whose time the true religion was professed by the Egyptians, and Shlimun (Solomon) bar Davith, the lord of the demons. Another false prophet and magician was Yishu M shfhd, who was in fact a manifestation of the planet Mercury. Forty-two years before his day, under King Pontius Pilate, there had appeared the true prophet Yahyd or John son of Zechariah, an incarnation of Hibil, of whose birth and child hood fantastic stories are told. Yahya by a mistake gave baptism to the false Messiah, who had feigned humility; on the completion of his mission, after undergoing a seeming execution, he returned clothed with light into the kingdom of light. As a contemporary of Yahya and the false Messiah Hibil ts younger brother Anush Uthra came down from heaven, caused himself to be baptized by Yahya, wrought miracles of healing and of raising the dead, and brought about the crucifixion of the false Messiah. He preached the true religion, destroyed Jerusalem (&quot; Urashlam,&quot; i.e., &quot; the devil finished it&quot;), which had been built by Adunay, dispersed over the world the Jews who had put Yahya to death, and previous to his return into the worlds of light sent forth three hundred and sixty prophets for the diffusion of the true religion. All this speaks of intense hatred alike of Jews and Christians ; the fasts, celibacy, and monastic and anchoret life of the latter are peculiarly objectionable to the Mandseans. Two hundred and forty years after the appearing of the false Messiah there came to the world sixty thousand saints out of Pharaoh s world to take the place of the Mandcuans, who had been completely extirpated; their high priest had his residence in Damascus. The last false prophet was M hammad or Ahmat bar Bisbat (Mohammed), but Anush, who remained close beside him and his immediate successors, prevented hostilities against