Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 15.djvu/494

Rh 470 M A N M A N tlie true believers, who claim to have had in Babylonia, under the Abbasides, four hundred places of worship. Subsequent persecutions compelled their withdrawal to Ammarah in the neighbourhood of Wasit, and ultimately to Khuzistan. At the end of the world the devil Ur will swallow up the earth and the other intermediate higher worlds, and thereupon will burst and fall into the abyss of darkness, where, along with all the worlds and powers of darkness, he will ultimately cease to be, so that thence forward the universe will consist of but one everlasting world of light. The chief depositaries of these Mandsean mysteries are the priests, who enjoy a high degree of power and social regard. The priest hood has three grades. (1) the Sh kanda or deacon is generally chosen from episcopal or priestly families, and must be without bodily blemish. The candidate for orders must be at least nineteen years old and have undergone twelve years preparation ; he is then qualified to assist the priesthood in the ceremonies of religion. (2) The Tarmida (i.e., &quot;Talmida,&quot; initiated 1 ) or priest is ordained by a bishop and two priests or by four priests after a long and extremely painful period of preparation. (3) The Ganzivra (&quot;treasurer&quot;) or bishop, the highest dignitary, is chosen from the whole body of the Tarmidas after a variety of tests, and possesses unlimited authority over the clergy. A supreme priestly rank, that of Rish amma, or &quot;head of the people,&quot; is recognized, but only in theory ; since the time of Pharaoh this sovereign pontificate has only once been filled. The priestly dress, which is all white, consists of drawers, an upper garment, and a girdle with the so-called taga or &quot;crown&quot;; in all ceremonies the celebrants must be barefoot. By far the most frequent and important of the religious ceremonies is that of baptism (masbutlui), which is called for in a great variety of cases, not only for children but for adults, where consecration or purification is required, as for example on all Sundays and feast days, after contact with a dead body, after return from abroad, after neglect of any formality on the part of a priest in the discharge of his functions. In all these cases oaptism is performed by total immersion in running water, but during the five Jays baptismal festival the rite is observed wholesale by mere sprinkling of large masses of the faithful at once. The Mandaeans observe also with the elements of bread (pehta) and wine (mambuga, lit. &quot;fountain&quot;) a sort of eucharist, which has a special sanctifying efficacy, and is usually dispensed at festivals, but only to baptized persons of good repute who have never willingly denied the Mandsean faith. In receiving it the communicant must not touch the host with his finger ; otherwise it loses its virtue. The hosts are made by the priests from unleavened fine flour. A peculiar act of piety is for a layman under the guidance of the bishop to receive the massektha (&quot; elevation&quot;), and thereby become a sort of ascetic, a shalmana taba (&quot;really perfect&quot;). The Mandsean places of worship, bt-ing designed only for the priests and their assistants, are excessively small, and very simply furnished ; two windows, a door that opens towards the south so that those who enter have their faces turned towards the pole star, a few boards in the corner, and a gabled roof complete the whole structure ; there is neither altar nor decoration of any kind. The neighbourhood of running water (for baptisms) is essential. At the consecration of a church the sacrifice of a dove (the bird of Venus) has place among the ceremonies. Besides Sundays there are six great feasts: (1) that of the New Year (Nauniz rabba), on the first day of the first month of winter ; (2) Dehwa h nina, the anniversary of the happy return of Hibil Ziva from the kingdom of darkness into that of light, lasting five days, beginning with the 18th of the first month of spring; (3) the Marwana, in com memoration of the drowned Egyptians, on the first day of the second month of spring; (4) the great five days baptismal festival (pantsha), the chief feast, kept on the five intercalary days at the end of the second month of summer, during its continuance every Mandeean, male and female, must dress in white and bathe thrice daily; (5) Dehwa d daimana, in honour of one of the three hundred and sixty Uthras, on the first day of the second month of autumn; (6) Kanshe Zahla, the preparation feast, held on the last day of the year. There are also fast days called m battal (Arab.), on which it is forbidden to kill any living thing or eat flesh. The year is solar, and has twelve months of thirty days each, with five intercalary days between the eighth and the ninth month. Of the seven days of the week, next to Sunday (habshaba) Thursday lias a special sacredness as the day of Hibil Ziva. As regards secular occupation, the present Mandaeans are goldsmiths, ironworkers, and house and ship carpenters. They practise polygamy, the Sidrd Jlabbd laying great stress upon the duty of procreation, but few of them are rich enough to maintain more than two wives. In the 17th century, according to the old travellers, they numbered about 20,000 families, but at the present day they hardly number more than 1200 souls. In external appearance the Mand.aean is distinguished from the Moslem only by a brown coat and a parti-coloured headcloth with a cord twisted round it. They have some peculiar death-bed rites : a deacon with some attendants waits upon the dying, and as death approaches administers a bath first of warm and afterwards of cold water ; a holy dress, consisting of seven pieces (rasta), -is then put on ; the feet are directed towards the north and the head turned to the south, so that the body faces the pole star. After the burial a funeral feast is held in the house of mourning. The Mandaaans are strictly reticent about their theological dog mas in the presence of strangers ; and the knowledge they actually possess of these is extremely small. The foundation of the system is obviously to be sought in Gnosticism, and more particularly in the older type of that doctrine (known from the serpent symbol as Ophite or Naassene) which obtained in Mesopotamia and Further Asia generally. But it is equally plain that the Ophite nucleus has from time to time received very numerous and often curi ously perverted accretions from Babylonian Judaism, Oriental Christianity, and Parsism, exhibiting a striking example of religious syncretism. In the Gnostic basis itself it is not difficult to recognize the general features of the religion of ancient Baby lonia, and thus we are brought nearer a solution of the problem as to the origin of Gnosticism in general. It is certain that Babylonia, the seat of the present Mandaeans, must be regarded also as the cradle in which their system was reared ; it is impossible to think of them as coming from Palestine, or to attribute to their doctrines a Jewish or Christian origin. They do not spring historically from the disciples of John the Baptist (Acts xviii. 25 ; xix. 3 sq. ; Rccocf. Clem., i. 54) ; the tradition in which he and the Jordan figure so largely is not original, and is therefore worthless ; at the same time it is true that their baptismal praxis and its interpretation place them in the same religious group with the Hemerobaptists of Eusebius (//. E., iv. 22) and Epiphanius (Hser., xvii.), or with the sect of disciples of John who remained apart from Christianity. Their reverence for John is of a piece with their whole syncretizing attitude towards the New Testament. Indeed, as has been seen, they appropriate the entire personale of the Bible from Adam, Seth, Abel, Enos, and Pharaoh to Jesus and John, a phenomenon which bears witness to the close relations of the Mandaean doctrine, at the time of its formation, both with Judaism and Christianity, not the less close because they were relations of hostility. The history of religion presents other examples of the degradation of holy to demonic figures on occasion of religious schism. The use of the word &quot;Jordan,&quot; even in the plural, for &quot;sacred water,&quot; is precisely similar to that by the Naassenes described in the Philosophumcna (v. 7) ; there 6 peyas lopSdvrjs denotes the spiritualizing, sanctifying fluid which pervades the world of light. The notions of the Egyptians and the Red Sea, according to the same work (v. 16), are used by the Peratrc much as by the Mandaeans. And the position assigned by the Sethians (Z^Qiavol} to Seth is precisely similar to that given by the Mandseans to Abel. Both alike are merely old Babylonian divinities in a new Biblical garb. The genesis of Mandaeism and the older gnosis from the old and elaborate Babylonio-Chaldsean religion is clearly seen also in the fact that the names of the old pantheon (as for example those of the planetary divinities) are re tained, but their holders degraded to the position of demons, a con clusion confirmed by the fact that the Mandaeans, like the allied Ophites, Peratae, and Manichaeans, certainly have their original seat in Mesopotamia and Babylonia. Great caution is necessary, in the present state of our knowledge, in the use made of the results of cuneiform decipherment in relation to Babylonian mythology ; but so much seems clear, that the trinity of Anu, Bil, and Ea in the old Babylonian religion has its counterpart in the Mandaean Pi ra, Ayar, and Mana rabba. The D mutha of Mana is the Damkina, the wife of Ea, mentioned by Damascius as Aavirri, wife of A.6s. Manda d hayye and his image Hibil Ziva with his incarnations clearly correspond with the old Babylonian Marduk, Mero- dach, the &quot;first-born&quot; son of Ea, with his incarnations, the chief divinity of the city of Babylon, the mediator and re deemer in the old religion. Hibil s contest with darkness has its prototype in Marduk s battle with chaos, the dragon Tiamat, which (another striking parallel) partially swallows Marduk, just as is related of Hibil and the Manichasan primal man. Other features are borrowed by the Mandaean mythology under this head from the well-known epos of Istar s desccnsus ad inferos. The sanctity with which water is invested by the Mandaeans is to be explained by this fact that Ea has his seat &quot;in the depths of the world sea.&quot; Compare K. Kessler s article &quot;Mandaer&quot; in IlerzoR-Pli t s Real-encyklopadie, and the same author s paper, &quot; Ueber Gnosis u. altbabylonisehe Religion,&quot; in the Abhandh d fiinften international^ Orienta isten-congresses zu Berlin (Berlin, 1882). ( K - K -&amp;gt; MANDALAY, the capital of Independent Burmah, is situated about 2 miles from the left bank of the Trawadi river, in 21 59 N. lat. and 96 8 E. long. It was founded by the king of Burmah, who transferred to it the seat of government from Amarapura in I860. The city proper is laid out in a square, each side of which is a little over a mile in length. It is enclosed by a crenel-