TO RETURN TO
MANDAEAN WORLD
CLICK HERE

TO E-MAIL
MANDAEAN WORLD
CLICK HERE

MANDAEAN LITERATURE

The Thousand and Twelve Questions

Below is part of the introduction to The Thousand and Twelve Questions as written by E.S. Drower.  She explains the purpose  and some interesting facts about this book.

The Thousand and Twelve Questions
((Alf Trisar Suialia)
Edited in transliteration and translation by E.S. Drower
Akademie Verlag; Berlin: 1960

"The texts which compose "The Thousand and Twelve Questions" may have I venture to suggest, not a little to contribute to the study of Gnostic beliefs and practices prevalent in the early centuries of the Christian era and possibly, immediately before them. For the peculiar value of this scroll is that its seven books provide a detailed picture, unique in the history of religion, of the rites and beliefs of a Gnostic sect which has not only survived but, thanks to its own form of separatism, has enjoyed complete segregation. Over centuries rites have been preserved from change owing to the rigorous manner in which deviation and carelessness have been penalised whilst its beliefs have been transmitted and guarded by a hereditary priesthood which married only from its own caste and had no political aspirations. Settled in small places, marshes and villages rather than in towns and protected by its own unimportance the sect has miraculously survived invasion and persecution.

In the seven texts which compose the scroll we are given explanation of rites meticulously performed and learn that these explanations are never imparted to the laity, for as they are secret and given to a young priest at his initiation into the priesthood and not before. That these explanations shed a new and most valuable light upon other Gnostic texts is very evident: the student should be warned, however, that, as grains shinning in dust, they appear only when a mass of tiresome detail and repetition has been sifted.

The scroll is the longest in Mandaean libraries. It is often consulted and highly treasured. It is not intended for laymen and is always kept in the hut in which a candidate for ordination and his instructor spend a week of vigil and prayer.

Like the Ginza Rabba (Great Treasury), the Drasia q Yahia (known in translation as the “John Book") and the Sfar Malwasia (Book of the Zodiac) it is a miscellany. In the colophon to the end of the seventh book the words of Ramuia son of 'Qaimat, an early liturgest, are quoted as he wrote them when editing the miscellany:

“When I wrote this Diwan, it was in separate treatises".

The first of the seven parts or texts is that which lends its name or a form of it, "The Thousand and Twelve Questions” to the whole scroll. This work detached from the other six, exists in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris (Cod. Syr. 16) and it was the only part of the great whole seen by Noldeke and Lidzbarski. I looked in vain for the other six in the libraries of Oxford, London, Berlin and Rome.  In the marshes of Lower 'Iraq I acquired two scrolls under the title, (D. C, 6 and D.C. 36), but from the former two parts, viz. Parts VI(a) and VII were missing. D. C. 36 was said by reliable priests to contain all the parts, as they knew them. Like D. C. 6, D.C. 36 shows traces of hard and continuos use and patches have replaced what was missing or torn.  In D.C. 36 renovation goes no further than the first text: the remainder is in one excellent hand. According to its colophon this scroll was completed in the year 1085 A.H., approximately 1684 A.D. Part of D. C. 6 is older, but so much of it was written in and pasted in. that D. C. 36 is the more reliable text of the two.

The parts are not in the same order. Ramuia's account of his editorship explains two repetitive passages [Parts III(b) and Part V(a)]. He was evidently anxious to two distinct versions of a single original, which had been so transformed by emendations, addenda, and notes that he treated them as separate compositions.

Lists of copyists and owners given in the colophons are worth consideration for not only do they give the pedigree of each fragment, but some indication of date.  Long scrolls such as this are very seldom re-copied but are handed down from father to son until dilapidation makes replacement desirable.  Sometimes a priest copies a scroll to enrich his library, but this is exceptional.  If an accident, such a fire, destroys a box of treasured manuscripts, its owner will of course try to replace its contents.

Most “pedigrees” of this scroll end with the common ancestry. The three copyists named by Ramuia son of ‘Qaimat, Bainai son of Haiuna and Zazai d-Gawazta. 

The former seems to have been a very active in collecting and editing scattered Mandaean manuscripts.  “The Book of Souls” (Sidra d-Nismata), the ‘niania (psalms, hymns), and other liturgical prayers appear to have been collected by him in a miscellany named Aina Rabita (“the Great Wellspring”).  Earlier Ramuias are mentioned as having copied the Masbuta d-Hibil Ziwa (Baptism of Hibil Ziwa), for Haiuna daughter of Yahia-Yuhanna is said to have copied it from the manuscript of one Yahi-Ramuia who had copied it from his father’s, Ramuia-Natar’s scroll.  Tib, a small town between Wasit and Khuzistan, was the center of this liturgical activity.  According to Yaqut (Mu’ajjam al-Buldan vol. Vi page 76, Cario 1906) who wrote about 626 A.H., Tib was inhabited by Nabataeans who spoke Nabataean (i.e. Aramaic) “ and claimed to be descendents of Seth son of Adam and were of the Sabian sect.” All this fits in very neatly to our Mandaeans who today are called Sabiya or colloquially Subba.

Haiuan, mentioned above, had evidently a valued library.  Not only did she copy herself, but also was in possession of other scrolls copied or borrowed by other liturgists.  Binai, son of Yahia, who apparently lived with his mother Haiuna, was also a copyist and his name is preserved with hers and others of the contemporary Tib group in the great commemoration prayer Abahatan Qadmaiia under the designation “ethnarchs”; probably because of their editorial activities. The collection of the manuscripts undertaken by them took place probably early in the Moslem era.

There is little literary grace in the associated text of this great scroll; imaginative flights are rare: the writers are concerned with the stern business of instruction and explanation and are anxious to convey the immense importance of every detail of ritual.  Mandaean priests consult the scroll to discover how these should be performed correctly, and also what they must do “to become clean” after breach of ritual law.

To the Mandaean where ritual is more important than theology.  He appears to recognize with easy acquiescence that it is all but impossible to state the infinite in finite terms, an tolerates widely varying accounts of creation and redemption as well as inconsistent descriptions of the nature and activities of divine beings.  He makes no attempt to reconcile or to rationalize statements which disagree: indeed those who complied sacred texts often displayed a bland impartiality by placing contradictory passages side by side in a single codex or roll.

It is otherwise where ritual is concerned.  Here a Mandaean priest is on terra firma.  For him, ritual employs an ancient and potent language, that of mind and symbol.  Each rite is a drama.  Accompanying recitations are often irrelevant, sometimes only remotely applicable. At initiation he is taught the “true” and “secret” meaning of his sacramental acts, and the importance of the exact performance.  To misperform a religious ceremony brings both pollution and curse.

Sections dealing with cosmology recall phases of Kabbalistic theosophy, and as in other mystical literature, sexual imagery is employed to convey certain mystical conception.  Analysis of these reveals that form of Oriental theosophy which we know as Gnosticism, a subterranean stream of ideas which emerges in Protean forms in Manichaeism, in various heresies known to us chiefly in polemical writings, in Jewish mysticism, and Kabbalism and as late as the Middle Ages in dualistic European sects.  In the Mandaean texts these conceptions are linked to ceremonies which are undoubtedly pre-Christian, such as baptism.

Since similar sacramental rites are enacted by Christians our text is important as it reveals not only the manner in which they were performed by a Gnostic sect of high antiquity, but also the symbolic meaning attached to them, a symbolism entirely in accord with Gnostic teaching about the soul, its destiny and it’s Creator.

The novice is taught that when he celebrates the masiqta he is enacting symbolic ceremonies which enables the soul that is ‘departing the body’ to be reborn into a new and immaterial world.  The body is passing into a state of corruption, but the soul, contained by its association with the lower personality, the ruha and by its sojourn in the flesh, is tied to corruption until it is released by funeral rites and sacraments celebrated in its name. It does not emerge from its prison alone, but with the purified ruha: both are - ”raised up” – the word masiqta means literally “a raising up” – and eventually united.

In the masiqta powers of light and life are invoked and above all the two great poles of creative energy, one active and the other receptive, known as the Father and the Mother.  The universe itself, according to the commentaries, is the manifestation, of the union of these two forces.  Hence in the masiqta there is a symbolic Marriage and Conception.  These enable the soul to emerge from the material world just as a babe emerges from the womb.

The postulant (aswalia) learns that the drama of the soul corresponds to a vaster drama: that the Life itself retires into periods of quiescence and when active again manifests itself into the two great life forces, and in renewed creation.  Cycles of cosmic life, he is told, is reenacted yearly on thew terrestrial globe in the story of grain, blade, leaf, and fruit.

Belief in the serial nature of the cosmic plan is as ancient as the soil on which these ceremonies are performed.  It was probably the result of patient observation of the heavens: for astrologers of Chaldea and Egypt were responsible for profound changes in the attitude of men towards their gods.  There was sublimation of many old and primitive beliefs and fresh interpretation of seasonal ritual.  Interpretation, but not disappearance, for seasonal, ritual appears to be conservative to an amazing degree, not only in the Middle Eastern countries but all over the world.

The method of instruction in these texts is mostly question and answer. The Great Nbat, Mara d Rabutha, answers Great Sislam just as the rba  (or rabbi) of whom he is here the prototype answers of his pupils, the aswalia, of whom Sislam-Rba is here the prototype.  The word rabuta (Rabuta) apart from meaning “greatness”, is the ecclesiastical word for the status and function of a rba, a rabbi, that is to say teacher. So that throughout The Thousand and Twelve Questions, Mara d Rabutha could be aptly translated by ‘the Lord of Instruction’ meaning ‘Lord of Initiation into priestly gnosis.’  The rba turns the Mandaean, the layman, into the tarmida (priest): and the priest who is  a true hearer into a Nasuria – a Nasoraean.  For the knowledge taught in the scroll is summed up in a single word ‘Nasirutha’, a word that has yet to find an adequate translation.

Most of the teaching is to be hidden from the layman, the Mandaean.  There are repeated warnings that explanations of ritual are not for him; they are addressed only to the malka. The “king”, that is to say to the priest.  For the priest wears his crown, the badge of his office, as a guardian of the physical and spiritual welfare of the community; he is as stated on page 120, its gada, its sacred Luck, its Good Fortune.

At this time when the commentaries edited by Ramuia and his colleges were composed – and these already ancient scrolls were imperfect, tattered, and worn when collected, priestly tradition had needed refreshment.  Even in these early commentaries we find a religious system in its dotage, long past its prime.  In them priests are constantly reminded of the esoteric meaning of ceremonies performed mechanically over a long period.  Digressions and inconsequent phrases abound; and at times the commentary is childish and absurd.  For my translation of the texts, I make no apologies, although conscious of many imperfections.

THIS WONDERFUL BACKGROUND CAN BE FOUND AT