The Lost Gnostics: The Mandeans

Explore the mysterious world of the Mandaeans in "The Lost Gnostics: The Mandeans." Discover the ancient secrets and teachings of one of the last surviving Gnostic sects through Andrew Phillip Smith's approachable work, "John the Baptist and the Last Gnostics: The Secret History of the Mandeans."

In this intriguing episode of Beyond the Book, we look at the Mandeans, a group renowned for its resilience through the ages and its distinctive spiritual practices. This episode unveils their deep connection to John the Baptist, whom they revere not just as a prophet but as their final great teacher. We uncover the Mandeans' ritualistic baptisms, their unique perspective on biblical figures, and their complex relationship with both the material and spiritual worlds. The discussion also highlights the challenges they face today, especially in light of recent geopolitical events. Join us as we explore the rich history, beliefs, and the ongoing spiritual journey of the Mandaeans.

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Transcript

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Today we're going to look into the mysterious world of the Mandaeans, a religious group that survived the sands of time empires, modern wars. They maintain their beliefs that blend this cosmic duality of light and darkness. Imagine a community so ancient and unique that they view John the Baptist not just as a prophet, but as their last great teacher, and consider themselves the true keepers of his legacy. And this beyond the book episode, we're going to cover John the Baptist and the Last Gnostics The Secret History of The Mandaeans by Andrew Philip Smith. It explores what their incredible journey tells us about the complexity of their faith. And it's interesting to look at this because when we think of the Abrahamic religions, we usually only think of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. But there's quite a few other religions mixed into the themes of these foundational religions, and there's a lot to learn in this episode, and we're going to discuss some open minded approaches that might completely change your universal view. Andrew Phillips Smith isn't a technical scholar, and he really writes for the layperson, for you and me, and he also includes plenty of references and leans on a couple of the main Mandaean academics who are Western experts on these people. And they're fiercely private. And so finding source material directly from the Mandaeans and their just bore is actually super difficult. And so that makes studying them really hard. And they aren't precisely Abrahamic. They're actually more adjacent. And they might more accurately be called Adamic because they see Adam as their true origin. And that line, they don't particularly care for Abraham or Moses. In fact, they side with the Egyptians in the whole Red sea disaster, and they actually even observe a mourning each year. For when the Egyptians were lost, when the Red sea collapsed back and crushed the Pharaoh's army. In fact, they believe Jesus was just a lazy Mandaean. And who created Christianity to slack off? And that's a true story. So who are the Gnostics? The author has a strong background in Gnosticism, and he believes the Mandaeans are essentially agnostic sects That continue to exist on the fringes of Near Eastern history, even as Gnosticism was eradicated in nearly every other place on the planet. The Gnostics were Christian and Jewish mystics who believed in a more esoteric approach to Christianity and Judaism. The term refers to members of various religious groups that flourished, especially in the first few centuries C.E., primarily in the Mediterranean region. The core belief that defines Gnosticism is the conviction that esoteric knowledge, or gnosis of the divine and the true nature of reality, is the path to salvation and spiritual awakening. And here are some of the key aspects of Gnosticism. It's characterized by a stark dualism between the spiritual and material worlds. Gnostics typically view the material world as flawed or even evil, created by a lesser divine being, rather than this transcendent supreme God and many Gnostic systems, the creator of the physical universe is seen as either malevolent or ignorant deity of the higher spiritual realities, and his creators often identified with the God of the Old Testament, distinct from the true transcendent God who is pure spirit. Gnosis, or secret knowledge, is central to Gnosticism. This knowledge is not intellectual, but it's experiential. And I think if you've ever gotten into mysticism or how mystics approach things, that's what it's about. It's about how do you experience the divine, the universal, you know, that thing inside? How do you experience it yourself? How do you let it flow through you, revealing the spiritual truths about human existence, the divine in the cosmos? Such knowledge is believed to be, for Gnostics, the key to spiritual liberation, Many Gnostics hold a belief in a cosmic redemption narrative, where a figure that can be equated to Christ or another revealer descends from a spiritual realm to impart this gnosis, the secret wisdom that's necessary for the salvation of souls trapped in the material world. So salvation in Gnostic belief, typically revolves around liberating the spirit from the confines of this material world. And actually, if you think about it, you know the path that you're on in the spiritual path that we're all walking. I think we could probably see strong parallels between that line of thought and where we're trying to get to and what we're trying to achieve. And so for them, through the realization of one's divine origin and their rejection of this material and bodily concern, they're getting to that place. They're getting to that secret place, that mystical place. Gnosticism was never a unified or homogenous religious movement, and this label really applied to a diverse group of sects. they had really varying beliefs and practices, and some were Christian and some were were Jewish. And there were pagans that that had, kind of subscribe to this Gnostic idea. And it persisted in various forms, and it really influenced mystical and esoteric traditions that went, way beyond the time where Gnosticism was practiced, the study of Gnosticism. And it has it's evolved. It's been, hugely benefited from the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library in Egypt. This contained a wealth of these ancient Gnostic texts that have been previously completely lost, and they have only been known due to some critical writing that had been written about them. But no one had ever actually seen these texts themselves until the Nag Hammadi scriptures had been unearthed, and that's only been in the last couple hundred years. This has helped scholars better understand the complexities and nuances of Gnostic beliefs. The Ecclesiastical Church kind of hated them, and I that's really actually an understatement, because they killed them all and destroyed nearly all records of the Gnostics. And this was an intentional, brutal campaign. And it was like, exceptionally not cool. It's the kind of thing that really makes you ponder the phrase history's written by the victors. And so take this as an opportunity to find your own way. I'd take this as a challenge for you to look at what history is and is not. Approach knowledge with this open mind and open heart. Really consider what's real, what's not real, and how can you search for these universal truths? And what's a universal truth for you? Might not be a universal truth for me. And keep that in mind. That's probably one of the main takeaways from this episode. Looking at what we know or what we think that we know, and you challenge it. The more that you read, the more powerful you're going to become. But try and not take this knowledge as pure gospel. Compare and contrast different works from around the world, and look at truths that you can so together from across time, you're really going to start to see all these similar threads. As you gain experience on your spiritual path, you're going to be able to convert this knowledge and these threads into this amazing wisdom. And that's how you see beyond or deep into yourself if you want to look at it from another perspective. So how can you take this moment right here from this video and make a change to go out and shift your perspective on how you understand the universe all around you? Hit me up in the comments with how you plan to move ahead in this way, and how do you think it will change your perspective and change the way that you move through the world? If you want to have conversations with others who are exploring spirituality and what it is to them, please join our community at Keesha Dawg. There's a link in the description. This subject is about a melting pot of spirituality. The bandanas are kind of this unidentifiable amalgamation of various Abrahamic and Middle Eastern face. With Zoroastrianism mixed in, and possibly some eastern influences from as far away as India, but nobody knows exactly what their origins are. This book explores all of that, and in doing so, it really opens your eyes to the complexities of religion in the Near East, going all the way back to antiquity. It's kind of this wild ride, honestly. There's there's so much to it, and this only touches lightly on the surface. It even gets into the Hellenistic cultural and religious impact on the Levant and Mesopotamia. And so when you hear about Hellenistic culture, what we're talking about is Greek culture and how it impacted the Levant and the Middle East. There is this great blending of Greek culture with local traditions. It strikes me how interconnected all of these historic Mesopotamian religions are. When you look at them moving between, Mesopotamia to Egypt, to Persia, to the Levant, to Anatolia, in Turkey, modern Turkey, Greece and Rome, it's it's like everything came together and it's like all these different cultures, all these different people of different backgrounds intermixed. And we ended up with this really diverse set of religious traditions, the mandanda really into baptism and I mean really into baptism. It's central to their religious practice. And they perform baptisms all the time, not just as a rite of passage where they, you know, baptize someone when they're younger or when they come into the church or the, the temple, but they perform baptisms of almost everyone almost every single week. And they also do it on special occasions for life events and and special ceremony. So it's always happening. It's just continual process for them. And, and when you look at the fact that their prophet is John the Baptist, it kind of makes a lot of sense. But baptism for the Mandaeans is not only a personal religious act, but it's a communal one as well. It bonds them together, and they hold firm beliefs regarding the sanctity and purity of their bodies. And this belief, it's not just a recommendation, but it's seen as an essential teaching, and it's rigorously upheld within their community. The man and believe we are all exiled in darkness, waiting to return to the world of light. And they're not supposed to, according to their priest. But the Mandaeans are really into astrology. Their priests don't like it, but pretty much to a man and woman they use astrology to live their daily lives. They use it to give their children their primary name when they're born. It's really important to them, And even if astrology is discouraged by the priest, is still has influenced the entire religion. And they're also into ritual magic. Their sacred rituals often involve complex ceremonies designed to achieve specific and particular spiritual outcomes, and these rituals can include symbolic objects, recitations of sacred texts, and specific body movements. And so the purpose of these rituals is typically to invoke divine forces or manipulate spiritual energies in a certain way that aligns with the practitioner's religious goals, such as protection, purification, and healing. They say specific prayers and chants that are integral to performing this ritual magic, and it's believed to invoke spiritual beings or channeled divine energies to make these things happen. Like many Gnostic and mystical traditions, mundane ritual magic involves esoteric knowledge that may only be fully understood or practiced by initiated members of their religion, and that's often their priests. And this really overlaps many other religious and spiritual traditions from around the world. If anyone ever call me a mystic, I think that I would respond with a thank you. That's what it's about. How do we take all this stuff that we read, all this knowledge that we have, that we've turned into wisdom, and how do we convert that into ritual that takes us from this real world that we occupy together to that other place? You could call the other side. You could call that thing deep within yourself. How do we do that? That's what it's all about. Their backstory is filled with contradictions. The Mandaeans keep changing their history and changing the canon of what is and isn't in their religion. It's been fluid, and it hasn't always added up or made sense. And that's really part of what makes it hard to pin down on exactly who they are and where they've come from. Going way back. Their religious leadership holds all the power in this religion. They share very little of the intricacies and the secrets of what they know with the average layperson, the average man. Dan. And this has led to significant losses of knowledge during things like plagues and illness through the ages. And at one point, they lost every single priest that had been alive at that time. But the laypeople had somehow managed to keep everything and kind of hold it together and kind of regenerate the line of the priest in the religion. And we know the man and were heavily influenced, you know, by Christians, Muslims and Jews, especially Babylonian Jews. But they were also influenced by Sumerian and other Mesopotamian and ancient religious practices. because we know that, like some of the earliest recorded, evidence of civilization and writing occurred with ancient Samaria, and some of their traditions go back that far. It's really a complex web. It's something that you could look at and kind of, you know, see these things all connected and it would look like a spider web. So where did they come from? And more modern times before the U.S. invaded Iraq and kind of messed everything up in the Near East, you know, for the foreseeable future, the Mandaeans enjoyed a mostly peaceful existence in southeastern Iraq, in western Iran. But historians believe they have originally come from the land between two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. But they may have also spent significant time closer to the Levant. In the eastern Mediterranean, it's hard to say for sure, but it's also likely that they spent a good deal of time as a desert civilization between Baghdad and northwestern Arabia, and so that would have been this very harsh existence for them during that time. And the fallout of the war in Iraq has left them and Dan scattered across the world now. And this is a difficult situation given their reliance on a close knit and close clergy who hold most of the knowledge of their practices and ways of life. The secret of who and what they are, that's being lost. It's very sad. And there is a silver lining. The good news is there's always hope. some faiths have had this tight hold on their religion and have later had to increase the reliance on lay membership to carry on due to geopolitical or concerns about modernization. And if you look at the history of Judaism, you can see that as a way for them to survive. The Jews entered times where they were moved about and separated from one another. In the Middle East and later in Europe, they were forced to adapt. And this is when the real power of Judaism shifted from the clergy and temple leadership to the household and family level. It sustained them for centuries, and the fact that the main Danes have survived for as long as they have, for all these centuries, given how small they are, Is really quite remarkable in and of itself. It speaks to something inside of them, something that I don't think that we can really even put into words. And now that we've explored this history of this fascinating religion, continue down this path by checking out this video on Judaism, and you'll probably discover something about them that you didn't know. And until next time, I wish you peace on your journey.