The journey – thankfully, not mine – begins in central Iraq. The protagonist turns twenty when his spiritual twin visits him in a dream, ordering him to improve the teachings of an eccentric man killed two centuries before for a religion he didn’t even plan to create. Exactly twelve years later, again in a dream, the spiritual twin comes back to repeat his request, and the young man awakens, declares himself an apostle of Jesus Christ and goes to India with a clear intent: to create a religion.

View of the Cao'an temple. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

Standing on the shore of the muddy Jin river, I’m struggling to understand the concept of spiritual twin. To eyes trained on European dimensions, everything in Asia seems slightly frightening: the intimidating mountain chains that jut out far above the clouds, the yellow void of the deserts, the rivers whose other shore can barely be made out in the mist, the unimaginable masses of people in perpetual motion. In some translations, I remember, it is a celestial or divine twin. Do I have one too? Philosophers of Modal Realism claim that each theoretically possible world is as real as the one we live in, and some of them believe (or at least pretend to believe) that in each one of those worlds there is one me, just a little different. I also remember reading, in Karl Jung’s Memories, that early on in his childhood he discovered a separate person inside himself – an old man with a white wig and iron-buckled shoes – with whom he sometimes conversed. If Buddha was right and “I” really is an illusion, or an overarching process in the cerebral cortex evolved to oversee everything else (including itself), then why, beside the main I-process, there couldn’t be some minor ones, half-conscious, the parasitic frequencies that huddle around the pure tone each time a hammer hits a bell?

After India, where he got acquainted with the local religious ideas, in the mid-third century A.D. Mani returns to Persia in order to teach the religion bestowed upon him by the spiritual twin. He teaches his disciples that there are two worlds: good – light – spirit on one side, vs. evil – darkness – matter on the other. Our universe wasn’t created by God, but by a lower-rank malicious creature that belongs to the material world. That is why our world is essentially evil and unbearably painful, and our task is to somehow extricate ourselves from it. The human soul fell from the world of Light and got tangled up in materiality. However, within itself it still contains thin Light threads, strong and fragile at the same time, as the last link to that other, better place – and the hope of a return.

A whole decade and a half earlier, I stared at the entry portal of Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona thinking of Neo-Platonists: in the middle there is the god, emanating logos, which emanates the world soul, which in turn emanates our small individual souls and finally the matter. It seemed to me that, in Gaudi’s amorphous shapes differentiating from the center towards the edges, I could detect some sort of a homage, a tip-of-the-hat to old Plotinus and his teachings. All of that, of course, only existed in my imagination, for which Gaudi himself is at least partially to blame, leaving his cathedral unfinished when he was run over by a tram car, and then ignored in the hospital because he looked like a beggar; if only he had put some more effort into selecting his attire for the day, maybe the cathedral would have been finished and my musings avoided. Be that as it may, it is almost certain that Mani nicked some of his ideas from the workbook of Plotinus, his contemporary: the farther we are from the source of Light, the more defined, physical, material and miserable we are. Simply put: the more material we are, the more it hurts.

In one of my favorite short stories, H. L. Borges tries to understand Averroes, an Andalusian philosopher who tries to understand Aristotle, and in the end nobody manages to understand anybody, each remaining locked in his own time-space and isolated in the bubble of his great misunderstanding – one of the few constants that we, human beings, can always count on. At the end of the story everyone disappears, dissolved in the impossibility of touch, as Borges realizes the futility of his effort. Sometimes I play that game myself: I choose someone – a beggar in the street or a historical figure, a man sitting opposite me on the metro or one of my distant ancestors from a faded sepia photograph – and try to imagine being him or her. What do I see? What do I feel inside my chest? What am I thinking about? If all the people who have ever lived are connected by some invisible (light?) threads, I say to myself, maybe it would be possible to somehow pick out the thread between any two randomly selected human beings, and then carefully follow it?

Still on the shore of the same Jin river, now under an umbrella, I look at a small boat with fishermen pulling oysters out of a wide estuary. Green bushy aquatic plants float on the surface, and the older houses in this suburb – that once used to be a separate village – are built out of those same oysters. I relish in the knowledge that this very place, the city of Quanzhou, used to be the largest port of the Old World, from which Marco Polo set sails on his final journey home. At about that time, and also from here, the fleet of Kublai Khan sailed out on his ambitious conquest of Japan. Their ships were pulverized by a typhoon (which even now, as the weather forecast informs me, creeps somewhere just behind the horizon). The typhoon that saved Japan from the Mongolian invasion earned itself the name of kami kaze, the divine wind. And in those hard and murky times, on a mountain on the other side of the city, a statue was being carved following the order by a divine twin.

Riffling through scanned specimens of Manichaean scripts (feeling grateful to the Light Deity for the miracle of Internet that enables me to never leave my house) on the websites of various museums, archives and universities, I discover that, in fact, very little has been preserved. The pivotal document on Mani and his religion was discovered in Egypt in 1969, which was hardly breaking news in the year when humans, among other endeavors, landed on the Moon (at the same time planning to destroy their own planet with nuclear bombs). The text was written in Greek by Mani’s disciples “based on his own words”. That was how we found out about the syzigos, the spiritual twin. Using this document, as well as the scripts found in the oasis of Turfan in the Chinese Taklimakan desert, in the Thousand Buddhas Caves in Dunhuang and the writings of St. Augustine (a former Manichaean who abandoned the religion due to a disagreement about the nature of evil), L. J. R. Ort wrote a book in which there is a chapter entitled Mani’s Perception of Self. There I learn that the spiritual twin, after the second revelation in a dream, stayed with Mani for the rest of his life, even at the moment of his death in a Persian prison. He whispered into his ear what to say, how to preach, and traveled around the world with him helping him in the battle against the evil forces of the darkness/matter. I also learn that the young Mani first shared his revelation with his father, who was – upon hearing all that – “amazed” and soon afterwards “converted”. And it is exactly here, says Ort, that we can for a brief moment hear the voice of Mani himself, telling about his childhood and his father. The father who became the first disciple of his own son.

Illustration from a Manichaean manuscript, 8th-9th century.

At the other end of Quanzhou, climbing towards a small mountain temple of Cao'an, I wonder what happens in a man to make him wish to create a new religion. (The same conundrum bugs me when it comes to politicians, military leaders, statesmen: greedy charismatic egomaniacs, or idealists to the bone?) Pulling on the thin Light thread I try to fathom who is on the other side: a trickster or a prophet, a villain or a madman? Or neither? Or all?

Psychologist V. S. Ramachandran writes that localized epileptic seizures in the brain’s temporal lobe sometimes induce the feeling of direct communication with god. People who suffer from this kind of seizures often claim to have seen the all-illuminating light, fathomed the absolute truth that lies beyond the grasp of mortals, clearly felt the presence of angels or heard god’s voice. The effects of the seizure are long-lasting: obsession with theological, philosophical and metaphysical topics and an unbearable urge to talk about it; hypergraphia (compulsive writing, in this case of religious manifestos, treatises, essays, theories). He also mentions his patients who showed him their lengthy manuscripts full of complex symbols and explanations: the holy books with only a single follower. In the late 20th century, scientists Koren and Persinger made a contraption aptly named “God helmet”, which uses fluctuating magnetic field to stimulate the brain’s temporal lobe. The subjects who underwent the stimulation allegedly attested to direct communication with god, visions of long-passed relatives, or the presence of an unidentified conscious being (in a BBC documentary, Richard Dawkins put the helmet on his head and felt, in his words, just slightly dizzy).

At the foot of the rock on which the Cao'an temple was built there is a giant conifer, with a plaque that informs us that the tree was one thousand years old as of March 2016. For a moment I ponder the insufferable Chinese logic – instead of writing the year when the tree was planted, they always write how old it was in the year when it was dated, meaning that in the future every visitor will have to do the adding up – but I instantly abandon that futile train of thought and put my foot on the first step of the staircase that leads to a small building made of red bricks and stones of varying shapes and shades, the temple whose religious affiliation seems impossible to determine from the outside. On the way I stop to take a photo of a wacky insect, who eyes me wearily and then slowly moves away.

Somewhere towards the end of his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins puts forward the possibility that ideas evolve and fight for dominance in a way akin to the evolution of living things. Since the unit of information for the development of living things is gene, he suggests the term meme as the unit of the idea. Some memes are more successful – for example, those that make up the greatest ideologies of our world – while others aren’t particularly tough, so they eventually drop out of the meme pool. Religious ideas – we were told in our Marxist-oriented schools in the penultimate decade of the 20th century – developed as the result of the human inability to understand the forces of nature, from our fear of chaos and randomness. The universe – even if it really was created by a lower-rank malicious demiurge – obviously wasn’t made for us. Not only are we not located at the center of it, but even in our own galaxy we are tucked away at the deep periphery, and so on, in short – nobody and nothing cares about us. But at the same time we feel that we have to matter for something. How to make up these two extremes? At his ripe age, Leo Tolstoy was so tormented by that question that he removed the belt from his trousers every night before going to sleep, lest he should give in to the urge to hang himself: how can something finite, such as human life, have a meaning that is infinite? If only we could somehow forget about the cruel indifference of the universe, wriggle out of the meaninglessness and avoid death! And if we can’t – well, let us at least shut our eyes and avoid ourselves. The ideas that help us do that (or at least promise to do so) are the most successful memes in the history of mankind (except, of course, for those of you who wish to stop being Borges).

Cao'an, the temple on the rock that rises before me was built a thousand years ago, at which time a tree was planted in front of it. A thousand years, I mumble, a bit theatrically, trying to envision the hand putting a sapling into the hole, then burying the root and patting the soil. The planter disappears, and instead of him, in that very same place, I stand under a large canopy. The thought travels the distance of a thousand years in one second.

A 1000-year old tree growing in front of the Cao'an Temple. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

Mani envisaged his teaching as an integrative, ecumenical religion based on Zoroastrianism, supplemented with dualist (good-evil, spirit-matter, light-darkness) teachings of various Gnostics, and then stuffed with the ideas and iconography of other religions that he came into touch with. In a temple in Japan (Seiun Ji, city of Kofu, Yamanashi prefecture) an image of Buddha Jesus has recently been discovered. Some historians of religion believe that the image was made in the Manichaean community in Southern China, in the 12th or 13th century. Buddha Jesus has slant eyes and a wide halo, sits cross-legged on a lotus flower, and holds a golden cross on his chest. The memes of Jesus and Buddha, mixed in the embrace of Manichaeism, merged into one.

Left: Aristotle with a disciple, Arab illustration from 1220. Right: Manichaean Buddha Jesus.

The day before, I clambered around a forested hill in this same city of Quanzhou, looking for old Islamic tombs from the times of Sinbad the Sailor and thinking how everything that comes to China sooner or later becomes China. On the weed-covered tombstones, the image of lotus flower and the bismilah ir-rahman ir-rahim written in Arabic calligraphy sit next to each other. Lotus is also present in the old mosque in the city center, that to an untrained eye looks exactly like any Chinese temple, plus a minaret. The Mongols led by Kublai Khan conquered China in the 13th century, but already the next generations of Mongol emperors spoke Chinese and called themselves the Yuan Dynasty. The great civilization relentlessly pulls towards itself, but its gravity at the same time distorts and adjusts everything to its own needs: Jesus gets to keep his cross, but somewhere along the way he also becomes Chinese, crosses his legs and takes a seat among lotus petals.

Língshān Islamic Cemetery in Quanzhou. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

The small plateau is deserted. The Temple of the Buddha of Light, the arrow says. Under it there’s another arrow that says toilet. The door is open. In semi-darkness on the right side I see another door leading off to a small side chamber, in which an old woman in worn-out clothes sits, staring absent-mindedly at nothing and clicking a rosary in her hand. On the table in front of her there are several jars with pickles or fruit preserves.

Manichaeism is long forgotten in its Middle Eastern cradle. Then it also disappeared in the West, lingering on for a little longer in the mountains, disguised as the religion of the Bogomils in the Balkans (which then lingered on just a little longer disguised in the person of a crackpot painter Lazar Drljača). For the longest time it survived in Southern China, as a once large community that crumbled from one century to another, to finally disintegrate completely. From a religion that once spread on three continents, all that remains is a couple of torn scraps of parchment, several books on history of religion that nobody reads... and the miniature Cao'an temple, today a Buddhist one, without any priests.

A thousand years, I repeat, mockingly, to myself. And if any priest comes to confess me and give me communion, tell him to make himself scarce, and may he give me his curse! ... Men like me should live a thousand years! – bellows, from the edge of death, the sick, aged Zorba the Greek, or at least the man who served as the inspiration for the literary character, if the memoirs of Nikos Kazantzakis – written on the brink of his own death – are to be trusted. But how can one live a thousand years? I will die twice, whispers Ivo Andrić into my ear with some self-pity, once when I leave this world... and the second time... when my lifework disappears.

Eyes are getting used to the darkness. In front of me, in his last temple, sits the Buddha of Light.

He is carved out of living rock that at the same time makes the head wall of the temple and the mountain on whose ledge the whole building sits. At first sight he looks like any typical statue of Buddha, but a closer inspection reveals secret signs, tiny traces, bits of the riddle carved in 1339 during the great renovation of the Cao'an temple, which had then already been more than three centuries old. Long hair falls over his shoulders, and his beard flows down his chest. His brow is prominent and his jaw strong and pronounced. Instead of looking down, as Buddha normally does, Mani is looking straight at me. Instead of having one palm facing upwards and the other downwards according to the Buddhist tradition, both his hands rest on his belly, palms upturned.

Old weasel Borges once wrote that it doesn’t matter what Buddha is, but what he becomes. By the same token, one might say that it doesn’t matter what Mani was – an overexcited boy, a self-proclaimed prophet, a hardcore idealist, a charlatan, the owner of an atypical brain, a twin of his spiritual twin – but what he became.

The statue of Mani in Cao'an, the last standing Manichaean temple in the world.

The statue sits behind a protective glass wall, with a white rectangular reflection of the main door and, trapped in it, my confused face, broken in the glass. In the background there is the crown of the millennial tree and an adjacent hilltop. And I can’t help but wonder how many of us, following the complicated Light threads of our lives, have lingered here, passing a brief moment on his doorstep? And we have all gone.

Disappeared, once or twice.

In Mandaean legends, as well as in those of India and Persia, one finds perpetual reference to wandering dervishes, the wanderers who set out in search of intellectual and spiritual peace.

*

In the following pages an attempt is made to relate what the author has seen, heard, and observed of the Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran. of Iraq and Iran. Observations were made over a number of years and furnish a considerable body of new evidence as to their customs, beliefs, cults, and magic. This evidence, we submit, is useful, not only to the student of anthropology, folk-lore, and ethnology, but to students of the history of religions, for the Mandaeans are what the doctor calls a case of arrested development. Their cults, which are regarded by them as more sacred than their books, and older, have been tenaciously retained; their ritual, in all its detail, most carefully preserved by a priesthood who regard a slip in procedure as a deadly sin. Segregated since the coming of Islam from those amongst whom they dwell by peculiarities of cult, custom, language, and religion, they have kept intact and inviolate the heritage which they had from their fathers.

Mandaeans do not adore the heavenly bodies, but they believe that stars and planets contain animating principles, spirits subservient and obedient to Melka d Nhura (the King of Light), and that the lives of men are governed by their influences. With these controlling spirits are their doubles of darkness. In the sun-boat stands the beneficent Shamish with symbols of fertility and vegetation, but with him is his baleful aspect, Adona, as well as guardian spirits of light. The Mandaeans invoke spirits of light only, not those of darkness. All Mandaean priests are at the same time astrologers.

In the sun-boat stands the beneficent Shamish with symbols of fertility and vegetation, but with him is his baleful aspect, Adona, as well as guardian spirits of light.

The great alluvial plains of the Tigris and Euphrates lie between the Far East and Near East and in constant contact with both. From earliest times, highroads have run from the uplands of Iran, from the steppes of Asia, from the deserts of Arabia, from the plains of India, through what is now modern Iraq, to the Mediterranean seaboard. From the first its inhabitants have been subject to influences from all quarters of the civilized globe and ruled by race after race. There could be no better forcing ground for syncretistic thought. Babylonia and the kingdoms of Persia and Media offered natural conditions favourable to the growth of religious conceptions compromising between ancient traditions and cults, and ideas which had travelled from the old civilization of China by way of the Vedic philosophers of India ideas whichspiritualized, revived, and inspired man's belief in the immortality of the soul, its origin in the Divine Being, and the existence of beneficent ancestral spirits. Moreover, in the five centuries before Christ, there was a steady infiltration of Jewish, Egyptian, Phoenician, and Greeki nfluences into Babylonia. Before the Captivities, Jewish communities of traders and bankers established themselves in the land of the two rivers, while mercenaries and merchants passed to and fro between the Far East and the seaboards of Egypt, Phoenicia, and Greece.

Speculation in the West is mostly conducted from a chair: the adventurer into the realms of thought goes no farther than the laboratory or the study. In the East, seekers after truth were peripatetic : their intellectual vagabondage was physical as well.

The soldier and the merchant, though they contributed as intermediaries in the exchange of ideas, could never, however, have been more than passive 'carriers' of religious thought. In Mandaean legends, as well as in those of India and Persia, one finds perpetual reference to wandering dervishes, the wanderers who, like Hirmiz Shah in the Mandaean story, like Gautama the Buddha in India, or, in medieval times, Guru Nanak, set out in search of intellectual and spiritual peace. Speculation in the West is mostly conducted from a chair: the adventurer into the realms of thought goes no farther than the laboratory or the study. In the East, seekers after truth were peripatetic : their intellectual vagabondage was physical as well. It is certain that where the merchant penetrated, religious wanderers followed; travelling philosophers, ranging from China to India, Baluchistan, and Persia, and from Persia and Iraq to the Mediterranean, using the passes of Kurdistan and the waterways of Iraq.

The Oriental loves metaphysical argument and seeks it: the higher his type, the more addicted he is to this form of mental exercise, and the readier to listen to the opinions of a guest. The result, a leaven of unorthodoxy amongst the intellectual, eventually spread to the masses, first, possibly, as secret heresies, and then as new forms of religion. Here lies the importance of the Mandaeans. Extremely tenacious, while adopting the new at some far distant syncretistic period, they also conserved the old so religiously and faithfully that one can disentangle the threads here and there, and point to this as Babylonian, to that as Mazdean, to this as belonging to a time when animal flesh was forbidden, to that as suggesting a phase when zealous reformers endeavoured to purge out some ancient and inherent beliefs. At such a period as the last-named, the scattered religious writings of the Mandaeans were gathered together and edited. One may surmise that the editors and collectors were refugees, sophisticated priests who, returning to peaceful communities in Lower Iraq, were scandalized at their incorrigible paganism. The emended writings breathe reform and denunciation.

The core or nucleus, of the Mandaean religion, through all vicissitudes and changes, is the ancient worship of the principles of life and fertility. The Great Life is a personification of the creative and sustaining force of the universe, but the personification is slight, and spoken of always in the impersonal plural, it remains mystery and abstraction. The symbol of the Great Life is 'living water', that is flowing water, or yardna. This is entirely natural in a land where all life, human, animal, and vegetable, clings to the banks of the two great rivers Tigris and Euphrates. It follows that one of the central rites is immersion in flowing water.

The second great vivifying power is light, which is repres ented by personifications of light (Melka d Nhura and the battalions of melki or light spirits), who bestow such light-gifts as health, strength, virtue, and justice. In the ethical system of the Mandaeans, as in that of the Zoroastrians, cleanliness, health of body, and ritual obedience must be accompanied by purity of mind, health of conscience, and obedience to moral laws. This dual application was characteristic of the cults of Anu and Eain Sumerian times and Bel and Ea in Babylonian times, so that, if Mandaean thought originated or ripened under Iranian and Far Eastern influences, it had roots in a soil where similar ideals were already familiar and where ablution cults and fertility rites had long been in practice.

The third great essential of the religion is the belief in the immortality of the soul, and its close relationship with the souls of its ancestors, immediate and divine. Ritual meals are eaten in proxy for the dead ; and the souls of the dead, strengthened and helped, give assistance and comfort to the souls of the living.

The appellation 'Subba' (singular Subbi) is a colloquial form which this people accept as referring to their principal cult, immersion; but the more formal name of their race and religion, used by themselves, is Mandai, or Mandaeans. Arab authors have sometimes confounded the Mandaeans with the Majus, or Magians, and not without reason, since

the cults are similar. Travellers in the East were wont to refer to them as 'Christians of St. John', and Europeans who have come to Iraq since the Great War know them as 'the Amarah silverworkers'. As the community is small and peace-loving, with no political aspirations, it has no place in history beyond the occasional mention of its existence, and the record that some of the most brilliant scholars of the early Moslem Caliphate were of its way of thought.

Today, the principal centres of the Subba are in Southern Iraq, in the The Mandaeans (or Subba) of Iraq and Iran marsh districts and on the lower reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris ; in the towns of Amarah, Nasoriyah, Basrah, at the junction of the two rivers at Qurnah, at Qal'at Salih, Halfayah, and Suq-ash-Shuyukh. Groups of them are found in the more northerly towns of Iraq: Kut, Baghdad, Diwaniyah, Kirkuk, and Mosul all have Subbi communities of varying size. The skill of the Subba as craftsmen takes them far afield, and Subbi silver-shops exist in Beyrut, Damascus, and Alexandria. In Persia the Mandaeans were once numerous in the province of Khuzistan, but their numbers have diminished, and the settlements in Muhammerah and Ahwaz along the banks of the Karun river are not so prosperous or so healthy as those in Iraq.

Like the followers of other secret religions, the Mandaeans, when talking to people of another faith, accentuate small points of resemblance between their beliefs and those of their hearers. To inquirers they will say, 'John is our prophet like Jesus' (or 'Muhammad', as the case may be) 'is yours'. I soon found that John the Baptist (Yuhana, or Yahya Yuhana) could not with accuracy be described as 'their prophet' ; indeed, at one time I was tempted to believe that he was an importation from the Christians. I became gradually convinced, however, that he was not a mere accretion, and that he had real connexion with the original Nasurai, which was an early name given to the sect. Mandaeans do not pretend that either their religion or baptismal cult originated with John; the most that is claimed for him is that he was a great teacher, performing baptisms in the exercise of his function as priest, and that certain changes, such as the diminution of prayer-times from five to three a day, were due tohim. According to Mandaean teaching, he was a Nasurai; that is, an adept in the faith, skilled in the white magic of the priests and concerned largely with the healing of men's bodies as well as their souls. By virtue of his nasirutha, iron could not cut him, nor fire burn him, nor water drown him, claims made to-day by the Rifa'i darawish.

Jesus too, according to Mandaean theologians, was a Nasurai, but he was a rebel, a heretic, who led men astray, betrayed secret doctrines, and made religion easier (i.e. flouted the difficult and elaborate rules about purification). The references to Christ (Yshu Mshiha) are, in fact, entirely polemical, and for the most part refer to the practices of Byzantine Christianity which awake horror in Mandaeans, such as the use of 'cut-off' (i.e. not flowing) water for baptism, and the celibacy of monks and nuns. The Haran Gawaitha (D.C. 9) mentions the establishment of Christian communities on Mount Sinai. In the cults, Jesus and John are both unmentioned.

Jesus too, according to Mandaean theologians, was a Nasurai, but he was a rebel, a heretic, who led men astray, betrayed secret doctrines, and made religion easier

During the British occupation and the early days of the mandate, as one walked between the Subbi silver-shops in River Street, Baghdad, one sometimes saw a board announcing the proprietor to be a 'St. John Christian', but these, now that Iraq has a national government, have disappeared.

*

The religious writings of the Mandaeans have never been printed. Down through the centuries, priestly scribes who derived part of their income from such labours copied them by hand for pious Mandaeans who believed the possession of holy books ensured for them protection from evil in this world and the next. Few laymen could, or can, read or write Mandaean ; literacy is mostly confined tothe priestly class. Laymen have complained to me, 'The priests will not teach us to read or write (Mandaean)'. The reason is a practical one : if laymen knew these arts, the priest's prestige would suffer; moreover, writing of talismans and charms would cease to be a priestly monopoly. Mandaeans have nothing to compare with the Gospels which, in their claim to recount the life and teachings of Jesus, have a certain unity, or of Manichaean books containing the actual doctrines of Mani. The Mandaean religion has no 'founder', indeed, from the critical standpoint, few religions can be said to have 'founders' or to be 'new'.

*

In the year 1622, a Carmelite father, R. P. Ignatius, was despatched by the propaganda in Rome to the Nestorians of Mesopotamia. Whilst in Basrah, he met with members of a sect who, as is their custom when dealing with Christians, told him that their prophet was St. John the Baptist. From them he obtained a roll illustrated by curious drawings of beings which they described as angels or demons. On his return to Rome, Ignatius published a treaatise in Latin about this interesting group of "heretics" whose ceremonies were at once like and unlike those of Oriental Christians, and whose creed was so "strangely perverted and pagan".

The roll found its way into the Museo Borgiano in Rome, where Julius Euting was it in 1879. Euting was deeply interested and persuaded a friend, Dr. B. Pfortner, to photograph the manuscript. This photograph was published in Strasbourg in 1904, under the title "Mandaischer Diwan nach photographischer Aufnahme, von Dr. B. Pfoertner mitgeteilt von Julius Euting". It was not translated.

Early in my dealings with Mandalean priests in the marhes of Lower Iraq, I was shown a copy of Diwan Abatur and after long negotiations, it was arranged that I should have the roll that I had seen after its owner had copied it for himself. The copy was made with skill and care, and the original sent to me. Judging by the paper and other indications, my roll, D.C. 8 of my collection, is about the same date as the manuscript taken to Rome by Ignatius. Neither the Borgian manuscript nor mine is dated, although each has a long list of copyists, showing that the text was an ancient one. A considerable part of the beginning is missing from the Roman roll, but I have been able to compare the remainder of the Borgian manuscript with my own. I discovered no other copy of the text in Iraq, although, of course, other priests may have concealed possession of a copy since, in spide of the inferior and childish quality of the composition and mistakes due to constant recopying, it is looked upon as a precious and holy book.

The illustrations, archaic and suggestive of a Cubist form of art, are identical in both manuscripts. The Subba are clever artists and craftsmen, but tradition dictates that representation of celestial and infernal beings must follow a certain pattern. Drawings like these in the Diwan Abatur are found in the ritual rolls, so that we have here no childish inability to portray a subject, but deliberate convention of a very individual order. A Subbi smith who drew naturalistic pictures for engraving on his silverwork, when asked by me to draw pictures of some celestial beings, produced similar odd geometrical-looking designs.

For the ethnological profession, the Belgrade settlement of Kalmyks, a West Mongolian people from the Volga River's lower reaches, is interesting as an example of a small community in the cosmopolitan metropolitan area, as a contribution to the ethnological appearance of Belgrade and, finally, as a fragment of Kalmyk history in emigration.

Most Kalmyks came to Yugoslavia in December 1920 with a group of 22,000 soldiers, accompanied by family members. This is the part of the Wrangl and Denikin units that were evacuated from Crimea before the penetration of the Red Army and transported to special camps near Constantinople, from where they dispersed across various European and overseas countries. There were many Don and Cuban Cossacks in this army with whom the Kalmyks lived mixed or in a close neighborhood (for example, some Cossacks adopted from the Kalmyks the Lamaistic form of Buddhism) (2). During the Russian Revolution and the Civil War, the Kalmyks, under the leadership of Russian and Cossack officers, established two regiments, the 80th Don Dzungar and the 3rd Don Kalmyk Regiment, and parts of Kalmyk cavalry were also located on the other side of the front line, in the Red Army units.

Some Kalmyks arrived in Yugoslavia in 1922, when the last anti-Bolshevik units had to withdraw from Vladivostok.

The majority of Russian immigrants in Yugoslavia lived in Belgrade. Among them were many aristocracy members, landowners, contractors, clerks, and officers; people of farmers’ origin were relatively numerous, and very few were representatives of the proletariat (3).

The fact is that, after settling in Belgrade and other European cities, poverty forced many immigrants to accept difficult physical jobs and turn into some sort of proletariat; however, they still retained "the cultural-spiritual interests and needs of their former social strata" (4).

Buddhist temple in Mali Mokri Lug, Belgrade – the look of the altar in different periods.

Taking all this into consideration, the group of Kalmyk refugees, upon their arrival in Belgrade, represented the poorest class of Russian immigrants, both in material and socio-educational terms. Josip Suchy, who visited the Belgrade settlement of Kalmyks in 1932, noted that they were engaged in transportation, employed in factories and engaged in traditional local crafts as well as agriculture. There were almost no intellectuals among them, with the exception of doctors and two students at the Belgrade University (at the Faculty of Civil Engineering and the Department of Philosophy) (5). For this reason, the book by Belgrade-based Kalmyk, Dr. Erenzhen Hara-Davan, on Genghis Khan and his successors, published in Belgrade in Russian in 1929 (6), was a remarkable achievement. The work is entitled "A Cultural and Historical Description of the Mongol Empire from the 12th to the 14th Century" and is dedicated to the 700th anniversary of Genghis Khan's death. The author described the beginnings and expansion of the Mongolian state, and paid special attention to the Mongolian occupation of Russia and the Balkans and argued that it brought a number of positive consequences. The book aroused interest in international professional circles, and the author prepared a lecture on "Genghis and Mongolian penetration into Europe" (January 7, 1928) at the University of Belgrade (7).

In the first years after the Kalmyk settlement in Belgrade, an effort was made to adapt to the new environment, which was partly facilitated by the fact that all Kalmyk settlers, in addition to their Kalmyk language, also knew Russian, and thus learned Serbian faster. Those who originated in the northern foothills of the Caucasus also knew the Circassian language.

A Kalmyk leader, a Lamaist Buddhist priest, shortly after the arrival of a group of fugitives in the Yugoslav capital, asked Belgrade-based industrialist Milos Jacimovic to allow them to work at his brick mill in Mali Mokri Lug. He employed them and gave them land next to his facility. From the brick they received for free in the factory, they built 20 to 30 single-story houses and moved into them from the rented houses where they used to live. Each house was shared by two or three Kalmyk families. The living conditions were modest. Beside the houses were gardens, a common well and a common toilet. Not only those Kalmyks who worked in the brick factory, but also some of their relatives, settled in these houses.

Most Kalmyks in the beginning worked on the exctraction of clay and on its transportation to the brickyard. Over time, some of them bought themselves horses and started their own businesses; they also worked in wood, coal and similar industries. Some of them became coach drivers. Thus, in the new environment they continued the tradition of horse breeding, which they practiced on their native Don grasslands. They also did some home-made crafts.

The man was the head of the family. The Kalmyk women in Belgrade did not look for jobs, but contributed to the family budget by making slippers and fur jackets that they sold at the market (8).

The men first wore Russian military uniforms upon arrival to Belgrade (9) and later simple civilian suits that made them no different from Serbs in the surrounding area. The geographical location on the outskirts of the workers' settlement of Mali Mokri Lug proves that Belgrade's Kalmyk colony was a completely marginal community in socio-economic terms. With the gradual improvement of the economic position of individual families, their living needs increased. Thus, in the early 1930s, many Kalmyk children continued to high school education (10).

The Kalmyk community was quite closed to the outside world, linked within by their common language and origins, by the common fate of the immigrants, and by their affiliation with the Buddhist religious community. Contacts with the wider environment and Kalmyks living abroad were rare. Only the Kalmyk priests maintained links with their countrymen living in Paris, from which high religious dignitaries who occasionally participated in rituals occasionally came. They were not politically active. Although the Soviets proclaimed an amnesty for war refugees (1923), and the Kalmyk Society for Return to Homeland, headed by Bosan Kushlinov, did some propaganda, they did not choose to return to the Soviet Union.

They began to associate more freely with the Serb farmers of Mali Mokri Lug (who only knew them by the name "Chinese"). There were several mixed marriages between Serbs and Kalmyks. Kalmyk children were playing with their neighbors’ Serbian children. They also had a football pitch, the so-called "Chinese playground". They attended elementary school together.

"There have been several mixed marriages." From the Politika's photo archive.

The Kalmyk religion was Buddhism (Lamaism) with additions of Mongolian shamanism, with a pantheon of native pre-Buddhist deities and cults of historical figures (Genghis Khan, and also the imperial dynasty of the Romanovs). In 1932, there were a total of 300 Kalmyk immigrants in Belgrade, plus a few who lived in the vicinity of Pancevo, in the village of Debeljaca and in Gornji Milanovac (11). The custom of solidarity prevailed among the members of the community, which was reflected in the provision of mutual assistance and also in attending religious ceremonies and controbuting to the Kalmyk Lamaist temple.

In 1924, the high priest baksha (12) Manchu Birinov, asked and obtained official permission to arrange a tentative Buddhist shrine in a rented apartment in Mali Mokri Lug. It was a modest space, covered with carpets and decorated with several symbolic figures, with a bronze figure of the Enlightened in the background (13). Baksha Borinov, dressed in a dark blue priest's uniform, head covered with a round, gold embroidered cap, was the chief adviser to his countrymen in all life's decisions, visiting them at work and encouraging diligence and patience (14). In November 1929, the Kalmyks built a pagoda-shaped brick sanctuary, a hurul, on a piece of land donated to them by Milos Jacimovic. They built it themselves, collecting voluntary contributions (one of the donors was Princess Jelena, sister of King Alexander), and some funds were provided by the municipality. During the period between the two world wars it was the only Kalmyk sanctuary in Europe, outside the Soviet Union. At the consecration, in December 1929, the high priest, baksha Namdzlo Nimbusov of Paris and the Belgrade baksha Sango Umaldinov were present together with two gelongs (15). On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the shrine, a solemn ceremony was held in the premises in honor of the benefactor Milos Jacimovic. On this occasion, the Kalmyks presented him with a thank-you note written in a beautiful script, which his grandson later donated to the Belgrade City Museum. After the ceremony, the guests were offered tea and cakes in the next room. When Jacimovic died in 1940, Kalmyks also attended his funeral ceremony.

The tradition of wooden buildings was present in the architecture of the Kalmyk temples, and since the late 18th century they were also built of brick and stone. The main temple usually had a large central room with a vaulted tower, richly decorated with carvings, murals, paintings and bronze sculptures (16). The Kalmyks had their religious center near Astrakhan (Kalmyk Bazaar), in today’s Russia. This is where the Great Llama lived before the October Revolution. The wooden building of the main shrine in the area had an interior decorated with silk paintings (17). In addition to the larger permanent temples, they also had mobile smaller shrines in their yurts (18).

Compared to the temple compounds usually built by the Mongols and Kalmyks, the Belgrade Buddhist temple was small and modest. It was built in the form of a pagoda with three slightly upturned roof edges (one of the basic types of Mongolian shrines, where Chinese architectural influence is seen). It was standing in a fenced yard, surrounded by fruit trees. Next to the shrine was an added building with rooms for priests and a classroom where Kalmyk, Russian and Serbian languages were taught.

Classroom at the Kalmyk Buddhist Temple in Belgrade. The title reads: "A school that works once a week, has two subjects, and doesn't punish students for skipping classes".

From the roof corners of the Belgrade pagoda hung metal bells (protection from demons) that chimed in the wind. A lamaistic symbol was attached to the top of the roof – the vajra. (19) Above the front door, on the front of the building, was a Buddhist symbol: two gazelles and between them, on a lotus flower, a wheel of Buddha's teaching with eight parts. There was only one window on the ground floor, and four openings on each of the two upper floors.

Vajra is a Buddhist symbol of a lightning strike, invincible truths or absolutes, an attribute of Tibetan deities, and a ritual object during Lamaist rites.

The Kalmyks apparently brought the sanctuary equipment with them from Russia. Across from the entrance, in the lodge, was an altar on which, in addition to two Buddha statues, there were religious objects and relics, and beneath them were bowls of sacrificial gifts. To the left of the altar, in front of the windows, were two low tables, seats for two Lamaist monks and shelves for storing religious texts. On the walls were traditional religious paintings, tankas, and photographs of religious dignitaries. The floor was made of ordinary wooden boards, covered with cheap, factory-made carpets. The high ceiling was supported by four wooden, vividly painted pillars with Buddhist symbols (the wheel of Buddha's teaching, a lotus flower, etc.). Buddhist flags (white, red, yellow, blue, green) hung from the ceiling.

On the tables of both priests were laid out lamaistic ritual objects: rosary with 54 beads, ochira (double vajra), cymbals, sacred records in Tibetan, a rope for contact between the believers and the priests, a bowl with various grains and seeds, a bowl with water, a bowl with a peacock feather (boom pa), incense and scents.

Buddhist temple in Belgrade, exterior and interior. Photo by Dr. H. Klar.

A brief but valuable description of the interior of the sanctuary was published by Josip Suchy during his visit to the Belgrade Kalmyks in 1932. His report shows that the equipment has been somewhat modified and supplemented over time.

"There is a pleasant shade in the Buddhist temple. The windows are covered with beautiful curtains so that it is quite dark in the sanctuary. From the ceiling hangs an electric light bulb and a large glass ball. In the middle of the temple, against the wall, is an altar on which the Buddha himself sits in an oriental manner. Above him, two Buddhist saints reign, the first of whom is a former Buddhist chief, called the Bakshama Lama. On the altar are gifts from Buddhist believers. Just today (mid-July) they celebrated with a great feast and the believers bestowed on Buddha what they could in their misery. Some of them rice, others sweets and cakes... I also saw a ten-dinar coin on the altar... There are pictures of other high priests and prophets of the Buddhist faith hanging on the sides. On the right side of the altar there are mattresses on which gelong sits during a religious rite lasting at least three to four hours. "(20)

Buddhist temple in Belgrade - the interior. From the Politika's photo archive.

Suchy also took a photo of the exterior of the shrine. During the major holidays, the Kalmyks of Belgrade set up a table in the sanctuary's garden, covered it with donated food and beverages, drank tea mixed with butter, milk and salt, and feasted on horse meat, according to some reports. In the new environment, some holiday customs were lost or altered. For example, of the three traditional men's competitions: running, archery and wrestling - only the last one was preserved.

Lamaist priests who lived in celibacy and obeyed the other commandments of monastic life were the undisputed leaders of the Kalmyk settlement in Belgrade. And otherwise they enjoyed a greater reputation than people who lived a worldly life. Most Kalmyk lamas were descended from pastoral families, and only the highest lamas usually belonged to the aristocracy. They knew the language of the scriptures – Tibetan and Old Mongolian, and were proficient in Tibetan medicine and astrology. As members of the gelugp sect, they recognized as their highest religious leader the Tibetan Dalai Lama. In him they saw the incarnation of the bodhisattva of Avalokiteshvara.

The Kalmyk clergy supervised the life of each family and participated in all aspects of their lives (for example, the gelong chose names for babies, determined the wedding day, treated the sick, performed funeral rites) (21). This also applied to the Kalmyk colony in Belgrade.

Believers attended Lamaist rites for several hours, expecting spiritual purification and "salvation" in the next reincarnations. It was about the well-being of the visitor as well as the whole community. In addition to the daily service, their religious calendar also included significant dates from the Buddha's life, such as the Full Moon Feast, the New Moon Feast, the Tibetan New Year, and others (22).

During World War II, some Kalmyks of Belgrade left and became German soldiers on the Eastern Front. The Germans promised to establish a "free Kalmyk state" somewhere in the occupied territory of the Soviet Union. They also urged civilian expatriates to organize their own government.

Kalmyk Buddhist Temple in Belgrade, now inexistent.

In the fierce fighting for the liberation of Belgrade, which took place in the immediate vicinity of Mali Mokri Lug from October 12 to 16, 1944, the upper part of the tower of the Kalmyk shrine was partially destroyed. Even before that, a part of Kalmyk community had gone to Germany, and after German defeat they were deployed to camps run by US charities. Thus, with a group of Kalmyks, the Belgrade's high priest (baksh) Umaldinov and his associates, Helonzi Menjkov and Ignatov, also arrived to Germany. They probably brought with them the interior equipment of the Belgrade temple. Baksh Umaldinov, who was already an old man, died in 1946 in Krumbach, Bavaria. Those Kalmyks who remained in Yugoslavia were mostly deported to the Soviet Union after the war (and subsequently to Siberia, where the Kalmyks from the Soviet Union had been deported in 1943). (23). The Kalmyk colony in Belgrade thus completely disappeared.

Other tenants have moved into the houses on what used to be Buddhist Street, later called Budva Street. In 1948 the tower of the temple was demolished, and the building was transformed into a Cultural Center, where meetings, dances and weddings were organized. Later, in that same building, the local municipality had its premises, and then it was taken over and partly renovated by the company Buducnost (Future), to be used as their refrigeration facility.

Kalmyk refugees (800 people, including some of the Belgrade Kalmyks) lived in detention camps near Munich until the winter of 1951-1952, when 200-250 Kalmyk families moved to the United States under the patronage of the US Church World Service and The Tolstoy Foundation (in total around 650 people). They were later joined by their countrymen from France, so in 1980 the Kalmyk community in the USA numbered about 300 families, with approximately 900 people. They were settled mainly in the US states of Pennsylvania and New Jersey (24).

—

Retrieved from: Traditiones, Acta Institutes Ethnographic Slovenorum, iss. 17, 1988. Published in Journal of Culture of the East no. 25, YU ISSN 0352-4019, July-September 1990. Translated from Slovenian to Serbo-Croatian by Tatjana Latinović. English translation: The Travel Club.

—

Footnotes:

1. Among the informants, we are most grateful to Mara Stevanovic, Lomina 57, Belgrade.
2. Helmut von Glasenapp, Der Buddhismus in Indien und im Fernen Osten, Berlin-Zurich 1935, p. 347.
3. Nikolai Fedorov, "Russian Emigration", Croatian Review, 1939, no. 7-8, pp. 373. Aleksije Jelacic, "Russian Emigration in Yugoslavia", New Europe, 1930, no. 4, p. 242.
4. N. Fedorov, n.d., p. 372.
5. Joseph Suchy, "Visiting Buddhists," Morning, 1932, no. 1971, p. 5.
6. Dr. Eugene Hara-Davan, Chingis-Han as a Commander and His Inheritance, Author's Edition, Belgrade 1929, ch. i: Irena Griekat-Radulović, "Kalmici in Belgrade", Politika September 13, 1985, p. 12.
7. They included the book in their bibliography e.g. Ralph Fox (Gengis Khan, Hamburg-Paris-Bologna 1936) and Reinhold Neumann Hodizz (Dschingis Khan, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1985).
8. Slavoljub Kacarevic, Where did the "Chinese Pagoda" disappear?, Politika, September 8, 1985, p. 12.
9. Zeitschrift fur Buddhismus 1924/25, Munich 1925, no. 2, p. 388.
10. Suchy, at nav. site.
11. Ibid.
12. Baksa - Senior Lama, "Faith Master", who helps people with advice.
13. Gl. whop. 9.
14. Right there.
15. Belgrade Guide, Belgrade, 1920. Gelong (Tibet. DGe-slong) - an ordained monk, who completed a 12-year education under the guidance of an elder Lamaist monk.
16. The Bolshevik Soviet Encyclopedia, Vol. 11, Moscow, 1973 (3rd ed., Pp. 223-224).
17. Glasenapp, n.d. p. 347.
18. Drawing of the Kalmyk Shrine in the Yurt, by R. Karutz, Die Volker Nord - und Mittel - Asiens, Stuttgart, 1925, p. 69.
19. Vajra (Tibet. RDo-rje) - symbol of lightning, invincible truth or absolute. The attribute of Tibetan deities and ritual object during Lamaist rites.
20. Suchy, at nav. site.
21. Kalmici, c. Naroy of Peace, Peoples of the European Honor of the USSR II, Moscow, 1964, p. 745.
22. Giuseppe Tucci.Walther Heissig, Die religionen Tibets und der Mongolei, Die Religionen der Menschheit, Bd. 20, Stuttgart-Berlin-Cologne-Mainz 1970, p. 166-167.
23. Koldong Sodnom, The Destiny of the Don Kalmyks, Them Very Clergy, Author's Edition, USA 1984, p. 150.
24. Arash Bormashinov, Kalmyks, v. Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups, Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 1980, p. 599.

the girl was purified with smoke, painted red, and dressed in a black costume

During the time preceding the sacrifice she was treated with kindness and respect, but it was forbidden to give her any article of clothing. Only the leader of the war party and the chief of the Morning Star village could touch her after her dedication. A man who broke this rule was thought to have offered himself in her place and if he died before the time of the sacrifice she would be released.

The ceremonies preceding the sacrifice occupied four days, the victim being killed on the morning of the fifth. The rites performed during the first three days are not fully known, but apparently consisted in the singing of songs relating the exploits of the Morning Star and in the offering of smoke and dried meat to the Morning Star bundle. At the origin of the skidi pawnee sacrifice beginning of the ceremony the girl was purified with smoke, painted red, and dressed in a black costume which was kept in the Morning Star bundle between sacrifices. Her captor was also dressed in a costume from this bundle and throughout the ceremony the two seem to have personified respectively the Evening and Morning Stars. A fire of four logs laid with their points together and their ends extending toward the four directions was kept burning during the four days. About sunset of the fourth day the spectators were excluded from the lodge while the officiating priest drew four circles on the floor, one for each of the four world quarters. They were then readmitted and the priests sang a song descriptive of the journey of the Morning Star in search of the Evening Star while one of the priests danced about the lodge with a war club and obliterated the circles. The priests then began to sing a long series of songs believed to have been given by the Evening Star. As each song was finished a tally stick, taken from a bunch kept in the Morning Star bundle, was laid down, Dr. G. A. Dorsey (6) concludes that the idea underlying this part of the ritual was that the girl at first belonged to the world of human affairs but that, as each song was sung, she became farther removed from it until, when the last tally was laid down, she had been won from the people like a stake in a game and belonged to the supernatural powers. When the songs were finished, one of the priests undressed the girl, painted the right half of her body red and the left half black, and redressed her. The whole assembly then set out for the place of sacrifice.

House of the Skidi Pawnee people.

At the place of sacrifice a scaffold had been erected on the afternoon of the fourth day, the selection of the site, cutting of the timber for the scaffold, etc., being attended by special ceremonies. The scaffold consisted of two uprights and five cross-pieces, four below and one above. The two uprights symbolized night and day, the four lower bars the four directions, and the upper bar the sky. Below the scaffold was a pit lined with white feathers which symbolized the Evening Star’s garden in the west, the source of all animal and plant life. Two men led the girl from the lodge to the scaffold by thongs fastened around her wrists. She was kept in ignorance of her fate as long as possible and it was thought an especially good omen if she mounted the scaffold willingly. The men leading her removed her clothing and tied her hands to the upper bar and her feet to the highest of the four lower bars. The procession was timed so that she would be left alone on the scaffold at the moment the Morning Star rose. When the Morning Star appeared, two men came from the east with flaming brands and touched her lightly in the arm pits and groins. Four other men then touched her with war clubs. The man who had captured her then ran forward with the bow from the Skull bundle and a sacred arrow and shot her through the heart while another man struck her on the head with the war club from the Morning Star bundle. The officiating priest then opened her breast with a flint knife and smeared his face with the blood while her captor caught the falling blood on dried meat. All the male members of the tribe then pressed forward and shot arrows into the body. They then circled the scaffold four times and dispersed. The priests remained. One of them pulled out the arrows and laid them in four piles about the scaffold. The body was taken down and laid on the ground with the head to the east, and the blood-soaked meat was burned under the scaffold as an offering to all the gods. Finally, songs were sung describing the eating of the body by various animals and its final turning into earth. Dorsey (4, p. 67) says: ‘‘There is reason to believe that an abbreviated form of the ceremony was held each winter in December, at which time the ritual only was sung and the smoke offering performed.’’

The earthly beings were primarily the guardians of the medicine-men while the heavenly beings were the guardians of the whole people.

Wissler and Spinden (7) have pointed out that the Morning Star sacrifice has a number of features in common with the human sacrifices of the Aztec and suggest that its presence among the Pawnee may be due to diffusion from Mexico. The principal resemblances to the Mexican practices lie in the association of the sacrifice with a worship of the heavenly bodies, the impersonation of a deity by the victim, and in parts of the actual procedure. An analysis of the Pawnee ceremony shows that although some of its features were probably of foreign origin its underlying concepts and most of its ritual were in perfect accord with the general body of Skidi beliefs and practices. The Pawnee recognized a great number of both heavenly and earthly beings. The attributes and powers of these beings were more clearly defined than was usually the case among the Plains tribes and the most important of them deserve to be classed as gods. The earthly beings were primarily the guardians of the medicine-men while the heavenly beings were the guardians of the whole people and the rivers of most of the village and tribal sacred bundles. Nearly all the heavenly beings were identified with stars. Although our data on the other Caddoan tribes are rather scanty, stars figure largely in the mythology of all those for which we have information and it seems probable that a worship of the heavenly bodies was common to all the peoples of this origin of the skidi pawnee sacrifice  stock. It was such a basic feature of Pawnee religion that if its presence was due to diffusion from Mexico this diffusion must have occurred at a very ancient time. The impersonation of a diety by the victim in the Morning Star ceremony is suggestive of one of the Mexican practices, but the resemblance is not very close. In the Mexican rites cited by Wissler and Spinden (7, p. 54) the victims were sacrificed to the deities whom they had impersonated. In the Pawnee rite there was a double impersonation, the captor taking the part of the Morning Star and the girl of the Evening Star. The victim was not offered to the deity whom she had impersonated but to another being who had conquered that deity. Impersonations of deities occurred in other Pawnee ceremonies as well. Dorsey (6) says: ‘‘A man who has offered seven eagles to the heavenly deities may furnish a robe and other accessories used in a certain ceremony when one of the greatest of the heavenly beings, Paruxti, becomes represented in the bundles. He then becomes the earthly representative of that deity for the season. During all this season he neither cuts his hair nor his nails; he wears only a buffalo robe; in short, conducts himself as Paruxti did when he visited the earth.’’ The Morning Star ceremony was plainly a re-enactment of the conquest of the Evening Star by the Morning Star and, as such, was quite in agreement with the general pattern of Skidi ceremonies.

A Skidi Pawnee "winter count" calendar made on buffalo hide, tracking winters from 1800/1801 to 1870/1871.

Dorsey (op. cit.) says: ‘‘In theory the Skidi Pawnee ceremonies all have as their object the performance either through drama or through ritual of the acts which were performed in the mythologic age. The ritual is a formal method restating the acts of the supernatural beings in early times, and by this recitation of a ritual the deities of the heavens have their attention redirected toward the people on the one hand; on the other hand, people are reminded of the deeds which were done for them by the heavenly beings. The relationship between man and the supernatural world is renewed with the result that the supernatural beings, being pleased at the attention, which is usually in the form of sacrifical rites, bestowed upon them, continue their protection over the people.’’

The idea of sacrifice entered into practically all the Pawnee bundle ceremonies and the offering of sacrifices to the heavenly beings was one of the surest roads to the spiritual and social advancement of an individual. Dorsey (op. cit.) says: ‘‘The Morning Star told the people that he gave them bows and arrows with which to kill animals, telling them to get on the right side to shoot so that the arrow would go through the heart. As he had given them fire sticks the animal should be placed on the fire so that the smoke might ascend to the beings in the heavens. In these sacrifices by fire the blaze and smoke carry the prayers to the above, thus the smoke is the prayer bearer. This form of sacrifice was graded, the value ranging all the way from the sacrifice of the first bird shot by a boy with a toy bow to the sacrific of a human maiden to the Morning Star. When about to make such a sacrifice to the heavens, it was customary before using the bow, the instrument of death, to pronounce the name of the Morning Star. This pronounced upon an animal or human being is the dooming to death, or it may be compared to a curse. Apart from the human being who was sacrificed to the Morning Star certain animals were especially sought after for sacrifice. These were various birds, culminating in the eagles, except the white eagle, which was never sacrificed, and certain animals such as the deer, antelope, wild-cat, otter and buffalo, culminating in the sacrifice of a human scalp or human maiden.’’

the offering of sacrifices to the heavenly beings was one of the surest roads to the spiritual and social advancement of an individual

It is plain that no foreign origin need be sought for such features of the Morning Star ceremony as its association with a star cult, the impersonation of a deity by the victim, or the underlying idea of sacrifice. The killing of the victim with a single arrow through the heart was also in accordance with the tribal pattern, for animal victims were supposed to be killed in this way. There are, however, other features of the ceremony which seem at variance with the pattern. Thus, although human sacrifice was only the highest of a long series of graded offerings among the Skidi, there is no proof of its existence, except in the form of scalp sacrifice, among any of the other Pawnee. Animal offerings were brought in dead and offered through fire. The human sacrifice had to be taken alive and was not burned. Moreover, the use of a scaffold, the touching of the living victim with flaming brands and clubs, the opening of the thoracic cavity and offering of blood, and the final shooting with arrows by all the men present find no parallel in the other tribal ceremonies.

-

Extract from The Origin of the Skidi Pawnee Sacrifice to the Morning Star by Ralph Linton, American Anthropologist, vol. 28, 457–466, published in 1926.

Jinn are invisible to humans, but they do on occasion present themselves in the form of animals, plants, human-like beings or even inanimate objects. The ancient collection of jinn illustrations, known as Mehmed Siyah Qalam (known in Turkish as Siyah Kalem, meaning "Black Pen") contains around eighty paintings of jinn, who are represented as anthropomorphic beings.  

While man was built from clay and angels from light, jinn were created from smokeless fire.

It is unknown exactly when and how Mehmed Siyah Qalam came into existence. As the pictures are of varying sizes and artistic styles (many of them influenced by Chinese, Persian, Turkish or Mongol artistic traditions), it is believed that the collection was compiled over several centuries, receiving its current form in the late 14th and early 15th century. One theory is that it might have served as a storytelling prop at the Persian royal court.

Most of the illustrations in Siyah Qalam show jinn, but some also contain historically valuable portrayals of nomadic life, as well as rituals related to the last rites and the culture of the dead.

Even though jinn predate the Quran, they have been acknowledged in it and later as Islam spread across the world so did the they. They found their place in a wide range of cultures, from the Maghreb to the Balkans and Middle-East, all the way to Indonesia. These mythical beings are even present in today’s Western World. The word jinni has been anglicized to genie, and the stories from “Arabian nights” have served as the inspiration for Disney’s classic “Aladdin”, with Robin Williams’ as the benevolent Genie. They have been among us for many centuries and it seems that they will stay for many more to come, with all the mischief, apathy and good will that they had with them so far.

Many of the portrayals of jinn have been inspired by the illustrations in Mehmed Siyah Qalam. The collection is nowadays kept at Topkapi Palace Museum in Istanbul, where it is believed to have arrived following the Ottoman war with Persia in 1514.

Religion and nation –
My soul refused them both.

1) Very little is known about Yunus Emre, the famous 13th-century Turkish dervish poet. The data are scarce, and academics do not consider them authoritative. They consist mainly of ornate hagiographies of Bektashi origin. (The Bektashis later developed into a dervish order, and sought to portray all sorts of folk saints as part of their own brotherhood). Nonetheless, the legends of Yunus still paint a vivid picture of those times, as well as of the virtues attributed to the dervishes. He seems to have lived sometime between 1240 and 1320. His spiritual teacher was Taptuk Emre, a student of Sari Saltuk, a member of the "Heroes of the Roman Provinces" (Gazian-i-Rum), who were sometimes called by the Central Asian, Turanian nickname – Alp Eren – the one who reaches heights. Sari Saltuk was allegedly a Turkmen from Crimea. He arrived in Anatolia in the twelfth century, where he connected with one of the many groups of "Spiritual Heroes".

Yunus was most likely educated in Konya and then traveled the world to finally arrive at the Sarikoy tekke, near Eskisehir, in whose courtyard he was buried. According to popular hagiographies, he went to join the dervishes in times of famine and scarcity, after visiting Sari Saltuk, who was said to distribute wheat to the people. Yunus, with his donkey, went to the tekke to ask the holy man for help. Saltuk told him that he would gladly give him as many sacks of wheat as the donkey could carry, but that it would be better and more useful for him to forget the wheat and ask the dervishes for a blessing. Yunus replied that one could not live from blessings; mentioning his wife and children, he thanked him nicely and took the wheat. But on the uphill road to the house, he suddenly realized that the wheat would be eaten quickly and that everyone would be hungry again, so he returned to the tekke. After that, he spent fifty years as a lumberjack, the "wood collector" for Saltuk's famous friend Taptuk Emre. Silently, he collected dry wood and sticks, taking care not to damage any living plants. Only later did he become a poet. In his conversations with the Truth, he calls himself: Dervish, Ashik, Eren, Emre, Pauper and Beggar.

You, who do not understand,
You think I'm without faith.
Where can I put my faith,
When I have neither heart nor soul?

He is considered to be the first poet of Asia Minor to raise Turkish to the level of a literary language. Court critics were not always happy to recognize him, because he did not adhere to Persian and Arabic poetic forms. However, they were also forced to accept the spiritual power of his poems, claiming that "ilahiyyahs" or mystical inspirations and meditations, do not belong in beautiful literature. In this way, they tried to reduce his poetry to a shamanic-magical level. Despite harsh criticism, Yunus Emre is today considered a poet who had a strong influence on the development of Turkish literature as well as classical court music. After his death, a whole cult developed around his poems. He had a number of imitators, making it difficult for modern experts to separate his original poems from those written after his death. One of the interesting examples of this trend concerns a certain stubborn man named Mullah Kasim, who reportedly decided to censor Yunus Emre's poetry after the poet's death. Sitting in the woods by the creek, he began throwing non-orthodox verses into the water until he came across the following lines:

Yunus, be careful,
you twisted the words again.
One day Mula Kasim will come
To set you straight.

Upon reading these lines, Mula suddenly realized his own bigotry, but it was too late, as is usually the case. Thus, one third of Yunus Emre's poems went to fish and other aquatic creatures, the other was saved by birds and pulled out of the stream, and only the last third was left to humans.

2) Part of his opus consists of "mesnevis" and "nutuks", or didactic poems, composed according to the standard formulas, where he explains the basic concepts of Sufism: purification of spirit and summarization of personality, and human vices as opposed by virtues: greed-restraint, desire-patience, etc. Explaining the path of purification, he often sings about the lives of biblical and Qur'anic personalities as well as Sufi saints. These include the stories of Joseph, Edhem of Balkh – the Muslim version of the Buddha's life (also known as Ibrahim ibn Adham, or Ibrahim Balkhi), Mansur Hallaj, the famous mystic who was executed for claiming that he was the Truth, and so on. Through "mesnevis" and "nutuks" he also tries to prove his own orthodoxy and education, and then emphasizes that only after a person becomes a master of orthodox Islam can he surrender to mysticism or Sufism, which is a more humane approach to religion. He invites to the dervish tariqat only those who are able to adhere to that steep and difficult path and do not long for paradise and bliss, and who will, he claims, be judged according to Sufi laws, not according to "Muslim" ones. At the same time, he cannot resist mocking hypocritical theologians as well as Sufis.

The tomb of Yunus Emre in Eskisehir, Turkey - one of his many purported tombs found all around Turkey.

The second part includes spiritual hymns or "ilahiyya", aids in condensing the spirit, recited as dhikr, i.e. a ritual of mentioning God’s names and gathering thoughts. The most important characteristic of "ilahis" is a strong sense of rhythm, as they lose meaning if they are not accompanied by adequate music, which Yunus often alludes to with a play on words. A special cycle could include "devriye" (overturns), also a typical form of dervish poems; their intention was to evoke the indestructibility and universality of the world spirit.

The dervish needs to understand that his body is an empty shell.

3) Similar to eminent court poets, Yunus composed a classical spring ode, the so-called "bahariya", according to Persian patterns, whose goal has always been to awaken the zeal of life. The majority of his poems, however, are lyrical, somewhat simpler, reminiscent of the "kosmas" inherent in the Turkish folk poetry of Central Asia. Their goal was to "for a moment" stop the thoughts that run through the head (kosma, or kosuk – something that runs), which as a rule should be allowed to disappear, but from time to time poets catch them to convey the spirit. In his lyrical poems, Yunus does not pay attention to courtly poetic forms and complicated Arabic metrics. He often returns to his favorite topic of the transience of life. There he expresses doubt in life and, through conversations with the Truth, longs to extinguish his "I"; this longing leads the dervish to place himself on the "bonfire of love", in order to clear the space in the soul. Man reaches such heights when God has mercy on himself, because only with mercy can the worldly suffering, necessary to extinguish one's own personality, be endured. The dervish needs to understand that his body is an empty shell. For that purpose, a lot of his poems consist of meditations in the cemetery. When a man realizes his own nothingness, he reaches the ideal of a dervish and then becomes a "majnun" – one who has completely lost himself. Thus purified, he is able to hear the inner voice of intuition and to be a real man: "Er", the one who reaches the truth through wisdom.

In his poems, Yunus Emre explains dervish ethics, the ethics of heroes, superhumans, unattainable to the common man who (still) believes in heaven and hell. A strong sense of rhythm and frequent use of puns is of course lost in translation, which makes it difficult for the translator to fully conjure up the feelings that Yunus himself was trying to arouse.

*

Is there a companion
On this futile road?
In search of a home
We are looking for a brother in vain

Why we settled here
Under a heavy yoke
Who will accept our burden
And who is our reason?         

They left us
Let's have some fun
You built a house, poor thing
Who is tearing it down?

Deceived, we have not
Reached the heavenly thrones
But who creates and dissolves
Deceptions and thrones?

Come on, Yunus
You have already calmed down
You are among the last on the road
And who is the first?

*

I was walking along the path when I met
A branched tree.
I was happy
My heart was pounding.

Tell me:
Why did you branch out?
Isn't the world transient?
Your own luxury
Is proof of that

Come on, be more modest
So beautifully adorned
Seemingly comfortable
And cheerful

Your heart yearns for the truth
And it doesn't know what it's missing.

The tree is a century old
The branches offer to the birds
A short respite

Neither a pigeon nor a magpie
They haven't come yet,
To perch on you.

You'll be gone in no time
You will become soil
Like ordinary wood, your branches
Will use to warm up a cauldron

And you, my Yunus
What is wrong with you?
You're advising a tree!
Let it be!

*

Everywhere I look
I only see you.
Where can I put you?
Is there a deeper darknesses?

You are impersonal.
Why do they seek your image?
Is there an image
Inside of ourselves?

Don't ask me about myself
I'm not here either

My face walks blankly
In empty clothes

The unattainable
Took me away from myself.

*

How to reach nothingness
Whoever sees it
Becomes it

The ray only illuminates you
If your essence is bright

My love has long ago
Taken away my ego

What a sweet pain,
That pain within the pain.

*

Sharia and Tariqat
Trails for wanderers
Truth is wisdom
The essence of the road.

"Suleiman knew
The language of the mute. "
But the real Suleiman, where is he?
Not here.

The rites disappear
At the bottom of the soul
They have no purpose
In that depth.

*

If you want a lesson,
Come,
Visit the graves.
Even a stone would melt
To see them.

They used to have
Vain riches
I am watching them now.
Well, here they are
In the only shirt
A sleeveless one.

Those who
Had everything
Palaces and castles
Now lie crammed
Under the same roof
The stone covers them.

Where are those heroes?
Their house
Was too small for them

Where are their
Sweet mouths
And sun-like faces?

It's all lost now.
Lost.
Without a trace.

Now look,
And tell me: Who is the master,
Who is the servant?

No door to walk through
No guards,
And no food.

Nor is there light for them
To see their today
Turning into yesterday.

Ashik mourns in all languages
Tears stream down his cheeks
And me, in these foreign lands,
Will I face death?

*

Longing for calm
I'm trying to find the land of a Friend
To offer him my own being
Will I never find loneliness?

*

You unfortunate one,
There is no consolation for your pain.

Go on, wander from city to city -
You're a stranger like me.

I was an Ashik too
Traveled in Greek
And the Persian lands,
And in Yemen ...

*

Oh Yunus, you will arrive.
Rub the dust from your feet onto your face
Maybe the Truth will
Have mercy
And stay by my side.

Poor thing, you long for holiness
Heaven and earth are full.

Under every stone
There is the infinite, holy Truth.

If my soul disappears
Be her life
Awaken the dead heart
Let it jump

Let death be life
Let eternity be sought
And awaken the dead heart

It's easy when you're here
Be the light for the eye
That looks at nothingness.

*

Ashik's soul is dying.
The dervish is poor,
His eyes are full of tears,
He moves slower than a sheep.

No, you're not a dervish
Muhammad was gentle
You often get angry
While this anger is in you
You can't be a dervish.

My dear Yunus
Why are you always arguing
As long as such anger holds you
You won't be a dervish.

If you like to fight
Why do you need hands
If you swear
Why do you need a tongue
If you're a dervish
Why do you need a soul?

*

Sirat is thinner than a hair, sharper than a sword
"A house should be built on it"
Below is hell, a glowing pit
"We dream of resting in its shadow"

Good luck to you, sages of God,
on your way to hell.

(Sirat is a bridge which, according to Muslim tradition, souls cross after death)

*

This world is a big city
Life - the bustle of the market
He who strays is gone
Forever.

Illusions about the city
Lure all sorts of fools.
A series of adventures and miracles,
Tricksters and vampires.

The city has a ruler,
It protects us all;
If you get closer to it
The nothingness clears up.

Religion and nation –
My soul refused them both.

Those who understand that,
Why do they need a heart, or a soul?

You, who do not understand,
You think I'm without faith.

Where can I put my faith,
When I have neither heart nor soul?

Prayers are formless
If you live in love,
And the tongue falls silent
When its words are gone.

How to measure love
In the market without losses and gains.

Love washes away wealth
Of those who renounce both good and evil.

We neither curse nor fear.
We have lost our shell.

*

I am the rulerŽ
The one who stops everything

I'm a hero
And I'm a battlefield

I'm a highwayman
I'm fearless

Strength comes from truth
And that's me

Abu Bakr and Omar
Honorable believers,
Both Ali and Osman
It's all me.

I'm hitting the ball,
I'm the stick
And a field on which
The ball rolls.

And now I'm Yunus
And I am the sultan's slave
And I am the sultan
It is me.

*

Before I was born, I was alone
Pure love
Light without a trace.

I was aware in the presence of that vain power
I had neither a friend nor a companion,
Before the world came into being
Before the word was uttered.

Before the tablets were stolen
I was a sublime force
I came and went countless times

Created creatures, and to this one
I gave the name Yunus.

Let's start with a nice word
Let us fill the heart with zeal
Let us repeat along the way: La ilaha illa Allah

That fills the heart with happiness
Wards off the nigthmare, lifts the soul
La ilaha illa Allah

Opens the door, seeks the Truth
Extracting deep secrets from the dust
La ilaha illa Allah

*

Tambourine, where are you from, what are you
I ask nicely, answer me, whisper
Yes, I am wood and lambskin
Forget, listen to me and don't go crazy.

I know the Truth, I never cheat,
I don't know where I'm from, they told me
That I am a board, that I know about love
Love gave me a name.

I came merrily, I filled the world with hope.
Behold, in the midst of my living heart they cast me out,
The tree cast off its bark and fell
Into the sea of ​​love – there's no other way:
Now the tambourine follows the speech of truth.

"Remember that day and night are with you,
Angels, the tireless scribes
One writes the good, the other the evil,
Remember the Almighty ”.

Ah, and the tambourine is no different
From the world's sages!

*

The song of spring

Spring breeze again
Blows pleasantly
A breath that prevents
The dignified winter

Immeasurable mercy gives us back
Nightingale's song,
The new summer has come
And luck smiles on us

Fresh soil, precious
Taking out new dresses
The life has come back
Trees, grasses – adorned

And they were dead
Love gives them now
New life. New name.

Offspring sprout and bloom
Down fields and wastelands

A stream leaps drunkenly
The worlds are sowing seeds

The universe is rejoicing
While the soil paints its face
In various colors

The nightingale sings, looking at the rose
Life sways on the branches

Yunus, you Ashik, emerge
From nothingness!

The pride is destroyed
So better get drunk
From the cup of love.

—

Bibliography:
Abdulbaki Golpinarli, Yunus Emre, Hayati ve Butun Surleri, Istanbul, 1983.
Mehmed Acikgoz, Yunus Emre Divani ve Siirleri, Istanbul
Fuad Koprulu, Turk Edebiyatinda Ilk Mutasavviflar, Ankara, 1981.
Alessio Bombaci, Storia della Litteratura Turca, Milano, 1962.