There is, however, another tradition about John and the medieval period that sticks up stubbornly, refusing to settle. Once allowed into the mind, the idea never quite goes away, regardless of strong rational impulses for dismissing it. I refer of course to the mystery of Baphomet, an image, a head, alleged to have been revered by Knights Templar during interrogations of Templars that took place after Philip the Fair of France seized the Order in 1307.
BAPHOMET
If you ask a Mason today why Freemasonry enjoys a “John the Baptist” connection, he might well say it is because many Masons believe that in some way they derive from Templars. Pressed, he might mention something about a head “worshipped” by Templars, held by enemies as heretical, but really harmless. This is not the place to enter into the historicity of such ideas; they are, anyway, components of fringe-Masonic mythology, which contains much “Johannite” material. Somehow, John has become linked to the “head” or caput mortuum (death head) touched by some Templars with the waist cords of their dress in the thirteenth century. The late (after 1725) Masonic 3rd Degree ceremony does deal with facing death and emerging, raised, from the threat of the “King of Terrors,” but any idea of a link to a thirteenth-century figure called “Baphomet” seems hopelessly strained.
Templar interrogation records reveal that the head, which may have had two or three faces, was respected as a source of fertility and germination. There is obviously a link here with the idea of the “Lord of Midsummer” and the summer solstice. While some scholars reckon the word Baphomet was simply a corruption of “Mahomet” and employed to accuse Templars of apostasy to the Islamic faith, esoteric scholarship has tended to focus on the possibility of the name’s being derived from the Greek words baphēmēthra, that is, the baptism of “mithra.” Mithraism was a cult very popular with Roman soldiers, involving degrees of initiation. The Roman cult was probably derived from Iranian traditions of a redeemer called Mithra. In the Roman cult, Mithra slays a bull, drawing from it the promise of life, and everlasting life. Mithra (Roman form “Mithras”) was seen as sharing a banquet with the god of the Sun: Sol. This is all very suggestive of course.
When Thomas More wrote his famous Utopia (1516), he resolved religious dissension by inventing a country where everyone worshipped the source of universal life. The deity was known to Utopians as Mithra.
A figure called Mithra also figures prominently in the Gnostic Manichaean religion, which flourished in the East in late antiquity; St. Augustine was a Manichee “hearer” until hearing of the “Word made flesh.” As in the Enochian speculation, trouble in the Manichaean universe stems from the mixture of higher and lower realities, the realms respectively of light and of darkness, a crossing of the boundaries, in which events the Primal Man, called Ohrmazd in the Iranian form of the religion, is temporarily captured by Hylē, that is, matter. In response to this holding back of the encroachments of darkness, the king of light sends a being described as “the beloved of the beings of light,” “the great architect,” and “living spirit” to issue an awakening call to the trapped Primal Man. The living spirit’s work of salvation results in the Primal Man’s redemption. The name of the redeemer, in Persian, is Mithra.
Where the connection with John the Baptist?
Well, apart from the hypothesis that “Baphomet” referred to a “baptism” of Mithra, we may consider how in Islamic tradition, which the Templars encountered at close quarters, the prophet Idris, the “Green One” or “Evergreen,” is commonly associated both with Elijah and with Enoch. As an “incarnation” of Elijah, and arguably of Enoch also, the prophet John is thus brought into relation with Idris. In Islam, Idris is a saint and prophet whom God raised to heaven. He may appear when miraculous help is needed. The Qu’ran describes Idris as a man of truth, sincerity, constancy, and patience. Remarkably, in this regard, the Sabians (meaning “bathers,” the Islamic word for the Mandaeans) relate how they received their religion from Adam’s realization of God as Life, passed on to the prophets Seth and Idris (Enoch).
We may recall how Muslims in Damascus and Aleppo credited the relic of John the Baptist’s head with miraculous powers. Readers may draw what conclusions they will from these deeply related images and ideas, but before we leave this realm of speculation, we cannot avoid mentioning a notable painting discovered in a cottage in the village of Temple Combe, Dorset, England. The painting shows a severed head. Most who see it instinctively relate it to John the Baptist, rather than Jesus, the other obvious candidate for a bearded, long-haired icon. It has been carbon-dated to ca. 1280 CE, when the Templars held a commandery at Temple Combe. Temple Combe became the property of the Knights Hospitaller after 1307, when four knights were arrested, following the accusations of Philippe of France. The painting may have been a Templar object; it has a haunting quality.
There is undoubtedly a mythic dimension to the head of John the Baptist. It is on the head of Jesus, for example, that the Holy Spirit alights. From the mythological perspective, the blood of the Lord of Midsummer would have given form to ideas of rebirth and fertility, of raising and the power to return. The chaff must die, the harvest beaten on the threshing floor, winnowed in the spirit and the waste burned with fire, so the seed may live again in humankind, as food, drink, and the promise of renewal in creation. The secret is in the head of John that must be “cut” that he may live again in the spirit. John is thus lord of the season of the great Light, closest to the sun, and he is raised a Master; the “Jewel” rests on him first. We may, if we wish, conclude that the position of John has become a thing obscure to Masons either because it was hidden—and afterward forgotten—or it was suppressed and the comparatively wooden mythos of the slain Hiram, worker of brass, somehow nudged its way in by 1730. But if the spirit of John lives on, then we may glimpse that through John perhaps, the spiritual Templar has been reborn in our own times.
THE MANDAEANS
The claim of the Mandaeans that John the Baptist was their last prophet must be taken seriously. Other than the Kurdish Yezidis, whose doctrinal origins are more problematic for the historian and philosopher of religion, the Mandaeans are undoubtedly the last, attested sect to survive the first great Gnostic movement on Earth; their testimony is of inestimable value, as was recognized by the world’s greatest scholar of Gnosis, Hans Jonas (1903–1993).
Mandaeans do not claim their religion began with John the Baptist, but that what John believed, they share also. Primarily, that belief is in the efficacy of water baptism as the principle mode by which purification of the faithful is effected; baptism is vital for salvation. To the Mandaeans, John is a Mandaean. But “Mandaean” is not their original name, coming as it does from their word for knowledge: manda. Mandaean initiates are called “Nasuraiah” in Arabic, that is, Nasoraeans. They consider themselves “Guardians” (their term) of a primal revelation, an authentic, distinct, monotheist religion.
There is no a priori reason to doubt that Mandaeans were once historically linked in some manner to the “church” of John the Baptist. Kurt Rudolph (Gnosis, Harper & Row, 1985) is convinced their origins must originally have been Jewish but that the link with anything like normative Judaism has long been effectively severed. It would make sense then if the Mandaeans’ forebears dwelt in Samaria and were Samaritans, with Samaria’s closeness to those parts of the Jordan where the fourth Gospel shows both John and Jesus baptizing. Samaritans were estranged from Jerusalem and its temple cultus. Readers may recall Pontius Pilate’s vicious suppression of Samaritan religious enthusiasts in 36 or 37 CE. The proto-“Gnostic heretics” Simon (called “Magus,” fl. 50s CE) and his disciples Satornilos and Menander came from Samaria and taught in Syria and Syro-Phoenicia.
We read in the fictional “Pseudo-Clementine romance” (ca. third century), an anti-Pauline, Jewish-Christian polemic in the Jamesian tradition, the astonishing story that Simon Magus was not only an Alexandrian Jew (like Apollos) but also John the Baptist’s leading disciple, so gifted indeed that John would have
chosen Simon to succeed him but for the fact Simon was in Egypt when John was executed. Instead, according to the romance, John’s disciple Dositheos, another noted heresiarch, took over John’s church until Simon returned to usurp the position. While the author of the anti-Pauline romance may have been deliberately confusing Simon with Apollos, there may be something in the Acts story of Simon trying to purchase the “gift” of passing on the Holy Spirit from the apostles, the act that gave us the word simony. That is to say, we may be seeing the conflict between the John water baptism and Paul’s spirit baptism in an alternative form. We are clearly witnessing the surviving propaganda of rival churches.
It is especially significant then that the Nag Hammadi Gnostic text, Concerning Our Great Power, thought by scholar of Gnosis Kurt Rudolph to derive from “Simonian” speculative sources, begins with the words, “He who would know our Great Power will become invisible. And fire will not be able to consume him. But it will purify and destroy all your possessions.” We may detect here an echo of Paul’s caveat about the fire in 1 Corinthians 3 noted in chapter 10, here reappearing in a suggestively Johannite setting.
The church father Hyppolitus (Refutatio VI, 9–18) records a remarkable self-designation of Simon as “he who (formerly) stood, stands and (again) will stand.” Other sources give Simon the honorific title “he who stands,” a remarkable instance of “pillar language” based on the Malachi prophecy that asks, “Who will stand?” when the Lord comes into his temple, as well, perhaps, as a nod in the direction of the Syrian pillars of Seth. Seth was himself claimed by Gnostics as a patriarch and redeemer figure whose “three steles,” that is pillars, give us the title of another Nag Hammadi Gnostic composition, The Three Steles of Seth.
Standing and facing the sun is a persistent motif of what we may call broadly the John tradition. Lucian of Samosata in the second century apparently observed descendants of north Syrian “Nazerini” formerly noted by Pliny in the early 70s CE. Lucian’s “Daily Bathers” in the north Syrian Euphrates prayed to the sun, conducted dawn baptisms and ate honey, milk, and wild fruit.
The sun is the visible god whose radiance, as it were, hides the invisible God of the Gnostic, the Gnostic being he who will “become invisible. And fire will not be able to consume him.” The spirit of the Gnostic is redeemed into the invisible image of the Primal Man after a succession of ascent-trials; this is the Mandaean-Nasorean redemption also.
Unlike the Mandaeans, the Pseudo-Clementine romances take the Primal Adam (Man) to be Christ, though, following the Gnostic view, the Primal Adam is still the “great power above the creator,” an ideology associated with Dositheos, derived through Simon from his alleged master, John the Baptist. Paul was also aware of the “Primal Adam” theory. Paul held Jesus to be the “Second Adam,” a restoration of the primal or heavenly Adam whose link to humankind had been sundered by Adam’s “original” sin in the garden (paradeisos) of Eden, according to Paul. The Mandaeans found that the Primal Adam concept did not require a Jesus figure. The Man is the Man.
The Mandaeans’ “Secret Adam” is identified with the third descendant of Adam, Enosh, son of Seth: “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enos: then began men to call upon the name of the LORD” (Genesis 4:26). Enosh in Genesis restores the link between humankind and what the Mandaeans call the “Life.” “Enosh” is the Aramaic for “Man” and the Mandaean language is of an Aramaic type, though Mandaean employs its own distinct script, examples of which have been found on bowls from as long ago as the fifth century CE.
The Qu’ran accords respect to “Sabians” and while the precise origin and reference of the Qu’ranic term Sabian is debated, the fact that the Syriac root Sabu’a (“Washed Ones”) appears in Arabic as “the Subba” has ensured until recently that the “Sabaeans of the marshes” or Mandaeans have been protected by Muslim authorities in Mesopotamia and Persia, though accorded dhimmi or inferior status, like Jews and Christians under strict Islamic law.
To Mandaeans, John the Baptist is “Yahya Yuhana” or “Yahya as-Sabi” whose father was Abba Saba Zachariah. John’s teacher was Enosh, or “Man” (Hebrew: Adam), that is, the heavenly Man. This is consistent with my assessment of the term “Son of man” as denoting a person who has seen the divine image of Man in the Light of God.
Since the Allied invasion of Iraq in 2003, the largest Mandaean centers in Iraq, in Baghdad and Basra, whose priests have conducted their baptismal rites at the Shat al-Arab marshes where the Tigris and Euphrates join for well over fifteen hundred years, have suffered continual persecution and human-rights violation. Extremists have murdered and are murdering Mandaeans. Occasionally, the killings are opportunistic. The Mandaeans have long survived by organizing the gold and silver markets in Basra and Baghdad. Sectarian murders for ostensibly religious reasons are often inspired by a desire to rob shops and kidnap family members for money. The result is that a community estimated before the war at some fifty thousand souls has been reduced by exile to about five thousand. Mandaeans have found asylum in Jordan, Syria, Australia, Canada, the United States, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
In July 2004, Yuhana Nashmi, a “Tarmida” or first-stage Mandaean priest, gave a talk at the Liverpool Museum in England to highlight the plight of Mandaeans—problems, which I might add, that are also shared by the Yezidis in northern Iraq—and to give an insight into the Mandaean religion and the challenges to Mandaean survival in the modern world.
It had taken nearly two thousand years for a member of an authentic John tradition to speak about his religion in the West, for the Mandaeans do not proselytize. One wonders how many devotees they might find today if they did.
According to Yuhana Nashmi, Mandaeans believe in one God, Haii Rabi, meaning the Great Life, or the Great Living God. His universe has many mansions, of which life on Earth is only a part. Mandaeans understand that a conflict between good and bad characterizes our world. The good is the light (Nhora) and is represented in flowing, living water (Maia Haii); the bad is the dark (Hshokh) and represented as dead and salty water (Maia Tahmi). These principles achieve a balance on Earth, where there is a mixture to be found in all things.
After this life, the soul has the opportunity to enter the “world of light.” The soul (Neshemtha; the Hebrew Neschama) belongs to the Great Life and will return to it. On returning to God, the soul receives a body of light and life (Damotha). To reach the world of Light, it is necessary to render an account of one’s life on Earth.
Mandaeans believe in repeated baptism (Masbuta). Baptism cleanses the Mandaean faithful of their sins, preserving the soul from the negative effects of earthly life. In Iraq, little tributaries were traditionally taken off the Tigris for the purposes of baptism in flowing water. The tributaries, called “Jordans,” further testify to the ancient presence of the “nasuraiy ī ” (Nasoreans) or “elect of righteousness” (bhir ī zidqa; Hebrew zedek) in ancient Palestine. Mandaeans can still be seen on special occasions in their white robes and turbans immersing their fellows three times and crowning their heads with myrtle. This is probably a more accurate picture of the real John the Baptist than that provided by either Hollywood or Renaissance masters.
Yuhana gave an interesting account of the role of “manda,” knowledge, in the contemporary Mandaean scheme of life. Rather than speak of manda or gnosis as an initiated mode of spiritual salvation, or special esoteric knowledge, he spoke of knowledge in its conventional sense of education. Education and knowledge of the universe, along with a commitment to peace and nonviolence were ways to reach God. The Great Life, he said, is a “significant resource of knowledge.”
The first to realize Haii’s existence was Adam, the first prophet. His son Shetel (Seth) was the second prophet, followed by Sam (Shem) son of Noah, and finally the last prophet Yahya Yuhana, John the Baptist. John was the last Rabi, that is, the highest rank of Mandaean priest, to have lived on Earth. The second rank is the Reshama, or “Head of the Nation,” of whom there ca
n be only one (and no one in the role at present). Below this rank is the Ganzbra (or “Treasurer,” for Mandaean knowledge is a treasure). The Ganzbra is someone of distinguished religious education and perception. Currently, four Ganzbras live worldwide. The Tarmida is the initial rank of priest. He can perform ceremonies such as weddings but is regarded still as a student of the Mandaean religion. In 2004 Yuhana Nashmi was one of about thirty Tarmidas alive in the world. Tarmidas are assisted by the Shkanda whose presence is needed for important rituals.
The Mandaeans possess a surprisingly extensive literature, of which the most important work is the Ginza, “Treasure” or “Great Book.” The “Right Ginza” contains much theology and mythology. The smaller “Left Ginza” contains hymns for the mass of the dead, devoted to the soul’s ascent through the “kings” (melki) or angels. I saw a video recently of a Mandaean priest in Sweden who was upset because he experienced great difficulty in carrying out the baptismal mass of a dead Mandaean on account of the corpse having been consigned to a Swedish state hospital morgue. Mandaean custom requires the swift washing of the body with proper rites and prompt burial; the priest was frustrated at not being able to take control of the dead person’s body due to state bureaucracy. Mandaeans in England have found it hard to find suitable places of flowing water appropriate for regular baptisms.
The Mysteries of John the Baptist Page 27