Drower, E. S. - The Secret Adam. A Study Of Nasoraean Gnosis

by

 

E. S. Drower, 1960

https://archive.org/details/DrowerE.S.TheSecretAdam.AStudyOfNasoraeanGnosis/mode/2up

The Secret Adam – a Study of Nasoreaen Gnosis by E. S. Drower takes us deep into the pre-Christian spirituality of the ancient Persia. Still today there are remnants of the Mandaeans (“Gnostics”) also known as Sabaeans in Iraq who among other had a tradition of baptism. Their knowledge are historically accessible through a vast amounts of scrolls. In The Secret Adam, E. S. Drower outlines the history of the people, their thoughts and secret knowledge.

Ethel Stefana Drower née Stevens (1 December 1879 – 27 January 1972) was a British cultural anthropologist who studied the Middle East and its cultures. She was considered the primary specialist on the Mandaeans, and the chief collector of Mandaean manuscripts.

She was a daughter of a clergyman. In 1906 she was working for Curtis Brown, a London literary agency when she signed Arthur Ransome to write Bohemia in London.

In 1911, she married Edwin Drower and after his knighthood became Lady Drower. As E. S. Stevens, she wrote a series of romantic novels for Mills and Boon and other publishers. In 1921, she accompanied her husband to Iraq where Sir Edwin Drower was adviser to the Justice Minister from 1921 to 1946. Her works include The Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans (a translation of the Qolusta); The Secret Adam (Mandaeans); and The Peacock Angel (about the Yezidis).

INTRODUCTION
BY the rivers of ‘Iraq and especially in the alluvial land of AlKhaur 
where the Tigris and Euphrates squander their waters in
the marshes, meeting and mating at Qurnah before they flow
into the Persian Gulf, and in the lowland of Persia along the
Karun, which like its two sister rivers empties into the Gulf,
there still dwells the remnant of a handsome people who call
themselves Munduiiu, Mandaeans (‘gnostics’), and speak a 
dialect of Aramaic. When the armies of Islam vanquished the
Sassanids they were already there and in such numbers that the
Qur’Hngrantedthem protection as ‘people of a book’, calling them
‘Sabaeans’. To that name they still cling, both in its literary form
and as the vernacular q-Subbu, for it ensures their existence
as a tolerated community. The word (from SB’, Syriac ua )
means ‘submergers’ and refers to their baptism (mqhtu) and
frequent self-immersion. In the ninth book of his Fihrist ul-
‘ulzim, Al-Nadim, who wrote in the tenth century, calls them
ul-Mu&tasiluh, ‘the self-ablutionists’.
I chose none of these names when writing of them in this book
for, though this may appear paradoxical, those amongst the
 community who possess secret knowledge are called Nqruiiu
Nqoraeans (or, if the heavy ‘s’ is written as ‘z’, Nazorenes). 
At the same time the ignorant or semi-ignorant laity are called
‘Mandaeans’, Mmduiia-‘gnostics’. When a man becomes a
priest he leaves ‘Mandaeanism’ and enters tumidutu, ‘priesthood‘.
 Even then he has not attained to true enlightenment, for
this, called ‘Neirutha’, is reserved for a very few. Those possessed
 of its secrets may call themselves Nasoraeans, and ‘Nqomean’ 
today indicates not only one who observes strictly all
rules of ritual purity, but one who understands the secret doctrine.
When the head priests of the community learned some years
ago that two of their number had permitted certain scrolls to
pass into my possession they showed resentment and anger.
These scrolls, they said, contained ‘secrets’, knowledge 
imparted only to priests at ordination and never to laymen 
 or to outsiders. Their attitude is understandable. When I  
was advanced enough in their language to read these documents,
 I found at intervals stern insistence on secrecy. Only ‘one in a thousand
and in two thousand two’ would be found worthy of initiation
into certain mysteries and any initiate who permitted them to
become public was doomed to punishment in this world and
the next.