Free Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell

“The eggplant will disappear for three thousand years” apparently means that there were three months of the year when the eggplant should not be eaten.
    E. S. Drower was a good friend of the Mandaean community (a “dear sister in faith,” as one Mandaean priest called her). Yet even she only managed to see their holy texts after nine years of asking. When the head priests of the community found that she had succeeded in deciphering some of their scriptures, they reacted, in her account, with “resentment and anger. These scrolls, they said, contain ‘secrets,’ knowledge imparted to priests only at ordination and never to laymen or outsiders.” As she read the manuscripts, she found that their introductory pages were inscribed with curses on anyone who revealed them to the uninitiated.
    The books that Drower read can today be seen in an underground vault belonging to the Bodleian Library in Oxford. In those books, and in Drower’s published transcriptions of oral legends told to her by Mandaeans in the 1930s, I discovered more about their radical mythology and the amazing characters that populate it. There is Krun, the flesh mountain, who sounds a bit like Jabba the Hutt; as Drower wrote, “The whole visible world rests on this king of darkness, and his shape is that of a huge louse.” There is Abraham, who appears as a failed Mandaean guided by an evil spirit to leave and found his own community. There is the dragon Ur, whose belly is made of fire and who sits above an ocean of flammable oil. There is Ptahil, “who takes souls to be weighed and sends his spirits to fetch souls from their bodies.” My favorite was the demon Dinanukht, who is half man and half book and “sits by the waters between the worlds, reading himself.”
    The reason for the secrecy, Nadia said, was bound up with belief in magic. “Some people think that if they reveal their name, it can be used for black magic. But I trust you. And,” she chuckled, “you don’t have access to the black magic books.” Magic is the fourth and final link between the modern Mandaeans and the ancient Babylonians. The Nabatean Agriculture included a great number of magical spells in its list of agricultural techniques. (Some examples: averting hail by placing a tortoise on its back in the middle of a field, or having three menstruating women bare their vulvas at any approaching hailstorms to make them go the other way, using the apotropaic power of menstrual blood.)
    In the seventh century, the Christian writer Yohannan bar Penkaye (who lived near where the Turkish-Iraqi border is today) said that sorcery was more common in his town than it had been in ancient Babylon. In the 1930s, E. S. Drower was fascinated by the survival of magic in Iraqi society. Magicians—of all different religions—told people’s future and also produced love charms. She wrote of a modern spell that could easily have come from Nabatean Agriculture : “To cure a Baghdad boil . . . take a sparrow, kill it, and apply his body so that the fresh warm blood touches the sore. Then hang the sparrow up. As the body dries so will the boil dry up and disappear.”
    Jews and Mandaeans, Drower writes, were particularly famous for spells. Mostly they gave out amulets and good-luck charms, but occasionally they used darker arts. Drower’s collection at the Bodleian includes a book of “black magic”; Drower justified using the term because, she said, even in the Mandaean language this book was described as “evil,” as it contained spells for breaking up marriages, inflicting illness, and bestowing curses. I leafed through its pages and saw diagrams of the human body, numerological charts, strange symbols, and unreadable letters repeated over and over again, all blotched with ink (suggesting, perhaps, a lack of skill on the part of the scribe; or perhaps the pages had been wetted as part of a ceremony, for in some magical rites in the Middle East, water that has touched the ink of a