"Zihrun, das verborgene Geheimnis".

• Author: Buckley, Jorunn J.
• Position: "Zihrun, das Verborgene Geheimnis": Eine Mandaische Priesterliche Rolle - Book review

"Zihrun, das verborgene Geheimnis": Eine mandaische priesterliche Rolle. BY BOGDAN BURTHA. MandaistischeForschungen, vol. 3. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWTIZ VERLAG, 2008. Pp. 213. CD-ROM. [member of]40.

A translation of a previously unpublished Mandaean lest from the Drower Collection (no. 27) in Oxford's Bodleian Library, this book contains introductory materials, the translation itself, a commentary, a word list (an expansion of forms of verbs and nouns absent from E. S. Drower and R. Macuch. A Mandate Dictionary [1963]). a list of abbreviations, a bibliography, and an index.

Drower purchased this document in 1937; it was transcribed by the priest Zihrun, son of Yahia Mhatam in 1677 in Sustar; it contains 559 lines and has illustrations. Burtea does not say whether he has consulted Drawer's notebook, vol. xii, with its transliteration and partial translation of the text (the stack of Drawer's notebooks remains. I assume, safely at the Freie Universitat. Berlin). Burtea calls the document an example of priestly "Fachliteratur" (p. 1). a good way to characterize this type of esoteric writing.

Other translated and published Mandaean texts also fit this category, such as The Thousand and Twelve Questions (= AT$, published by Drower in 1960) and The Scroll of Exalted Kingship ( = DM'L, published in 1993, my translation). Familiarity with these texts facilitates the reading of Zihrun. The Mandaean priestly "Kabbalistic" commentary style is present in all three texts, and the contents presuppose the Mandaean liturgy, the baptism, and ]masiqta (death-mass) rituals. Readers will find a keen interest in correct ritual proceedings and ritual efficacy, anatomy, physiology, various types of secret correlations, numerology, etc. In short, Zihrun provides "gefundenes Fressen" for those who are at home in the universe of Mandaean esoterica.

The text focuses on the special ritual sequence required for a person who has died from snakebite, insect bite, or attack by a wild animal, all categorized as unclean deaths. The baptism section ends at line 174, where we find the first colophon, and the masiqta follows after the large illustrated part. Burtea presents a useful schematic view of the baptism proceedings (pp. 142-44) and the entire ritual sequence (pp. 189-91).

At times. Burtea respects the scribe's handwriting too much, so that in the first colophon, we can find "Yuhana" transcribed as "Ihana" (p. 11). or "Ram" as "Dam," in line 180 ("Dam" surely is not a...