The Ascent of the Soul Through the Watch-Houses

Mandaic gives the funerary rite performed for the dead a specific name, the masiqta, meaning ascent, and the term names the doctrine as much as the ceremony. Mandaean priests perform it over an extended sequence of days, with its own ritual meal and its own recitations, and its stated purpose is to equip the departing soul to pass the watch houses rather than merely to mourn or to dispose of the body. Without a priest to perform the masiqta correctly the soul's passage is held to be genuinely at risk, which is why the rite sits at the center of the Mandaean priesthood's function rather than at its edge, and why a community with too few ordained priests experiences that shortage as a threat to something more than convenience. The masiqta is also performed, in an abbreviated form, for the living, which signals that the doctrine is not only about what happens after death but about a connection between the soul and the World of Light that ritual work maintains throughout a person's life and completes at its end. Because the rite is central and because Mandaean priesthood is hereditary and small, the diaspora's difficulty in training and ordaining enough priests bears directly on whether the tradition's dead can continue to be given what the doctrine says they need.