Qolasta

Mandaean religion turns on living water. Baptism in the yardna, the flowing river that mirrors the heavenly Jordan, is not a single initiation but a repeated sacrament, performed on Sundays and festivals, after defilement, at marriage and near death, and every stage of it is voiced by the Qolasta's prayers: the blessing of the banner and the myrtle wreath, the descent into the water, the triple immersion and signing, the crowning, the handclasp of truth, and the sacramental bread and water that follow. The rite restores the laufa, the life-giving connection between the worshipper and the World of Light from which the soul came.

The book's other great sequence serves the masiqta, the mass for the dead, celebrated by priests on the third day after death, when the soul is held to begin its ascent through the matarata, the watch-houses where hostile powers detain the unworthy; the hymns strengthen and accompany the soul stage by stage until it reaches the House of Life. Around these two cores the collection carries the daily prayers said at dawn, noon and evening, the rushuma signing prayers, blessings for oil, bread and water, and the marriage service. The prayers' idiom is the religion in miniature: light against darkness, the great First Life and its emanations, Manda d-Hayyi the personification of saving knowledge, and the soul as an exile remembering its home.

Mandaean scribal practice attaches to each copied text a colophon naming the copyist and the chain of predecessors from whose manuscripts the copy descends, and the Qolasta's colophons are among the longest of any Mandaean book, running through dozens of named priests. Scholarship that has worked through these chains, above all the studies of Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley on the postscripts, traces continuous copying back to the early Islamic centuries and, in the reconstructed earliest links, to a copyist named Zazai of Gaokhta placed around 270 CE, evidence that parts of the liturgical corpus are among the oldest strata of Mandaean literature, older than the final redaction of the great prose collections. The hymns' poetry, with its parallelism and its imagery of the soul's exile and return, has drawn comparisons with other Aramaic religious poetry of late antiquity.

The prayerbook reached Western scholarship through manuscripts acquired from the community, and the standard complete translation is that of E. S. Drower, published in 1959 as the Canonical Prayerbook of the Mandaeans. For the community itself the book has never been an object of study so much as a working instrument: priests learn its prayers by heart in training, and the liturgy has continued through the community's modern catastrophes, the drainage of the marshes, the wars in Iraq, and the emigration that has scattered most Mandaeans to diaspora communities on other continents, where tanks of river water now stand in for the yardna and the same prayers are said over them.