The Diwan Abatur: A Map of the Soul's Road

Unrolled, it runs for more than six metres. Along it walk and sit strange figures drawn in ink: beings with human bodies and the heads of beasts, towers with animals chained at their doors, a boat on a river, and a great figure seated with a pair of scales. Between the pictures run lines of Mandaic script. This is the Diwan Abatur, the "Scroll of Abatur", a sacred illustrated scroll of the Mandaeans, the Gnostic baptising community of southern Iraq and Iran. It maps the road that a soul travels after death, through a series of watch-houses, to the place where it is weighed.

The manuscripts

• The best-known copy is DC 8 in the Drower Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, an eighteenth-century scroll collected by Lady Ethel Stefana Drower, who published it with an English translation as Diwan Abatur, or Progress through the Purgatories (Vatican, Studi e Testi 151, 1950).
• Another copy, MS Borgiani Siriaci 175, is in the Vatican Library; a facsimile was published by Julius Euting in 1904.
• The text itself is older than these copies; like most Mandaean scriptures its date of composition is uncertain.

The journey

• After death the soul must pass through the maṭarātā (sing. maṭarta), "watch-houses" or purgatories, each guarded by beings of the lower worlds. There it is held and purified according to its sins.
• The scroll pictures the maṭarātā of the sons of Ptahil, the demiurge who made the material world, and of the seven planets; each is said to measure 2,000 parasangs and to lie thousands of parasangs from the next.
• A ship named Shahrat, "she kept watch", ferries the souls across the river Hitpun, which divides the lower world from the World of Light.
• At the end sits Abatur, "Abatur of the Scales", who weighs each soul; the soul that balances passes on to the World of Light.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The scroll as map. A long roll read from one end to the other, the book is itself a road: to unroll it is to follow the soul.

Animals at the gates. Chained beasts at the watch-houses stand for the passions and powers that detain the soul in the lower world.

The scales. Weighing the soul links Mandaean belief to a long Near Eastern image of judgement, from Egyptian scenes of the weighing of the heart to Zoroastrian and Islamic scales.

Script. The Mandaic alphabet is itself held sacred; its letters are counted and used in the community's rituals.

Connections

Mandaeism (ch56), with Gnosticism (ch17) for its dualism of light and darkness. Compare the Papyrus of Ani (V20) for the Egyptian weighing of the heart, and the Bardo Thödol (V82) for another guide to the passage after death.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/diwan-abatur.html