The Haran Gawaitha

The Haran Gawaita (Mandaic "Inner Haran" or "Inner Hauran") is a Mandaean text which purports to tell the history of the Mandaeans and their arrival in Media as "Nasoraeans" from Jerusalem

Presenting the ancient Holy Grail lineage from Asia and how the Knights Templar were initiated into it, this book reveals how ancient Asian wisdom became the foundation for the Holy Grail legend.

The City of the Moon God treats the religious and intellectual history of the city of Harran (Eastern Turkey) from Biblical times down to the establishment of Islam. The author starts from the well-known reference in the Quran and the early Islamic histories to the people of Harran as Sabians, one of the 'peoples of the book'. But what was the Sabian 'book'? Why was their belief seen by the early Muslims as being so akin to Christianity and Judaism? More importantly, what does information about the religion of Harran reveal to us about the intellectual origins of Islam, and does this support later attempts to see in early Islam a pure, monolithic belief? The author unravels strands of religious tradition in Harran that run from the old Semitic planetary cults through Hellenistic hermeticism, gnosticism and Neo-Pythagoreanism and Christian cults to esoteric Islamic sects such as the Sufis and Shia, showing the city to be a collection point for Near Eastern and Hellenistic ideas and as such a microcosm of the later world of Islam. She also points to the process by which a multiconfessional world was gradually given Muslim garb and integrated into an Islamic community.

An edition of the scholarly letters of the English Lady E. S. Drower, famous for her novels, travel accounts, and studies in the Middle East, especially on the Mandaeans. Drower (1879‐1972) kept up a lively correspondence with scholars, and the letters here span the years 1938 to the mid 1960s. It presents a window on Near Eastern studies in the mid 20th century, from the viewpoint of an autodidact insisting on, and succeeding in, a place among the academics.. Correspondence with many famous scholars and intellectuals are included, such as Cyrus H. Gordon, Rudolf Macuch, Sidney H. Smith, Godfrey R. Driver, Samuel H. Hooke, and Franz Rosenthal. The letters focus on four of Lady Drower's main books: The Book of the Zodiac (1949), Water into Wine (1956), A Mandaic Dictionary (with Rudolf Macuch, 1963), and Drowers hoped for, crowning achievement: the presumably lost, large manuscript, Mass and Masiqta.

An exploration of the phenomenon of angelic vice regency in Late Antiquity. It comparatively examines figures from Judaism, Mandaeism, and Gnosticism, shedding new light, in particular, on the Jewish angel Metatron and the Mandaean light-being Abathur.

It seems to me that with the development of the critical spirit we shall be able to realize, not merely our own selves, but the collective life of the race, and so to make ourselves absolutely modern, in the true meaning of the word modernity. For he to whom the present is the only thing that is present knows nothing of the age in which he lives. . . . To know anything about oneself, one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathize, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.