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not just be read; they would be worshiped by some. As for the rest of us, we might be following a mystery religion, one that vouchsafes its truths only to selected elders. What such a religion offers is not so much a personal relationship with God as the opportunity to benefit from the powers enjoyed by those few austere and pious elders who do have such a relationship. Several of these religions were among Christianity’s early competitors, including the Manichees. The following chapter gives an idea of what having such a religion might be like.

1: MANDAEANS
    I N THE FADED CAFETERIA of Baghdad’s al-Rashid Hotel, the Mandaean high priest, his brother, and his cousin all looked at me, asking for my help. They did not know how honored I felt to meet them. Here, in front of me, were the representatives of one of the world’s most mysterious religions. Because they worshiped one God, practiced baptism, took Sunday as their holy day, and revered a prophet called John, the Mandaeans had been mistaken by sixteenth-century European missionaries for yet another of the region’s many and varied Christian sects. In fact, their religion is wholly separate from Christianity. They believe in a heaven, but it is called the Light-World; in an evil spirit, but one that, unlike Satan, is female, and called Ruha; and in baptism as a necessary condition for entering the Light-World, though for them it must be in running water, while babies who die unbaptized are comforted for eternity by trees bearing fruits shaped like their mothers’ breasts. Their John is the Baptist, not the Evangelist, and although the Baptist is presented in Christian texts as a follower of Jesus, the Mandaeans see him as a greater prophet. After hearing the Christian gospel in which John the Baptist says he would be unfit to undo the strap of Jesus’s sandals, one nineteenth-century Mandaean convert to Christianity became indignant. “Aren’t Isa and Iahia”—the Arabic names for Jesus and John—“cousins, and therefore equal?” he demanded of the priest after the service. “Aren’t they in the Light-World together?”

    A Mandaean baptism in the River Tigris. © Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images
    Mandaeans claim descent from Seth, son of Adam, and to have received secret teachings passed on from Adam in the garden of Eden. When a Mandaean priest whispers into the ear of one of the faith’s followers, on the day of that individual’s first baptism, the person’s sacred name, the name that he or she must never disclose except to the closest family members, he says it in the language of ancient Babylon. When he takes down from his shelf one of the sacred books, containing legends and dialogues that were so secret that for many centuries they were not written down at all, he reads words that have been repeated by Mandaeans for more than fifteen centuries. When he ingests a sacred meal, performing the rituals in the precise order required for the salvation of souls, he is doing as his ancestors did for generations. These rituals connect the present day with the distant pre-Christian past, the funerary banquet of the Mithraists and the Egyptians, and the teachings of the Manichees, the now extinct religion that in its day had followers as far away as China and competed with Christianity for the loyalty of St. Augustine.
    I encountered this extraordinary religion in the least promising of circumstances. In 2006 I was stewing in the dusty heat of Baghdad, suffering not from fear but from frustration. Barbed wire circumscribed my world—the Green Zone, a five-square-mile twenty-first-century dystopia filled with concrete berms and barbed wire, highway bridges that ended in midair where a bomb had cleaved them, and tunnels walled off to block intruders. In this place, which once had been a suburb specially built for the former dictator Saddam Hussein and his closest henchmen, swimming pools had now been dutifully filled in, gaudy palaces had been partitioned, and a