Abatur

Region/Culture: Mesopotamia and Ancient Near East
Mythos: Mandaeist Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: An uthra of the Lightworld who keeps a set of scales at the boundary between light and darkness, weighing each ascending soul against the measure of Shitil’s purity.
Role in Mythos: The third of three subservient emanations from Hayyi Rabbi, called the Father of the Uthras, who fathers Ptahil the demiurge and presides over the gate through which the souls of the dead must pass to return to the World of Light.
Relation to Humans: He has no dealings with the living and never enters the visible world, yet his judgment shapes every Mandaean soul’s destination after death. Mandaeans address him in the prayers of the Qulasta and read of his court in the Scroll of Abatur, asking that their souls be found light enough to cross.

He sits at the farthest edge of the Lightworld where the radiance thins toward something else. The throne is gold. A curtain of light hangs at his back. In front of him stands a pair of scales, and the soul that has crawled up through every purgatory now waits to be placed on one of the pans. The scale on the other side does not hold a feather, the way an Egyptian heart might be measured. It holds something stranger: the soul of Shitil, son of Adam, set there as a standard of what an honest soul ought to weigh. The newly arrived soul is laid down. Abatur does not speak. He watches the beam settle.

He is the third of three emanations from Hayyi Rabbi, the supreme and unknowable Great Life, who pours forth lesser lights without ever stooping into matter. Yushamin came first as the Second Life. Then Abatur. Then, through him, Ptahil. Mandaean texts call him the Father of the Uthras, which makes him a kind of generative principle inside the Lightworld itself, the source from which other guardians proceed. His name appears as Abathur, sometimes Awathur, sometimes simply the Ancient of Days. Modern Mandaic carries it with a soft second consonant, more breath than stop.

Beneath his throne, in the older cosmogony, lay nothing — only a great hollow filled with muddy black water. He looked down. His own reflection stared back at him from the surface of that water, and out of the reflection rose Ptahil, who would be sent to make the world. The instruction was Abatur’s. The materials were Abatur’s. The reluctant labor was Ptahil’s, who took the work and complained about it the whole way through, much as his father had complained about his own post on the boundary. Both of them did as they were told. The world Ptahil produced was darker than the country he came from, and that is exactly the trouble the Mandaeans say it is.

The other half of his job came from Hibil Ziwa, the great envoy who had gone down into darkness and returned. Hibil told him to take up the scales and to weigh, for purity, every soul that had passed through the purgatories and now wished to return home. The purgatories are not gentle. They are stations where souls are tested, stripped, and worked over, and only those that survive them reach the place where Abatur sits. So he meets each one already half-undone by the journey, and he watches the beam.

The light soul rises. It is set into a ship of light and ferried upward to the worlds above, into the deeper precincts of the Lightworld where the highest uthras live and the air is closer to Hayyi Rabbi. The heavy soul does not. It is turned back for further purgation, or it sinks toward the regions it had hoped to leave behind. Abatur does not enjoy this. The texts depict him as a melancholic figure who tarries on the boundary, sometimes troubled by what comes from his own hand, the second great complainant of the Mandaean pantheon after the son he produced from his own face on the water.

His iconography is its own quiet shock. The surviving images in the Scroll of Abatur show a being whose face is divided into four squared panels, the eyes placed not where eyes belong but lower, in the bottom two quarters, as if the celestial geometry of his vision answered to laws different from any human one. Ptahil is shown the same way. None of these figures has anything you could call a body. They are shapes of light pretending, just barely, to be persons, and the artist is honest about it.

His powers are limited in a way that is interesting rather than weakening. He cannot enter the material world. He cannot reach down into Tibil and intervene in the affairs of the living, the way a Mesopotamian sky god might. His authority belongs to the threshold and to the judgment that happens there. He weighs. He admits. He turns away. He is the angel of Polaris in some readings, fixed at the still point around which everything else rotates, and his fixedness is the source of his power. His weakness is the same thing. He is bound to his post. He does not move. He generated Ptahil and then watched what Ptahil made, and he cannot unmake it. The Mandaean view of the cosmos is that this is how light and matter are arranged, and Abatur is the figure who sits exactly on the seam.

That seam is where everyone must one day stand. When the scales settle, the soul learns what it weighs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Abatur in Mandaean mythology?

Abatur is an uthra, the Mandaean term for an angel or guardian of the Lightworld, and the third of three subservient emanations from the supreme god Hayyi Rabbi. He is called the Father of the Uthras and presides at the boundary between the World of Light and the World of Darkness, where he weighs the souls of the dead.

What does Abatur do with the scales?

Abatur uses his scales to measure each soul that has finished passing through the Mandaean purgatories, weighing it against the soul of Shitil — Adam’s son Seth — as a standard of purity. Souls light enough to balance the scale are sent upward in a ship of light into the upper Lightworld, while heavier souls are returned for further purgation or pushed down toward darkness.

How is Abatur related to Ptahil and Yushamin?

Abatur is the son of Yushamin, the Second Life, and the father of Ptahil, the Fourth Life. Ptahil emerged from Abatur’s own reflection in the muddy black water that lay beneath his throne, and Abatur then instructed Ptahil to build the material world, Tibil, supplying him with materials and even with assistance from the World of Darkness.

Does Abatur have a physical appearance?

The Mandaean illustrated text called the Scroll of Abatur depicts him seated on a golden throne inside a luminous chamber, but in a blocky, almost cubist style: his face is divided into four quarters with eyes placed in the lower two. He has no fleshy or material body, and the same visual convention is used for his son Ptahil.

Why does Abatur sit at the edge of the Lightworld rather than at its center?

Abatur was instructed by the envoy Hibil Ziwa to take his post on the boundary between light and darkness so that he could weigh souls returning from the purgatories. His position is by command rather than by choice, and the Mandaean texts present him as a melancholic figure who tarries on the threshold, fixed to his task in the same way that, in some traditions, he is the angel of the still pole star.