Anush

The sick came out of the doorways first, because they had the least to lose. Word had gone along the street that a stranger was working in the city, and Jerusalem in the middle of the afternoon smelled of dust and hot stone and the animals in the lower market. He asked for nothing. He cleansed the lepers, straightened the crippled so that they walked away on their own legs, opened the ears of the deaf and loosened the tongues of those who could not speak, and then, with a power the text credits to the Exalted King of Light rather than to him, he brought back the dead.

That is Anush, and the Mandaeans have been telling it for a very long time.

He belongs to a class of beings called uthras, a word whose meaning is still contested. It is cognate with an Aramaic term for riches, so it has usually been read as “wealth”; Charles Häberl argues instead for a form meaning “excellency”, which is why his full title now often comes into English as Excellent Ennosh. Either way the word names the shining inhabitants of the World of Light, the messengers who come down through the worlds carrying errands from the Great Life. Anush is among the highest of them. His name is the Mandaic form of Enosh, the grandson of Adam, and Mandaean liturgy keeps him in fixed company: the prayers of the Qulasta invoke Hibil, Shitil and Anush together, three uthras standing where Abel, Seth and Enosh stand in Genesis. Whether Anush is Shitil’s son or his brother the scriptures never settle, and after fifteen centuries nobody appears troubled by it.

His dwelling is Mshunia Kushta, which is not quite a heaven. It is the world where the true versions of things are kept, the originals of which earthly bodies and earthly rivers are only copies: the hidden Adam standing behind the Adam of clay, the great Jordan behind every brown and reedy channel a priest wades into. Anush keeps his house there, and comes down from it.

Something of that traffic still runs. Before dawn on a riverbank in southern Iraq, a priest in undyed white stands waist deep in cold water with his hand on the back of a stranger’s neck, and the name goes up with two others in a formula older than any of them. The water does the work. The names hold the door open.

Jerusalem is where the tradition puts him to work, and Mandaean literature is fixated on that city out of all proportion to any obvious reason. Jerusalem is named some forty five times in the Ginza and eighty four times in the Book of John, more often per page than in the Babylonian Talmud. Several uthras make the journey in different tellings, sometimes Hibil Ziwa, sometimes Manda d-Hiia, sometimes Anush, which suggests the story mattered rather more than the name attached to it. In one related version the visitor is refused entry and addressed as the Alien Man, and Adunai’s countermeasure is a book: Mercury and the Seven compose it, the Sun carries it, Moses is called up the mountain and fasted forty days, and comes down with the Torah in his hands. It is the Mandaean account of where scripture came from, and it is not a compliment.

The chapter that belongs to Anush opens with him ranging across generations and worlds, carrying weapons and smashing idols. He reaches Jerusalem, sets up a throne, and the city opens to him. Then the healings, and then Christ, who wants to know who this is. A line repeats through the passage with the flavour of something muttered in a doorway: where is Christ? He changes his appearance, he twists his tongue when he speaks with me. Christ claims a book of living water of his own and demands credentials, an actual letter from the World of Light proving the stranger came from before Life. The letter is produced and read aloud in the street, and in it Adam and Seth and Shem are on record as believers in Anush Uthra. The Ginza tells the same scene more briefly and lets Jesus overplay his hand, claiming to be Hibil Ziwa, and the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, all in one breath.

What Anush teaches the disciples he wins is not complicated. There is life and there is death. There is light, and there is darkness and blazing fire. There is truth and there is error. Three hundred and sixty of them go out from him in some tellings, three hundred and sixty five in others, and the round solar number is probably doing deliberate work against a rival tradition of twelve. In the fifteenth book of the Ginza’s right volume he and Ruha argue over the building of Jerusalem itself, and the argument ends with the place a ruin. The text is not sorry. The word Jerusalem in the Book of John tends to arrive with a curse fastened to the front of it, and the reason given is that the disciples were hunted and killed there.

He does one small thing as well, and it is over almost before it begins. Men come for the infant John the Baptist and his mother, meaning to murder them both, and Anush arrives first and carries the child out. A single appearance in a single chapter, and it plants him at the opening of the life of the one prophet the Mandaeans still claim as their own.

Nobody says what he looks like. The scriptures give him a throne, a letter, a voice and hands that work, and no face at all, which for a being defined by radiance is either an oversight or the entire point. The closest thing to a likeness is the Scroll of Abatur, an illustrated Mandaean ritual scroll running more than twenty feet, its drawings mapping the trumpets and cymbals of the purgatories and the ship that ferries souls toward the house of the judge. Anush is on it, inked by a scribe who was not attempting a portrait.

His powers follow from his errand rather than from any nature of his own. He is sent, so what he carries is borrowed: the King of Light revives the dead through him, and the healings are proof of provenance more than acts of mercy, a way of demonstrating in public which world a visitor has come from. The idols break because they are false and he is not. The argument he wins against Christ he wins on documents.

The limits are sharper than the powers. He cannot stay. One text says flatly that from the building of Jerusalem to the coming of Muhammad he never once managed to dwell in the world, and the pattern holds everywhere he appears: he arrives, he works, he leaves, and the people he has convinced are still standing there when the door shuts behind him. His disciples in Jerusalem are persecuted and killed, and his answer is not rescue but demolition, delivered late. He creates nothing. Against a world assembled by the wrong hands, an uthra can open eyes, mend legs, out argue a god and win the room, and then he has to go home.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Anush in Mandaeism?

Anush is an uthra, one of the beings of light who serve the Great Life in Mandaean religion. He is the Mandaic counterpart of the biblical Enosh, and the scriptures call him either the son or the brother of Shitil without settling which. Mandaean prayer invokes him constantly, in the standing formula “in the name of Hibil, Shitil and Anush.”

What did Anush do in Jerusalem?

Anush came to Jerusalem, smashed idols, set up a throne and healed the sick: the blind saw, lepers were cleansed, the crippled walked and the deaf spoke, and he revived the dead by the power of the Exalted King of Light. He won hundreds of disciples among the Jews and taught them to tell life from death and truth from error. When those disciples were hunted and killed, the destruction of the city followed.

Is Anush the same as Jesus?

No, and Mandaean scripture sets the two of them against each other on purpose. Anush performs exactly the miracles Christians credit to Jesus, in the same city and the same period, while Christ is presented as a shape changer who twists his words. When Christ demands proof of Anush’s origins, a letter from the World of Light is read out naming Adam, Seth and Shem as believers in Anush Uthra.

Where does Anush live?

Anush dwells in Mshunia Kushta, the region of the World of Light that holds the ideal counterparts of earthly things. The hidden Adam and the heavenly Jordan belong to the same world, standing behind the Adam of clay and the rivers that Mandaeans baptise in. Mandaean texts name Mshunia Kushta specifically as the shkina, or celestial dwelling, of Anush Uthra.

What is the connection between Anush and John the Baptist?

Anush is named among the uthras who taught John the Baptist, and in one chapter of the Mandaean Book of John he rescues John as an infant, reaching him ahead of men sent to murder the child and his mother. The episode is brief and he does not reappear in the rest of John’s story. It is enough to tie him to the prophet the Mandaeans still honour above all others.

Related Entries

Hibil Ziwa, Manda d-Hayyi, Hayyi Rabbi, Ruha, Abatur, Ptahil, Yushamin, Ur, John the Baptist, Jesus, Adam, Metatron