Ruha

They came to the wedding with presents. Shamish the sun brought a garment and Sirra the moon brought a skirt, Nbu brought gold, Kiwan brought sandals and shoes, Bel brought the bread and the wine, and Nirig brought the drinking cups. Behind them the twelve signs of the zodiac worked as carpenters, lesser demons twined wreaths, and the temple-demons went round as cup-bearers. It reads like any large family turning out for a son’s marriage. What was being furnished was Adam and Eve, and the household that had come to help was the household of Ruha.

Her name is simply the Aramaic word for spirit, or breath, or wind, and one of her own epithets is Ruha d-Qudsa, which is the Aramaic for Holy Spirit. The Mandaeans, who have kept their religion and their eastern Aramaic script in the marshes of southern Iraq and Iran since late antiquity, attached those two words to the queen of the World of Darkness and left them there. She has other names. The Diwan Abatur, a scroll about the soul’s ascent, gives her seven of them, and they are not the sort of names given to a monster: she enflames the womb, treasure, she-lusted-after, she-conserved, drop, she-loved-these, and Qin. Elsewhere in the same literature Qin is a separate being, the mistress of darkness, and Ruha is her daughter. The record does not settle which. She is also called Namrus and Hiwat, and no one has ever fully sorted out whether those are aliases, aspects or relations.

She lives in the first underworld. With Gaf, one of the giants of the darkness, she had a son called Ur, a dragon coiled around the whole world, whose power the Left Ginza says nothing can match. Ur is the reason the story turns as it does, because he is chained, and because she wanted him free.

The world was being built badly. Ptahil, the fourth emanation of the Light and the craftsman assigned to make the earth, was struggling with his first attempt, and Ruha saw an opening. She went down to Ur three times. The first time she came to him as his mother and told him to get up and sleep with his mother and be freed from his fetter. Seven days later she gave birth to the Seven, the planets. She looked at them and her heart fell down from its support. The second time she came to him as his sister and told him that if he slept with her his strength would be doubled. Twelve days later she bore the twelve signs of the zodiac, and they pleased her no better. The third time she told him to gaze his fill at the world, and from that she conceived the five monsters, the planets counted without the sun and the moon. Nothing she made ever satisfied her. She lost her magical powers in the making, and Ur stayed in his fetters.

She has no claws and no wings. Her symbolic colour is sky-blue, and where the liturgies describe her at all she is a woman of extreme beauty who arrives either in a blue mantle or naked, which the texts treat as two settings on the same instrument. The Ginza says she talks with the wisdom of an illusionist. In the Book of John she waits at the gates of darkness with gold heaped in baskets and pearls threaded onto the ends of her hair, and offers the whole lot to a stranger if he will sing her one of his sublime songs. He tells her to get away from him, and adds, with a flatness that has survived seventeen centuries, that he is an iron shoe which has trampled down the darkness.

She is more interesting when she speaks for herself. In the sixth book of the Ginza she opens her mouth and says that she is the radiance and the light, the death and the life, the darkness and the light, the error and the truth, the destruction and the structure, the offence and its purification, and the being who came before the one who built the heavens and the earth. Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, who wrote the one sustained scholarly defence of her, called this a rehabilitation and noted how closely it echoes the Nag Hammadi poem The Thunder: Perfect Mind. The comparison with Sophia, the fallen wisdom of other Gnostic systems, is a modern one and Mandaean literature has no Sophia of its own.

Her best attempt on a human being is also her worst hour. Adam was made drunk, three cups, until his body wanted to dance, and Ruha took him by the hand. He held her and kissed her and was about to lie with her when Manda d-Hayyi, the Knowledge of Life, appeared in a cloud of radiance and made him hear a voice that dropped his heart out of its support. The spells came undone and Adam stood there ashamed. Then the uthra went to work on the family. He took the secrets of Ruha and her party, discredited their oaths, threw her off her throne, checked her with a camel-bridle, struck her with his scourge, split her head open and bound her to the heart of the heavens. He unmanned Shamish, whipped the moon, took the crown off Bel and put his mace through Nirig.

What she keeps is the road. A Mandaean soul leaves the body three days after death and spends forty-five days climbing through the matarata, the watch-houses strung between the earth and the World of Light, and the third of them is hers. The Book of John has Excellent Ennosh complaining to the Life that his disciples are trapped in Spirit’s captivity and swallowed by Ur, and being told to calm down, because when the earth ends Hibil Ziwa will come to Ur and twist his mouth back and take those souls out of it, and throw them into the great Ocean until their sins dissolve, and they will float there like white sesame in living water. Hibil Ziwa had already been down once, carrying a passport and a seal, and had confused her badly enough to walk out with the gimra and the mrara, the two secrets of the World of Darkness.

She loses on that scale every time. On the smaller scale she does fine. One of Adam’s sons lay awake with a groaning in his heart, got up, left his father and his mother and his sleeping brothers, climbed the fortress by the wall and walked into the assembly of the planets. Ruha saw him and laughed, and all the planets were pleased. She fetched the fire herself while Shamish brought the incense. Then she bowed, and prostrated herself, and praised him, and cast the incense into the flame, and Bel came forward with myrtle, and Kiwan set a blossom in the boy’s hand and passed him a wreath. She could not take the first man by force or by seduction. She took his son by kneeling to him.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Ruha in Mandaeism?

Ruha is the queen of the World of Darkness in Mandaean religion, and the mother of the seven planets, the twelve signs of the zodiac and the five monsters. Her name is the Aramaic word for spirit or breath, and one of her epithets, Ruha d-Qudsa, is the Aramaic for Holy Spirit. She lives in the first underworld and is also called Namrus and Hiwat.

Where do Ruha’s children come from?

Ruha bore the planets and the zodiac by her own son Ur, the dragon of the darkness, in three separate encounters described in the Right Ginza. She approached him first as his mother and bore the seven planets after seven days, then as his sister and bore the twelve signs after twelve days, then a third time and conceived the five monsters. None of the offspring pleased her.

What does Ruha do to human souls?

Ruha works to keep souls inside the material world she helped Ptahil furnish, using lust, illusion and false wisdom rather than force. After death the Mandaean soul climbs for forty-five days through the matarata, the watch-houses between earth and the World of Light, and Ruha holds the third of them.

How is Ruha defeated?

Ruha is overpowered twice in the Mandaean scriptures by beings of light. Manda d-Hayyi breaks her seduction of Adam, throws her from her throne, bridles her, splits her head open and binds her to the heart of the heavens. Hibil Ziwa travels through the World of Darkness with a passport and a seal, confuses her, and carries off the gimra and the mrara, the two secrets of her realm.

Is Ruha evil?

Ruha is the leader of the powers of darkness in Mandaean cosmology, and Mandaean ritual is built partly to get souls past her. She is not written as a flat villain, though. In the sixth book of the Ginza she names herself as both the light and the darkness, both the error and the truth, and the scholar Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley argued in 1982 that the tradition treats her far more ambiguously than her reputation suggests.

Related Entries

Ur, Ptahil, Hibil Ziwa, Manda d-Hayyi, Abatur, Yushamin, Anush, Hayyi Rabbi, John the Baptist, Adam, Eve, Ishtar, Nabu, Nergal, Tiamat, Lilith