🜂 The Mandaeans Were Just Mandaeans
The Mandaeans
were just Mandaeans.
Not Baptists.
Not echoes of Jesus.
Not halfway Christians
waiting for scripture to arrive.
They were river-born.
Water was their archive.
Not to cleanse —
but to remember.
They bathed not in sin,
but in starlight.
In the memory of a world
before the world
was named.
They did not preach.
They recited.
They whispered planets
into flowing ink.
No cross.
No mosque.
No dome.
Just silence,
and the river,
and a language
older than conquest.
They needed no savior.
Because they had
a structure of light
that could not be colonized
by translation.
And when the world arrived
with swords and books,
it called them
“strange,”
“heretics,”
or “the first Baptists.”
But they never baptized.
They remembered.
And they are not
your origin story.
They are their own.