CHAPTER XI.

ZABIANISM AND SERPENT-WORSHIP.

THERE can be no question as to the antiquity or universality of Serpent-

Worship, whatever may be the difference of opinion as to its origin. According
to Bryant it began in Chaldea, and was “the first variation from the purer
Zabaism.” But this statement requires from us a brief preliminary explanation of
that ancient form of worship.

Zabaism, or Zabism, has had its two sects,—first the Chaldean Zabians of the
Kuran,—the “Parsified” Chaldee heathen, or non-Christian Gnostics,—the
ancestors of the present Mendaites, or so-called Joannes Christians, who reside
in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf, and speak a corrupt form of Chaldee-
Aramaic. And second, the Pseudo-Zabians, or Syrian Zabians, in Harran, Edessa,
Rakkah, and Bagdad. It is the latter who now chiefly represent Zabism.

The first named, or Chaldean Zabians, who transferred the name to the Harranic,
and greatly influenced the development of the peculiar system of the latter, are
the people so designated in the Kuran, and by the Mohammedans of to-day. The
Harranians, who rose about A.D. 830, profess to derive their denomination from
one Zâbi, who is variously called a son of Seth, son of Adam, or a son of Enoch
or Idris, or a son of Methuselah, or of some fictitious Badi or Mari, a supposed
companion of Abraham; while Mohammedan writers trace it to the word ssaba,
“to turn, to move,” because its professors turned from the path of true religion,
that is, Islam, or, as the Zabians say, because they have turned to the proper
faith.

The Zabian creed, as professed by the Harranic Zabians, would appear to resolve
itself into the following elements:—

It teaches that the Creator is, in His essence, primitivity, originality, and eternity,
One; but in His numerous manifestations in bodily figures, manifold. Chiefly He