The First Man Was Sealed

TL;DR

• The Mandaeans of southern Iraq and Khuzestan say Adam lay without a soul, his eyes and mouth unopened, until a soul from outside entered and said “I am Adakas-Ziwā”. His eyes opened, he saw his wife naked and was ashamed.
• Their first baptism was performed on Adam “when the pure Mānā began to breathe in him”, and two of their sacramental names come from the Babylonian “opening” and “washing” of the mouth.
• Egypt opened the mouths of dead kings and statues; Babylon opened the mouths of cult images; India opens the eyes of idols. All three treat a finished body as shut until it is opened.
• The Aitareya Upanishad, al-Ṭabarī’s Adam, Völuspá, Genesis and Zhuangzi’s Hundun tell the same first scene: a closed or empty body opened from outside into speech and self-knowledge.
• Central Australia’s Arrernte say the first people were sealed lumps cut open with stone knives, and they reopen every initiate’s mouth.
• Read through the Eve Theory of Consciousness, the sealed body is the human before the self. Every rite that opens it repeats the first “I am”.

“Before they had brought me … he had not opened his eyes, had not stood on his feet, had not opened his mouth and did not speak … and the children of men did not awaken in the world: until I, Adakas-Mānā, came from the hidden place.”
— The soul of Adam speaking, Mandaean Ginzā, Right Ginza X, in Lidzbarski 1925, p. 245

Did the first man have a soul? #

Not at first, say the Mandaeans. They are the last baptists of antiquity: a Gnostic people of the marshes and rivers of southern Iraq and of Khuzestan in Iran, who still baptise in running water and still read a scripture they call the Ginzā, “the Treasure”. Mark Lidzbarski translated it into German in 1925. Its oldest manuscript was copied in 1560, but Lidzbarski judged the bulk of it to be pre-Islamic and Babylonian, with roots older than Christianity (Lidzbarski 1925, pp. XI–XIII).

The Ginzā tells the making of Adam several times, and every telling starts with a body that does not work. In the third tractate of the Right Ginza the planets and their master, the demiurge Ptahil, build Adam and lay him down:

“Sie schufen dann Adam und legten ihn hin, / ohne daß eine Seele in ihm war. … Doch obwohl alle sich darum bemühten, / konnten sie ihn nicht auf die Füße stellen.”
“Then they made Adam and laid him down, without a soul in him. … But though all of them strove, they could not set him on his feet.”
— Lidzbarski 1925, p. 108 (GR III)

The makers pour in wind, fire and vapour, and the spirit Ptahil has brought. Nothing stirs. Then the soul is fetched from “the hidden place”, and the radiance of Life speaks inside the lump: “öffnete er die Augen im körperlichen Rumpfe”, “he opened his eyes in the bodily trunk” (p. 110). The narrator is Mandā dHaiyē, whose name means “Knowledge of Life”. He teaches the new man in the speech of the heavenly beings: “Ich predigte ihm mit sanfter Stimme / und weckte sein Herz aus dem Schlafe”, “I preached to him with a gentle voice and woke his heart from sleep” (p. 112).

The body is a trunk that cannot stand. The Left Ginza, the book of the dead, gives it the serpent’s own description. The soul asks, “Wer hat in den körperlichen Rumpf mich geworfen, / der ohne Hände und Füße ist?”, “Who threw me into the bodily trunk that is without hands and feet?”, and goes on: “Er liegt da und kriecht / und ist ohne Kraft”, “It lies there and crawls and is without strength” (p. 454). Elsewhere the Ginzā calls Ur, the great serpent of darkness, “die Schlange ohne Hände und Füße” (p. 88). Before the self arrives, the human body is a thing that crawls.

“I am Adakas”: the first word is a self #

The tenth tractate tells the same event more closely, and this time the soul has a name. It is Adakas, which Lidzbarski’s register glosses as “der verborgene Adam”, “the hidden Adam” (p. 597). The soul falls into the body, and the body comes alive in a burst of sensation:

“Adam nieste und fragte nach dem Leben. … ‚Ich bin Adakas-Ziwā, der aus dem verborgenen Orte gekommen ist.’ … Adam schaute hin und sah alles, was er sah. Adam sah sein Weib Hawwā nackt, und sein Sinn schämte sich vor ihr. … Dann schuf er Adam und seinem Weibe Hawwā ein Gewand, womit sie ihre Blöße bedeckten.”
“Adam sneezed and asked after Life. … ‘I am Adakas-Ziwā, who came from the hidden place.’ … Adam looked and saw all that he saw. Adam saw his wife Hawwā naked, and his mind was ashamed before her. … Then he made a garment for Adam and his wife Hawwā, with which they covered their nakedness.”
— Lidzbarski 1925, pp. 242–243 (GR X)

A sneeze, a question, and then a sentence in the first person: I am. The first thing the opened eyes take in is the woman, naked, and the first feeling is shame. Appetite comes in with the soul too: “Bevor Nimūsa in Adam fiel, aß Adam nichts”, “Before Nimusa fell into Adam, Adam ate nothing” (p. 248). The blessing said over Adam’s sneeze, “Lebe!”, “Live!”, is given in the text as the origin of the custom of blessing a sneeze.

Then the soul speaks for itself and lists what the body could not do before it came. The list is the epigraph of this essay. No eyes opened, no standing, no mouth opened, no speech, “and the children of men did not awaken in the world”, until Adakas came (p. 245). The Mandaean first man was a body shut at every opening, and the soul is what opened it.

“Mute, foolish, deaf, veiled” #

The Left Ginza opens with Adam at the end of his life, a thousand years old. Death is sent to fetch him. His son Sitil, a youth who “hat noch nicht auf den Saum eines Weibes getreten”, “has not yet stepped on the hem of a woman” (p. 426), goes up in his place. From above, Sitil addresses his father, and the address tells us how the Mandaeans pictured the first man:

“O Adam, erster Mann, Stummer, Törichter, Tauber, Verhüllter!”
“O Adam, first man, mute one, foolish one, deaf one, veiled one!”
— Lidzbarski 1925, p. 425 (GL I.1)

Lidzbarski explains “veiled” as “Dessen Verstand umschleiert und unklar ist”, one “whose understanding is veiled and unclear”. Sitil then prays that the powers of Life take from his father “die Blendung von den Augen, die Stöpsel aus den Ohren und das Fleischstück vom Herzen”, “the blinding from his eyes, the plugs from his ears and the piece of flesh from his heart, so that he may see this world to which I go” (p. 428).

Plugs in the ears. A cover on the eyes. A lump of flesh over the heart. This is the sealed first man in so many words, and the unsealing is a prayer said by a pure boy.

The same formula turns up in a mystery text of the ninth tractate. A silent boy is called out of the heavenly Jordan and asked his name three times. Twice he keeps silence; the third time he answers, “Ich bin der jugendliche Knabe”, “I am the youthful boy”. He is led into the Shrine within the Shrine and shown “die gewaltigen Eier der Verborgenheit”, “the mighty Eggs of Hiddenness”, and sworn to secrecy. Then he asks: “Wer hat mir die Blendung von den Augen und das Fleischstück vom Herzen genommen?”, “Who has taken the blinding from my eyes and the piece of flesh from my heart?” (pp. 236–237). What was done once to Adam is done again to an initiate, with the same words, after the same silence and the same “I am”.

Hewath: the woman whose name means “serpent” #

The Ginzā has its own Eden, and its own temptress. The demoness Ruha, mother of the planets, takes the shape of Hawwā, Adam’s wife, to seduce the men. Her son is given “den Becher … zum zweiten und zum dritten Male”, the cup a second and a third time, until “sein Körper verlangte von ihm nach Tanz”, “his body craved dance” (p. 129). When the trick is exposed, the man “sah sich an und schämte sich vor sich selber”, “looked at himself and was ashamed before himself” (p. 130). The eyes open on oneself, and shame follows.

Ruha’s other name is Hewath. Lidzbarski, a Semitist reading the text for himself, wrote of it: “Das Wort bedeutet ursprünglich ‚Schlange’ und liegt auch im Namen [der] Eva vor”, “The word originally means ‘serpent’ and is present also in the name of Eve” (p. 71 n. 1).¹ The Mandaeans made her a demon. Their scripture still keeps the old knot: the woman, the serpent and the opened eyes come in one name.

Why do the Mandaeans baptise as Adam was baptised? #

The Mandaean sacraments are a replay of Adam’s opening. The baptismal liturgy, the Qolastā, opens with this rubric:

“Dies ist die Taufe, mit der Hibil-Ziwā Adam, den ersten Mann, taufte, als der reine Mānā in ihm zu atmen anfing und er sich erhob, nieste und nach dem Leben fragte.”
“This is the baptism with which Hibil-Ziwā baptised Adam, the first man, when the pure Mānā began to breathe in him and he rose, sneezed and asked after Life.”
— Lidzbarski, Mandäische Liturgien (1920), pp. 54–55

The whole order of baptism is then told as Hibil’s work on the newly ensouled Adam (pp. 55–57). Adam is crowned and wreathed. The pandama, a cloth, is laid over his mouth. He goes under the water three times and is given three handfuls of it to drink. “Dann sprach er über ihn verborgene Namen”, “then he spoke hidden names over him” (p. 57). Every Mandaean baptism since has been the first man’s baptism, given on the day his soul began to breathe.

The mouth is the centre of it. In a prayer roll Lidzbarski quotes, the speaker takes salt, “die Tochter des Gottes Bel”, “the daughter of the god Bel”, and oil, and puts them in his mouth: “da richteten sie mir die Rede im Munde auf”, “and they raised up the speech in my mouth” (Lidzbarski, Johannesbuch (1915), p. 5 n. 3). The daily prayer asks the messenger of light: “komm und richte mir die Rede auf, / daß ich meinen Mund in Lobpreis öffne”, “come and raise up speech in me, so that I may open my mouth in praise” (Liturgien, p. 172). Speech has to be stood up in the mouth, every morning, by something from outside.

The names of the two sacraments say where the idea came from. The sacramental bread is the Pihtā and the sacramental drink the Mambūhā. Heinrich Zimmern, the Assyriologist, traced them to two Babylonian rites, pīt pî, “Öffnen des Mundes”, “opening of the mouth”, and mīs pî, “Waschen des Mundes”, “washing of the mouth”. Lidzbarski agreed that Mambūhā is called a “washing” in the Mandaic texts themselves, and thought it possible that Pihtā means “opening” and goes back to the Babylonian term. His conclusion: “Durch die Taufe wird ja eine Art Neuschöpfung vollzogen”, “for through baptism a kind of new creation is accomplished” (Liturgien, pp. XXII–XXIII).²

A new creation, through the mouth. The Mandaeans eat the opening of the mouth and drink the washing of the mouth, in a rite first performed on a soulless Adam as he began to breathe.

The dead are opened too #

The Mandaean death mass, the masiqta, sings the same story over the corpse. Adam’s soul says, “Adam in seiner Einfalt / schämte sich, da er nicht wußte”, “Adam in his simplicity was ashamed, because he did not know” (Liturgien, p. 100). Another hymn sung for the dead: “Das Leben wußte um mich, / Adam, der dalag, erwachte”, “Life knew of me; Adam, who lay there, awoke” (p. 96). In the Johannesbuch, after each step of Adam’s awakening the congregation answers: “Heil dem, der nach dir hört und gläubig ist”, “Blessed is he who hears after you and believes” (Johannesbuch, p. 57). The first man’s waking is the model for every waking: at birth into the faith, every morning, and at death.

How did Mani tell the waking of Adam? #

The prophet Mani was raised among baptists in southern Mesopotamia in the third century. His story of Adam survives in a Syriac summary by Theodore bar Konai, a bishop writing in Iraq in 791/2, which Henri Pognon translated in 1898. The demons have made Adam, and he lies like the dead:

“Jésus le lumineux s’approcha du stupide Adam et le réveilla d’un sommeil de mort … Alors Adam s’examina lui-même et sut qui il était.”
“Jesus the Luminous approached the stupid Adam and woke him from a sleep of death … Then Adam examined himself and knew who he was.”
— Pognon 1898, pp. 191–192

He is shown his own soul, scattered and eaten through all of matter, “aux dents de la panthère, aux dents de l’éléphant”. He is made to stand and given the tree of life to taste. “Alors Adam regarda et pleura. Il éleva fortement la voix comme un lion rugissant”, “Then Adam looked and wept. He raised his voice loudly like a roaring lion”. His first words curse the one who made his body: “Malheur, malheur au créateur de mon corps, à celui qui a lié mon âme”, “Woe, woe to the maker of my body, to him who bound my soul!” (p. 193).

Pognon noticed that Theodore’s word for “stupid” makes sense only as the Mandaic word for “ignorant, foolish”, and that several other words in the passage are Mandaic. He concluded that Mani’s books were probably written in Mandaic (p. 187 n.; p. 192 n. 1). The Manichaean Adam and the Mandaean Adam are told in the same words because they come from one milieu: the stupid sleeper, the awakener from outside, the man who looks at himself and knows who he is, and a roar.

Where did the opening of the mouth begin? #

If the Mandaean sacraments carry Babylonian names, the trail runs back into the oldest written religions of all. Both Mesopotamia and Egypt made gods and dead kings into persons by opening their mouths.

Babylon and Assyria: the statue that has to be opened #

In Mesopotamia a cult statue was carved, gilded and dressed by craftsmen, and it was still not a god. The mīs pî ritual, known from tablets found at Nineveh and Babylon, washed its mouth and opened it over a night and a day, by the river, in the orchard, in the temple. Only then was the image a living god, ready to receive its offerings. The texts are edited in Walker and Dick (2001), and the logic is the one Zimmern found inside the Mandaean sacraments: a made thing is closed until its mouth is opened.³

Egypt: “I open for thee thy mouth” #

Egypt carved the rite on the walls of a king’s tomb. The pyramid of Unas at Saqqara, built around 2350 BCE, holds the oldest religious texts in the world, and near their start is the Opening of the Mouth:

“I open for thee thy mouth; I open for thee thine eyes, O N. I open for thee thy mouth with the nwȝ, the mśḫtiw-hook of copper (or, iron), which opens the mouth of the gods. Horus opens the mouth of this N. … He opens the mouth of N. therewith, that he may go, that he himself may speak before the Great Ennead.”
— Pyramid Texts, Utterance 21, §§13b–14c, Mercer 1952

The point of opening the dead king’s mouth is speech: “that he himself may speak”. Utterance 22 adds the soul: “Osiris N., I bring to thee thy ba, whom thou lovest. I open thy mouth” (§15). Budge’s rendering of another Unas text makes the opened mouth a newborn’s: “thy two jaws are unlocked … thy mouth is [as pure] as the mouth of a sucking calf on the day of its birth” (Budge 1895, p. cxi).

Eleven centuries later the scribe Ani of Thebes took the rite into his own Book of the Dead, and the sealing is spelled out:

“May Ptah open my mouth, and may the god of my town loose the swathings, even the swathings which are over my mouth. Moreover, may Thoth, being filled and furnished with charms, come and loose the bandages, the bandages of Set which fetter my mouth … May my mouth be opened, may my mouth be unclosed by Shu with his iron knife, wherewith he opened the mouth of the gods.”
— Book of the Dead, ch. 23, Papyrus of Ani, Budge 1895, p. 306

The mouth starts out bound. A god cuts it open with a knife, the same knife “wherewith he opened the mouth of the gods”. The first opening was done on divine images, and every later one repeats it on a dead man. The vignette shows a priest in a panther skin performing the rite on a seated statue of Ani. Statue, mummy and god are opened by the same act.

A knife that opens a sealed mouth: the Egyptian scribe and the Arrernte storyteller of Central Australia give the same tool the same job.

What does the Aitareya Upanishad say about the first person? #

India tells the opening as cosmogony, and tells it more carefully than anyone. The Aitareya Upanishad, a Vedic text of the Ṛgvedic Aitareya school from about the sixth or fifth century BCE, begins with the Self alone. It draws a person, a puruṣa, out of the waters, and broods on him:

“He brooded on him, and when that person had thus been brooded on, a mouth burst forth like an egg. From the mouth proceeded speech, from speech Agni (fire). Nostrils burst forth. From the nostrils proceeded scent, from scent Vâyu (air). Eyes burst forth. From the eyes proceeded sight, from sight Âditya (sun). Ears burst forth. From the ears proceeded hearing …”
— Aitareya Upanishad 1.1.4, Max Müller 1879, SBE 1, pp. 237–238

Max Müller’s footnote on “burst forth” reads: “Literally, was opened.” The Sanskrit is mukhaṃ nirabhidyata yathāṇḍam, “the mouth split open, like an egg”. The first person is a closed egg, and his openings crack open one at a time.

The openings are empty at first. The gods that came out of them are hungry and thirsty and want somewhere to live. The Self shows them a cow: “This is not enough.” A horse: “This is not enough.” Then a man: “Well done, indeed” (1.2.2–3). And the gods go back in, each by its own door: “Agni (fire), having become speech, entered the mouth. Vâyu (air), having become scent, entered the nostrils. Âditya (sun), having become sight, entered the eyes” (1.2.4, SBE 1, p. 239).

Last of all comes the Self, and it makes one more opening:

“Then opening the suture of the skull, he got in by that door. That door is called the Vidṛti (tearing asunder).”
— Aitareya Upanishad 1.3.12, SBE 1, p. 242

Inside, the Self looks around: “He saw this person only (himself) as the widely spread Brahman. ‘I saw it,’ thus he said” (1.3.13). The last thing to enter the opened body splits the skull and says I.

This is the Mandaean sequence in Vedic dress. A body is made complete and closed. Its openings are broken. The faculties enter. Then a self comes in from outside, through the head, and its first act is to see itself and say so. In al-Ṭabarī’s Adam, below, the spirit also enters through the head.

India opens the eyes of its gods #

Hindu temples still open the eyes of their images, and the Agni Purāṇa gives the order of service. The sculptor is paid and a cow is given to the priest. “Then the eyes of the idol should be made open” with the verse citraṃ deva, and the sight is endowed with agnir jyoti (Agni Purāṇa 58.7–8, Gangadharan tr.). As in Babylon, the craftsman is settled and set aside before the god is opened. The rite went east with Buddhism. In 752 the Indian monk Bodhisena opened the eyes of the Great Buddha at Tōdaiji in Nara, Japan, with a giant brush that is still kept in the Shōsōin, and the Japanese name for the ceremony is still kaigen, “eye-opening” (Tōdaiji).

Vedic India opened newborns, too. In the birth rite of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad the father puts his mouth to the baby’s right ear and “says thrice, Speech, speech!”, feeds it honey and butter from a golden spoon, and gives it a secret name with the words “Thou art Veda” (6.4.25–26, SBE 15, pp. 222–223). Speech goes in at the ear, the mouth is opened with gold, and the child is told what it is.

What did Islam say about Adam before the spirit? #

The great historian al-Ṭabarī, writing in Baghdad around 915, collected the creation of Adam from the earliest Qurʾān commentators of Iraq. In the account he gives on the authority of al-Suddī, from Ibn ʿAbbās and Ibn Masʿūd, Adam lies for forty years as a body of clay. The angels pass him and are frightened, Iblīs most of all. Iblīs kicks the body and it rings like pottery, “from ringing clay like earthenware” (Q 55:14). Then:

ودخل من فيه وخرج من دبره، فقال للملائكة: لا ترهبوا من هذا، فإن ربك صمد وهذا أجوف
“He went in at his mouth and came out of his anus, and said to the angels: Do not fear this thing, for your Lord is solid, and this is hollow.”
— al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa-l-mulūk, vol. 1, the creation of Adam (Arabic text); translation mine

A second chain in the same chapter, from al-Ḍaḥḥāk after Ibn ʿAbbās, has the devil going in at the mouth and out at the anus and back again, and taunting the clay: “You are no thing made for ringing; you were made for something.”⁴ The Islamic first man is hollow, open at both ends, and empty. The first thing to pass through him is the devil. Then the spirit comes in at the top:

فلما نفخ فيه الروح في رأسه عطس فقالت الملائكة: قل الحمد لله، فقال: الحمد لله … فلما دخل الروح في عينيه نظر إلى ثمار الجنة، فلما دخل في جوفه اشتهى الطعام، فوثب قبل أن تبلغ الروح رجليه عجلان إلى ثمار الجنة
“When the spirit was breathed into his head he sneezed, and the angels said: Say, ‘Praise be to God’; and he said, ‘Praise be to God.’ … When the spirit entered his eyes he looked at the fruits of Paradise. When it entered his belly he craved food, and he leapt up, before the spirit had reached his legs, in haste toward the fruits of Paradise.”
— al-Ṭabarī, same account (al-Suddī’s chain); translation mine

The spirit enters at the head, as the Aitareya Self does. Adam sneezes, as the Mandaean Adam sneezes. His first words are words of praise put in his mouth by the angels, and his opened eyes fall at once on the forbidden fruit. Ṭabarī ends the passage with the Qurʾān: “Man is created of haste” (Q 21:37). The opening of the body brings appetite with it.

What did Genesis keep? #

The Hebrew Bible gives the clay body the breath first: “the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). The second opening comes at the serpent’s prompting. “For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (3:5). And then: “the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (3:7, Sefaria). The Hebrew verb, pāqaḥ, is the one used for opening the eyes of the blind.

Set the Ginza beside Genesis and the order matches beat for beat: the eyes opened, nakedness seen, shame, a garment made by the higher power (Genesis 3:21). What Genesis splits into two scenes, breath and then knowledge, the Mandaeans tell as one. The soul enters, says “I am”, sees the woman naked, and is ashamed. Genesis also keeps what the Mandaeans turned into a demon. The opener of eyes is the serpent, and the first to take its offer is the woman. Death comes in with it, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (2:17).

“Ephphatha”: the Church opens the baptised #

The Church took the opening into its baptism from a healing. In Mark’s Gospel Jesus put his fingers into a deaf-mute man’s ears, “and he spit, and touched his tongue; and looking up to heaven, he sighed, and saith unto him, Ephphatha, that is, Be opened. And straightway his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed” (Mark 7:33–35). By the fourth century the bishop of Milan did the same to every candidate before baptism. Ambrose explained it to the newly baptised around 390:

“Open, then, your ears, inhale the good savour of eternal life which has been breathed upon you by the grace of the sacraments; which was signified to you by us, when, celebrating the mystery of the opening, we said, Epphatha, which is, Be opened.”
— Ambrose, De Mysteriis 1.3, NPNF tr.

“The mystery of the opening.” The candidate’s ears and nostrils were touched, and the senses were opened before the new birth in the water. The rite of the Ephphatha stayed in the Latin baptismal liturgy for the next sixteen centuries. In Milan as among the Mandaeans, the person going into the water is treated as shut until a priest opens him.

What did the first Norse humans lack? #

The Norse tell the making of the first pair as an act of filling, and the list of what was missing is a list of openings. Three gods walking on the shore find two logs, Ask and Embla:

“Two without fate on the land they found, Ask and Embla, empty of might. Soul they had not, sense they had not, Heat nor motion, nor goodly hue; Soul gave Othin, sense gave Hönir, Heat gave Lothur and goodly hue.”
— Völuspá 17–18, Bellows 1923, pp. 8–9

The Old Norse says önd þau né áttu, óð þau né höfðu: they had no breath, no mind. Snorri Sturluson, retelling the poem in Iceland around 1220, makes the last gift exactly the senses: “the first gave them spirit and life; the second, wit and feeling; the third, form, speech, hearing, and sight” (Gylfaginning 9, Brodeur 1916, p. 21). In Old Norse, mál ok heyrn ok sjón. The first humans of Iceland and Norway were blank wood until gods put in speech, hearing and sight, and with them a fate.

Why did Hundun die when he was opened? #

China kept the sealed first being as a parable, and in China the opening kills. The last story of the inner chapters of the Zhuangzi, written in the state of Song (present-day Henan) in the fourth century BCE, concerns Hundun, the Emperor of the Centre:

儵與忽謀報渾沌之德，曰：「人皆有七竅，以視聽食息，此獨无有，嘗試鑿之。」日鑿一竅，七日而渾沌死。
“Shu and Hu planned how to repay Hundun’s kindness. ‘All men have seven openings, to see, hear, eat and breathe. He alone has none. Let us try boring them.’ Each day they bored one opening. On the seventh day Hundun died.”
— Zhuangzi 7, “Ying di wang” (text)

Two eyes, two ears, two nostrils and a mouth: the seven openings are the same seven that the Arrernte makers cut and the Mandaean prayer unplugs. The openers are visitors from outside, the emperors of the southern and northern seas. Their gift is the human condition, “to see, hear, eat and breathe”, and it is death.

The Zhuangzi drew on an older figure. The Shanhaijing, the “Classic of Mountains and Seas”, describes a god on Tian Shan shaped “like a yellow sack … six feet and four wings, 渾敦無面目, a featureless lump with no face or eyes”, and adds “是識歌舞”, “it knows song and dance”. It is “in truth Di Jiang”. Around 300 CE the commentator Guo Pu tied the two together himself: Master Zhuang’s Hundun, “bored with seven openings by Shu and Hu so that he died, surely borrows this as a parable” (Shanhaijing 2, Xishan jing, with Guo Pu’s commentary, text). The sealed being had no face, but it already danced.

The Han philosophers of the Huainanzi, presented to the emperor in 139 BCE, turned Hundun’s boring into history. In the first age the people were “uncarved simplicity not yet broken up, all one mass”. Under Fuxi, the snake-bodied first king, “knowing first began, dimly, to dawn: all of them wanted to leave their childlike, unopened mind, and woke up to look about between heaven and earth”. Then Shennong and the Yellow Emperor “split apart the great ancestor, 竅領天地, bored openings into heaven and earth” (Huainanzi 2, “Chu zhen”, text; translation from the Chinese). The verb is Zhuangzi’s, qiào, “to bore an opening”. In the Chinese account the opening of the world and the dawn of knowing happen together, under a serpent-bodied ancestor.

The Daoists counted it a loss and spent their discipline trying to close the openings again. That side of the Chinese story, the infant before the first smile and the child who learned to say “who”, is told in Before the First Smile.

Who were the sealed first people of Central Australia? #

The Arrernte (Arunta) of Central Australia tell the scene with no scripture at all, and they tell it most plainly. In Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen’s account from the 1890s, the first beings were the Inapertwa, “rudimentary human beings or incomplete men”:

“They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing or smell, and did not eat food, and presented the appearance of human beings all doubled up into a rounded mass in which just the outline of the different parts of the body could be vaguely seen.”
— Spencer and Gillen 1899, p. 388

Two beings called Ungambikula, “self-existing”, came down from the western sky with great stone knives and cut them free. Then: “A cut with the knife made the mouth, which was pulled open several times to make it flexible. A slit on each side separated the upper and lower eye-lids, hidden behind which the eyes were already present” (p. 389). The same makers went straight on to circumcise them.

The Arrernte also do it again to every boy. The initiate is put under a ban of silence and has his mouth reopened by an object pressed to it; neighbouring peoples use a yam, meat, or a bitten finger. That rite, and its relatives from Torres Strait to the Marind-anim of New Guinea and the Guianas, is the subject of The Mouth Is Opened Twice and of the Bullroarer Atlas essay The Mouth Is Opened Twice. Here it is enough to set the Arrernte storyteller beside the Egyptian scribe. In both, a sealed body is opened with a knife, the mouth comes first, and the opening is done again in rite.

The Zuni of New Mexico, in the United States, tell a close cousin. Their first people came up into this world “covered all over with slime. With slimy tails and slimy horns, with webbed fingers”. They were told to look at the rising sun, “Do not close your eyes”, and when their eyes had grown strong “they saw one another. ‘Oh dear! is this what we look like?’” (Bunzel 1932, p. 591). The unfinished bodies are washed and their tails and horns taken off (p. 593). The first look the opened eyes take is at themselves.

The pattern at a glance #

What does the sealed body mean? #

The human before the self #

Line the texts up and they describe one creature. It has a body, sometimes a perfect one. It may even breathe and move. What it lacks is a self. The Mandaean Adam has the makers’ “spirit” in him and still cannot stand. The Norse logs have no fate. Mani’s Adam is “stupid”. The Huainanzi calls the first age’s mind “childlike” and “unopened”. The Arrernte Inapertwa “did not eat food” and had no sight, hearing or smell.

The Eve Theory of Consciousness says there was such a creature: anatomically modern humans who spoke and made tools before they had an inner “I”. On that theory the self was a discovery. It was made once, women first, and spread by being taught, chiefly through initiation. The sealed first man is that earlier human as the old religions remember him: everything in place, and nobody home.

The opening is the first “I am” #

What comes out of the opened body is the same everywhere: speech and self-knowledge. The Mandaean soul’s first words are “Ich bin Adakas-Ziwā”, “I am Adakas-Ziwā”. Mani’s Adam “examined himself and knew who he was”. The Aitareya Self, newly through the skull, says “I saw it”. The Egyptian priest opens the king’s mouth “that he himself may speak”. The Bṛhadāraṇyaka father whispers “Speech, speech!” to the newborn and names it, “Thou art”. The Zuni see each other and ask, “is this what we look like?” The Mandaean initiate, asked his name three times, says “I am the youthful boy”.

That is the sentence the theory puts at the beginning of the self. A word for “I” that points at the speaker’s own inner point of view is a hard thing to invent, and there is a case that the first-person pronoun spread with self-awareness itself. The scriptures put the first “I am” in the mouth of the first man at the moment he was opened.

Shame, appetite and death come in with it #

The self does not arrive alone. The Mandaean Adam opens his eyes on his naked wife and is ashamed, and only then does he eat. Ṭabarī’s Adam looks at the fruit and leaps for it before his legs are alive. Genesis puts knowledge, nakedness, shame and death in one bite. Hundun dies of his openings on the seventh day. Mani’s Adam weeps and curses the one who made his body. Self-awareness brings with it the knowledge of one’s own body, its wants and its end. The myths say all of that came in through the same openings.

The serpent and the woman stand at the door #

The opener is always someone from outside, and in the oldest layer of several stories it has a serpent’s shape. In Genesis it is the serpent who promises “your eyes shall be opened”, and the woman who takes the offer first. In the Ginzā the woman who brings the cup and the dance, and makes the man look at himself and be ashamed, is called Hewath, a name Lidzbarski read as “serpent” and as Eve’s. The Chinese dawn of knowing happens under Fuxi, the serpent-bodied king. The Mandaeans and the Daoists both count the opening as a fall, and both still keep the serpent and the woman beside it.

Every rite opens the first man again #

The written religions did not leave the opening in the past. They repeat it on everyone who passes from one state into another:

• Newborns. The Vedic father says “Speech, speech!” into the baby’s ear and opens its mouth with gold. The Mandaean blessing over a sneeze is Adam’s.
• Initiates and the baptised. Mandaean baptism is Adam’s first baptism, given as his soul began to breathe, with the sacraments of the opened and washed mouth. Milan’s bishops said “Ephphatha” and opened the senses. The Arrernte reopen the initiate’s mouth after his silence.
• The dead. Egypt opened the mummy’s mouth and eyes, “that he himself may speak”. The Mandaean death mass sings Adam’s waking over the corpse.
• The gods. Babylon opened the mouths of its cult statues, Egypt opened the mouths of Ani’s statue and of “the gods”, India opens the eyes of its idols, and Nara opened the eyes of the Great Buddha.

A rite that opens a person’s mouth or eyes treats him, for that moment, as the first man before his soul came. Whatever was done to Adam is done to him. If the theory is right, the rites are doing what initiation has always done, teaching each new person to be a self, and they are using the oldest script for it there is.

Did one story travel? #

Some links in this chain are documented, and the documents point to one story carried from place to place.

The Mandaean sacraments carry Babylonian names for the opening and washing of the mouth: that is Zimmern’s and Lidzbarski’s reading of the words themselves. Mani’s Adam is told in Mandaic vocabulary, as Pognon saw, and Pognon also argued that a Ginza line about Adam waking “de son profond sommeil” came the other way, from Mani (Pognon 1898, p. 253). Egypt’s gods open mouths with an iron knife, and the Mesopotamian priests open them with water; both rites are older than any of the scriptures that remember them. India’s eye-opening went to Japan with Buddhism, carried by an Indian monk. The Ginzā’s Adam sneezes, and so does Ṭabarī’s, in an Iraqi tradition drawn from the same river country where the Mandaeans still baptise.

Further out the chain becomes a family resemblance: Hundun’s seven openings, the Norse logs, the Zuni slime-people and the Arrernte lumps cut with stone knives. The Arrernte themselves say the opener of mouths “vom Norden kam”, “came from the north” (Strehlow 1907, p. 6). Diffusion of one very old story, carried with the rite that re-stages it, is the simplest account of a pattern this specific: a closed body, an opener from outside, the mouth first, and a first sentence that begins with “I”. The Eve Theory gives that story a starting point. The self was discovered, and it travelled with the rite that teaches it. The written religions recorded the rite at the far end of the trail, and they still remembered what it was for.

For the longer survey of first humans made from residue, ash and blood, with the Mandaean Adam among them, see Titan Ash and Serpent Spark.

Sources #

1. Lidzbarski, Mark. Ginzā. Der Schatz oder das große Buch der Mandäer. Quellen der Religionsgeschichte 13. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1925.
2. Lidzbarski, Mark. Mandäische Liturgien. Abhandlungen der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, phil.-hist. Kl., NF XVII.1. Berlin: Weidmann, 1920.
3. Lidzbarski, Mark. Das Johannesbuch der Mandäer, part II. Gießen: Töpelmann, 1915.
4. Pognon, Henri. Inscriptions mandaïtes des coupes de Khouabir. Paris, 1898. With Theodore bar Konai’s account of Mani.
5. Walker, Christopher, and Michael B. Dick. The Induction of the Cult Image in Ancient Mesopotamia: The Mesopotamian Mīs Pî Ritual. State Archives of Assyria Literary Texts 1. Helsinki: Neo-Assyrian Text Corpus Project, 2001.
6. Mercer, Samuel A. B. The Pyramid Texts. New York: Longmans, Green, 1952. Utterances 20–22.
7. Budge, E. A. Wallis. The Book of the Dead: The Papyrus of Ani. London: British Museum, 1895. Ch. 23, p. 306; Introduction, p. cxi.
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9. Müller, F. Max, trans. The Upanishads, part 2. Sacred Books of the East 15. Oxford: Clarendon, 1884. Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad 6.4.24–26, pp. 222–223.
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13. Genesis 2–3 and Mark 7:31–37. King James Version; Hebrew via Sefaria.
14. Ambrose of Milan. On the Mysteries. Trans. H. de Romestin. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd ser., vol. 10. 1896.
15. Bellows, Henry Adams, trans. The Poetic Edda. New York: American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1923. Völuspá 17–18.
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20. Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan, 1899.
21. Strehlow, Carl. Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, part I. Frankfurt: Joseph Baer, 1907.
22. Bunzel, Ruth L. “Zuñi Origin Myths.” Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology. Washington, 1932.
23. Bullroarer Atlas. “The Mouth Is Opened Twice.”