Hayyi Rabbi (the Great Life)

Hayyi Rabbi, the Great Life, is the supreme and wholly transcendent deity of the Mandaeans. Unlike the anthropomorphic gods of neighbouring traditions, the Great Life is conceived as an ineffable, boundless presence of light and life pervading the World of Light. The Great Life does not fashion the material world directly; rather, creation is willed and delegated through a descending series of emanated beings, the Lives and the uthras. Among the divine titles recorded in the Ginza Rabba and the Qolasta are King of Light (Malka d-Nhura), Lord of Greatness (Mara d-Rabuta) and the Great Mind (Mana Rabba), the over-soul from which individual human souls are held to be sparks.

Children

• Yushamin (the Second Life)

Domains

• supreme life source
• light and radiance

Powers

• to emanate the lower Lives and the worlds of light
• to be the source of life that fills all existence

Epithets

• Malka ḏ-Nhura
• Mara ḏ-Rabuta
• Mana Rabba

Sources

• E.S. Drower, The Mandaeans of Iraq and Iran (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1937)
• Kurt Rudolph, 'Mandaeans ii. The Mandaean Religion', Encyclopaedia Iranica (online ed., 2008)
• Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, The Mandaeans: Ancient Texts and Modern People (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)