by Alexander Jacobson

Alexander Jacobsam believes very strongly in spreading awareness about religious minority groups. Unfortunately, he writes for Punch Bowl.

           The Mandaean Religion has existed longer than either Christianity or Islam and there is a damn good reason you haven’t heard of them. The Mandaeans are an actual society that actually live on the actual Iran-Iraq Border. I read about them in Harpers and, according to the Wikipedia article I just wrote, they’re coming to Penn. So, to brace the Penn community for the arrival of its newest club, I’ve thoroughly researched precisely 18 facts about the Mandaean Missionary club.

– They believe they are the descendants of Noah’s son Shem. Everyone else is descended from the union of Noah and a Demon that disguised itself as a war elephant to resemble Noah’s wife. Little do the Mandaeans realize, this also entails that they are the only ones left without recessive fire-breathing demon genes like the rest of us.

– They don’t care for Jews, whom they claim circumcise themselves with swords and then sprinkle themselves with the blood afterwards. Though they admit, that is pretty badass.

– They honor the Egyptians who drowned in the Red sea while pursuing Moses and the Jews by giving themselves plague and then arbitrarily choosing one Jew to hunt. They claim those Egyptians were Mandaeans.

– They claim Socrates was a Mandaean.

– They claimed Mike Tyson was a Mandaean until he expressly converted Islam. However, they only made this claim because they believed Evander Holyfield was a Jewish name. It’s not.

– Numbers have great significance for their culture. They believe that a child born on the sixteenth day of the month will suffer from constipation, probably until age sixteen. One should not wash one’s head on the third and, accordingly, one should avoid being tar and feathered on the second. The thirtieth is the day for sex, and, also accordingly, February is the month of sorrow. Finally, the seventeenth is the luckiest day, and those who fall ill will recover within seventeen days… unless they got knocked up on the thirtieth.

– They dislike the Zoroastrians, whom they claim take vows of silence, abort their babies, sleep with their mothers and sisters, and eat the dead. But they’re willing to tolerate them, provided they don’t cuddle with their sisters before eating the dead.

– The Mandeans don’t exactly embrace the Christians community either. Instead, they claim Christians have secret rites in which they worship a three-legged female donkey. As evidence that Christians refute this claim, Hillary Clinton fell thirty-two points in PAX TV’s campaign poll.

– They intend to build a pool for baptism beside the Schuylkill outfitted with ditches so that water, and trash, can flow in and out. They also had plans to build a temple that would be completely unadorned and empty inside, but scrapped the idea when they got permission to use DRL’s beautification lab.

– They believe that un-baptized dead babies go to a state of limbo where they are suckled by a tree with fruit shaped like breasts, more formally known as breastfruits.

– When a woman is using flour she must hold one hand under running water so that should she die while putting the bread in her EZ-bake oven, god will not condemn her. Too bad no one told her to hold the plug in the opposite hand you put under the faucet.

– They do not lament their dead, for tears create a river that is difficult for the soul to cross. Whartonite Mandaeans can be crybabies all they want though because their souls couldn’t cross even if they existed.

– They do not wear anything blue, for blue is the color of the imperfection and evil of the material world. They only cheer for the football team’s pants during games.

– Each person has four names, one of which is secret. Each person actually has three names.

– They inscribe their sacred books on bound sheets of lead, making them much more resilient than the paper-bound bibles or scroll-bound Torah. Too bad the Mandaeans don’t believe in the Romans… who discovered lead poisoning.

– Their alphabet has twenty-four letters. Both the first and the twenty-fourth letter are “A.” Their alphabet actually has twenty-three letters.

– They believe that somewhere in the north, beyond the pole, is a world that is double of this world called Musnia Kusta. Every living Mandaean has a double there, and all the Mandaeans of past live there, with plenty of food, music and cool breezes. This is regarded as heaven simply because there aren’t any Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, circumcisions, female donkeys, tears or blue-colored objects for them to hate. However, this place no longer exists because Tyson ate the musical instruments and smashed all the cool breezes after Socrates asked him how many Zoroastrian Ears he’d eaten.