Mandaean cosmology divides sharply, and the division is between light and matter rather than between good gods and bad ones.
At the source is the Great Life, from whom emanate the uthras, beings of light who populate the World of Light. Emanation rather than generation is the mechanism: nothing here is born, and there is no succession of divine generations because there is no reproduction among them.
The material world is not the work of the Great Life. It is made by a lower figure, Ptahil, in a work that goes wrong, with the involvement of powers belonging to the world of darkness. This places Mandaeism among the traditions in which the creator of the physical world is emphatically not the supreme being, and it is the structural feature that most distinguishes it from the Abrahamic arrangement it otherwise resembles in outline.
The human soul belongs to the World of Light and is in the material world as an exile. The purpose of religious life is its return, and the ritual apparatus of the tradition, above all repeated baptism in flowing water, serves that return.
The roster is fixed by the scriptures. There is no absorption of foreign deities and no mechanism by which a human being enters the divine world as a member of it.
Mandaeism is a living religion, the only surviving tradition of its kind, and its community is small and dispersed.