This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Mandaean Deities gathers four emanated beings from Mandaean theology, tracing a single descent from the transcendent source down to the flawed maker of the material world, in the only Gnostic religion from antiquity to survive as a living faith into the present day.
Hayyi Rabbi, the Great Life, is the supreme, transcendent divine source of Mandaean theology, from which the Lightworld and all subsequent divine emanations, the uthras, proceed. Manda d-Hayyi, Knowledge of Life, is the uthra who personifies saving gnosis and gives the whole religion its name, sent from the Lightworld to reveal true knowledge to humanity and to guide souls back toward the Lightworld after death.
Abatur is the weigher of souls, an uthra who sits at the boundary between the Lightworld and the material world and judges the deeds of the dead on a great scale, father of Ptahil the demiurge and a significant figure in the Mandaean vision of the soul's postmortem journey. Ptahil is the demiurge himself, a lesser, flawed emanated being who creates the material world and the body of Adam under instruction from higher powers, without fully understanding or embodying the perfection of the Lightworld he descends from.
Read in sequence, the four figures trace the same downward movement Mandaean cosmology describes, from the Great Life, through the uthras who judge and reveal, to the flawed act of making the world itself.