Zabism.

Zabism. Under the name Zabians used to be grouped several peoples distinct in origin and by no means alike in religion. The mediæval Arabic, Jewish, and Persian writers, all starting from the notion that idolatry, star-worship, and Sabawism were identical, called nearly all those heathens or Sabæans who were neither Jews or Christians, nor Mohammedans or Magians. Now the name Sabæans (q.v.) denotes strictly the ancient inhabitants of southern Arabia, who were but little modified by Babylonian influences; the Zabians of the Koran were originally non-Christian Gnostics—the ancestors of the still existing Mandæans (q.v.) or Joannes' Christians. Again there were Pseudo-Zabians, or Syrian Zabians (in Hanrân, Edessa, Bagdad), remnants of the ancient Syrian but Hellenised heathens, from about the 9th till the 12th century. They themselves derived their denomination from one Zâbî, variously called a son of Seth, of Adam, of Enoch or Idris, of Methuselah, or of some fictitious Badi or Mari, a supposed companion of Abraham. The name, however, was not native, but assumed, in order to evade Mohammedan persecution, from the people mentioned in the Koran. They were simply heathens who had to a certain extent adopted and modified Neoplatonist ideas, such as floated in the mental atmosphere of the early Christian centuries. These Zabians did not disappear before they had produced a host of men eminent in every branch of learning and literature, in philosophy, astronomy, history, natural history, poetry, medicine, and the rest. The Mohammedans had a high appreciation of Zabian learning, and explained it by tracing it to a supernatural source, notably to Hermes (Trismegistus), the father of the Zâbî mentioned above. The first to clear up the confusion about this people was Chwolson, in his masterly work, Die Sabier und der Sabismus (2 vols. St Petersburg, 1856).