What a mosaic of ceremonies and what a mixed cult in this river-bank prayer-meeting! The Sabeans of Amara tell me that every minute particular is correctly described, and yet themselves do not furnish the clew to the maze. Here one sees Judaism, Islam and Christianity, as it were engrafted on one old Chaldean trunk. Gnosticism, star-worship, baptisms, love-feast, sacrifice, ornithomancy and what not in one confusion. The pigeon sacrifice closely corresponds outwardly to that of the Mosaic law concerning the cleansing of a leper and his belongings and is perhaps borrowed from that source.[108] But how Anti-Jewish is the partaking of blood and the star-worship.[109] The cross of blood seems a Christian element, as does also the communion of bread, but from a New Testament standpoint this is in discord with all that precedes. Nevertheless a complete system of dogma lies behind this curious cult and one can never understand the latter without the former. Sabeanism is _a book religion_; and it has such a mass of sacred literature that few have ever had the patience to examine even a part of it. The _Sidra Rabba_, or Great Book, holds the first place. The copy I examined contains over five hundred large quarto pages of text divided into two parts, a “right” and a “left hand” testament; they begin at different ends of the book and they are bound together so that when one reads the “_right_,” the “_left_” testament is upside-down. The other name for the Great Book is _Ginza_, Treasure. It is from this treasure-house that we chiefly gather the elements of their cosmogony and mythology.[110]