This work is good. But this author’s translations of the Haran Gawaita and Secret Adam per the original, dispossessed, Nazari Mandaeans - whom Christ’s family lines, per Eusebius and Epiphanius, shared kinship with - are the most central and essential to understanding early Christianity and our ancient ancestors way of conceptualizing reality more fully (albeit so different from ours today).
Yet nowhere are these works found on this site; and out of print and hard found on the internet if at all. Truly earth can be a tower of babel where all that matters gets lost over the decades (or even within weeks). It is good this work is mentioned here at least, though but folk tales.
This problem with people becoming aware of what is most important in our past such as the complete works of this author here in question, a wise woman who lived among these peoples writing day and night...it reminds one of all the limited translations made available too of Giordano Bruno the Martyr for today: either they are just of his fantastically erudite astrological studies or of his math and science and never of *both* as the modern mind is too divided and not capable of seeing these are all part and parcel of the same One reality.
But try to show they are to people and you will see how things went even as they did for Giordano Bruno. The middle third brain between left and right and where the seat of consciousness can arise, topkapi as the Hopi call it, has still a long way to go it seems, if it will at all anymore.
"Now, finding Husain a pretty fellow, the s'iluwa (witch) did not eat him, but took him to her lair on the shore, where she made love to him, licking his legs so that they became thin and the bones lost their hardness and were like the wick of a candle." ~ E.S. Stevens' collection of folktales from Iraq was an absolute pleasure to read yesterday. The mad and mythical stories share ancestry with those from Grimm and Thousand Nights and One Night.
Lady Ethel Drower (nee Stevens) accompanied her husband to Iraq in 1921 and lived there for many years. She collected these stories from the people who told them and translated them herself, recording them for anthropological rather than literary purposes. The copious footnotes shed further light on tales that had been told through the generations without ever being written down. The book was republished in 2006, presumably because there was a resurgence of interest in all things Iraqi, but although it contains some interesting and delightful gems, I would suggest it is for those with specialist interest rather than for the general reader.