The dissolution of ideological identities that had seemed since the middle of this century fairly stable would appear to be one of the characteristics of our times. In place of the struggle between Capitalism and Communism, Samuel Huntingdon would wish to erect a more fragmented competition between civilizational blocs, bearing such labels as the Confucian East and the World of Islam. Yet even such an analysis seems already distinctly old-fashioned, imposing a questionable cultural stability on more labile phenomena. As an alternative Lionel Jensen suggests that the first of these labels, at any rate, is in no small measure the creation of early European observers, and that far from basking in any unproblematic sense of identity, some of the best minds of twentieth-century China actually expended much of their ink on a highly problematic search for the origins of an identifiable Confucian group in the early Chinese past.

Through work on the large collection of Mandaic lead rolls in the British Museum and collations of incantation bowls in various museums and libraries, it appears that Mandaic gnostic incantation formulas were often translated into Babylonian Aramaic and Syriac, but not the reverse. In Late Antiquity, Mandaic Vorlagen seem to have dominated the field of magic in Mesopotamia. Although, only a scanty amount of pre-Islamic Mandaic incantation material has been published so far, classical Mandaic literature already gives many hints of this fact. It turns out that many solutions to puzzling words or spellings in Babylonian Aramaic incantation bowls can be explained in the light of a Mandaic Vorlage.