The first named, or Chaldean Zabians, who transferred the name to the Harranic, and greatly influenced the development of the peculiar system of the latter, are the people so designated in the Kuran, and by the Mohammedans of to-day. The Harranians, who rose about A.D. 830, profess to derive their denomination from one Zâbi, who is variously called a son of Seth, son of Adam, or a son of Enoch or Idris, or a son of Methuselah, or of some fictitious Badi or Mari, a supposed companion of Abraham; while Mohammedan writers trace it to the word _ssaba_, "to turn, to move," because its professors turned from the path of true religion, that is, Islam, or, as the Zabians say, because they have turned _to_ the proper faith.
The Zabian creed, as professed by the Harranic Zabians, would appear to resolve itself into the following elements:--
It teaches that the Creator is, in His essence, primitivity, originality, and eternity, One; but in His numerous manifestations in bodily figures, manifold. Chiefly He is personified by the seven principal planets, and by the good, knowing, excellent earthly bodies. This, however, is without any disturbance of His unity. It is, say the Zabians, as if the seven planets were His seven limbs, and as if our seven limbs were His seven spheres in which He manifests Himself,--so that He speaks with our tongues, sees with our eyes, hears with our ears, touches with our hands, comes and goes with our feet, and acts through our members.
It teaches further, that GOD is too great and too sublime to occupy Himself directly with the affairs of this world; that its government He has therefore entrusted to other gods, and that it is only to the highest things of destiny He Himself devotes His attention,--an attribution of cold superiority and intellectual indifference in striking contrast to the idea of GOD _the Father_ developed by Christianity, that all-loving, as well as all-powerful GOD, Who watches over the fall of a sparrow, and listens with tender ear to the prayer of even the meanest of His creatures. Moreover, Zabism inculcates the chilling doctrine that man is too feeble to offer his homage directly to the Supreme, and must therefore address the inferior deities to whom the regimen of the world has been handed. In this way we see that the veneration shown to the planets and the worship of idols are only a symbolism resulting from the humiliating doctrines just defined.