The Brotherhood of the Spiral

The traditional stories of the bedouin of Saudi Arabia speak sometimes of the Brotherhood of the Spiral who worshipped a giant snail. They are always described as a secretive sect and no-one knew whether their neighbour was a member or not.

Some of the stories are clear fabrications with a strong 'Arabian Nights' feel about them. Others are very similar to stories about the Assassins and their stronghold on what is now the Syrian-Lebanese border. Nevertheless there would appear to be grains of truth hidden in the chaff. It is quite likely that the Brotherhood did, and possibly still does, exist.

One rather dubious source is the Codex Arabica discovered in a Dresden museum in 1936. It is clearly late medieval in date, written in the degenerate church Latin of the time, but purports to be a copy of an earlier document also in Latin which was translated from an Arabic original. The codex is an allegorical tale about the struggle of good and evil and as such it must have attracted the early church fathers.

The story of the codex is set in an unnamed desert and the two adversaries are the Followers of the Right-Hand Spiral and the Followers of the Left-Hand Spiral. The Followers were both concerned with the cult of a giant snail.

The Left-Hand sect, while acknowledging the supremacy of the Great Snail, argued that there were other powers also worthy of worship. Their great heresy was that the shell was not necessary for divinity and that Ishtan, the Dark Slug should also be worshipped. Followers of the Left-Hand sect are described as being attracted to cruelty and dark deeds.

If the codex is genuine then it is reasonable to assume that these Followers must be the same as the Brotherhood of the Spiral who appear in the bedouin stories and that the Great Snail is none other than Akuk. The temple itself, to judge from the clockwise and counter-clockwise spirals carved on the outside, was for all members of the Brotherhood. It is attractive to imagine a great schism between the Right-Hand and Left-Hand groups, perhaps to the detriment of the cult as a whole.