Late Antique Motifs in Yezidi Oral Tradition

318 Pages·2009·8.46 MB·English

by  Spat Eszter

Late Antique Motifs in Yezidi Oral Tradition
by
Eszter Spät
Submitted to
Central European University
Department of Medieval Studies
in partial fulfilment of the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Supervisors:
Gerhard Jaritz and István Perczel
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Budapest, Hungary
2009
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Contents
Acknowledgments...............................................................................................................................v
Abbreviations....................................................................................................................................vi
Maps.................................................................................................................................................vii
Chapter 1: Introduction.....................................................................................................................1
“Late Antique” Motifs.................................................................................................................8
The Nature of Oral Tradition: Tradition and Change.................................................................10
The Time Gap...........................................................................................................................13
Sources on Yezidi Religion.......................................................................................................16
Chapter 2: Religious Movements in the Middle East......................................................................23
The Geopolitical Background....................................................................................................23
From Gnostics to Islamic Ghulat...............................................................................................27
Gnostics - Gnosticism...........................................................................................................28
Manichaeism.........................................................................................................................32
The Dualistic Movements After the Advent of Islam.............................................................34
Contemporary Heterodox Religious Movements in the Middle East..........................................37
Chapter 3: The Origin of the Yezidis and of Yezidi Studies...........................................................44
The History of the Yezidis........................................................................................................44
Yezidis and Western “Yezidi Studies”.......................................................................................51
Chapter 4: The Religion of the Yezidis............................................................................................58
Orality.......................................................................................................................................58
Lack of Sources.....................................................................................................................59
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God, the Angels and the Khas in Traditional Yezidi Belief........................................................67
The Godhead and its Seven Angel or Seven Mysteries..........................................................68
The Khas – the Holy Beings, or Incarnate Angels..................................................................72
Chapter 5: Religious Oral Tradition and Literacy among the Yezidis of Iraq..............................79
The Appearance of “Canonical” Texts.......................................................................................80
Books on the Yezidis as a Source of Knowledge.......................................................................82
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Modernizing Yezidi Mythology: Scientific Interpretation..........................................................85
Pre-Islamic Origin and Islam as an Alien Element.....................................................................87
New Origin Myths of the Yezidis..............................................................................................89
Chapter 6: The Yezidi Creation Myth of Adam..............................................................................94
Adam’s Creation and Fall..........................................................................................................94
Tasting the Forbidden Grain..................................................................................................96
Adam and His Digestion.....................................................................................................100
Other Texts and Other Details.................................................................................................102
The Divine Origin of Adam’s Soul......................................................................................103
The Khirqeof Adam...........................................................................................................106
Chapter 7: The Khirqe, or Garment of Faith................................................................................115
The Khirqe in Yezidi Tradition...............................................................................................116
The SufiKhirka and the Yezidi Khirqe...................................................................................133
Late Antique Garment Theologies...........................................................................................136
Judaism...............................................................................................................................137
Christianity.........................................................................................................................142
Gnosticism..........................................................................................................................149
The Hymn of the Pearl........................................................................................................153
Manichaeism.......................................................................................................................157
The Garment of Light among Contemporary Heterodox Groups in the Middle East................159
Comparison of the YezidiKhirqe and the Late Antique Robe of Glory....................................161
Chapter 8: “The Song of the Commoner”: The Motif of Sleep and Awakening..........................167
The Title and Composition of The Song of the Commoner (Beyta Cindî)................................167
Sleep and the “Call of Awakening” in Late Antiquity..............................................................174
The Gnostics.......................................................................................................................176
The Hymn of the Pearl........................................................................................................181
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The Headdress and the Promise of Heaven in the Beyta Cindî.............................................200
Chapter 9: The Origin Myth of the Yezidis – the Myth of Shehid bin Jer...................................205
The Creation Myth of Shehid bin Jer.......................................................................................205
Creation from the Sur in Adam’s Forehead..........................................................................205
The Creation of Shehid from Adam’s Seed..........................................................................208
The Gnostic Myth of Seth.......................................................................................................210
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The Roots of the Speculations Concerning Seth...................................................................211
The Birth of Seth from “Another Seed”...............................................................................212
The Seed of Seth – the Race of Seth....................................................................................217
The Birth of Seth and the Enmity of Eve in the Manichaean Myth.......................................219
The Twin-Wife of Seth........................................................................................................221
Seth in the Middle East...........................................................................................................224
The Myth of Shehid and Its Two Variants...............................................................................226
Chapter 10: The Birth of Prophet Ismail in the Yezidi Tale of Ibrahim......................................231
The Tale of Ibrahim................................................................................................................231
The Birth of Ismail..............................................................................................................234
Appearance of Ali as a Child, Young Man and Old Man in Nusayrî Mythology..................235
The Trimorphic Divinity in Late Antique Apocryphal Literature.............................................238
Trimorphic Christ................................................................................................................238
The Trimporhic Deity and the Hellenic God of Eternal Time, Aion.....................................240
Further Applications of Trimorphy in Early Christian Writings...........................................243
The Motif of Divine Trimorphy in Medieval Texts..................................................................245
The Abgar Legend...............................................................................................................246
The Three Magi of the Orient..............................................................................................249
Chapter 11: Conclusion..................................................................................................................253
Epilogue: Late Antique Motifs and Modern Yezidism..................................................................258
Bibliography....................................................................................................................................262
Appendix I: Transcript of Recordings of the Myth of Adam and the Myth of Shehid bin Jer....286
Appendix II: Hymns translated by P. Kreyenbroek......................................................................310
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Acknowledgments
I would like to take this opportunity to express my gratitude to all those whose support has
contributed to writing this thesis. I am indebted to the Medieval Studies Department at Central
European University for having been open enough to let me write my thesis on a rather unusual and
unorthodox subject. My special thanks to Gerhard Jaritz who has painstakingly read through my
thesis (or study, as he prefers to call it), drawing my attention to mistakes and helping me shape it in
a more academic form. I am grateful to Andrew Palmer for drawing my attention to the topic of the
Yezidis, and to István Perczel and György Geréby for their enthusiastic encouragement and advice.
I would also like to take this chance to thank János Bak, who was my staunch supporter during my
rocky beginnings at the department (although he always claimed otherwise), who insisted that I
write my book on the Yezidis, and together with Aziz al-Azmeh found a publisher for it.
I owe special acknowledgment to Philip Kreyenbroek, who generously gave me access to
the unpublished Yezidi texts he has collected and translated, and helped my research in Göttingen.
My conversations with Christine Allison helped me develop a wider perspective of the Yezidis,
while the regular Kurdish workshops she organized in Paris made it possible for me to acquaint
myself with other aspects of Kurdish Studies.
My research was greatly helped by the financial help I received from the Open Society
Foundation and the Kurdish Institute of Paris. I must express my appreciation to the latter not only
for their generous financial help, but even more importantly for helping me find lodgings while in
Iraqi Kurdistan, not an easy task, without which my field research there would not have been
possible.
My thanks to Alice Choyke and Judith Rasson for their help with English and the intricacies
of bibliography and footnotes. I would also like to thank Alice for the long chats we have had and
on her moral support. I am also grateful to Csilla Dobos, our department coordinator, for her help with
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ranging from content to spelling.
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Abbreviations
AJSLL - The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures
CSCO - Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium
BSOAS- Bulleting of the School of Oriental and African Studies
JA – Journal Asiatique
JAOS – Journal of American Oriental Society
JRAS - Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
NHS – Nag Hammadi Studies
NHMS – Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies
RMM – Revue du Monde Musulman
RSO – Rivista degli Studii Orientali
SC - Sources Chretiénnes
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Maps
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Source: Joel T. Walker. The Legend of Qardagh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 3-4.
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Source: Philip G. Kreyenbroek. Yezidism (Lewiston NY, Edwin Mellen Press, 1995.)
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Yezidis are a Kurdish speaking religious minority of a few hundred thousand souls, living mainly in
northern Iraq, but also in Syria, Turkey, Iran and in the Caucasus, where they emigrated in the
nineteenthand twentieth century. Today there is also a sizeable Yezidi community living in Europe,
primarily in Germany. Yezidis are not Muslims, neither may they be considered Jews or Christians.
Rather they follow an oral religion of their own which may be assigned to none of these categories.
These people, accused of being “devil-worshippers”1 by their Muslim and Christian neighbors, have
for a couple of centuries, since the first reports of European travelers, exercised the imagination of
European researchers and scholars.
The aim of this work is to throw light on the meaning of some elements in Yezidi religion
through tracing their origins in Late Antiquity. Yezidi mythology and religious imagery have
incorporated and adapted to their particular religious system some myths and motifs which once
enjoyed widespread popularity in the wider region, but which have since been mostly been
relegated to oblivion, except among students of Late Antique religions. The study of such motifs
and myths would help to explain some elements of the Yezidi faith which have previously been
considered obscure, confusing, occasionally even childish, and were deemed to be the results of
Yezidis’ misunderstanding or distorting legends or myths taken from other religions (that is from
Islam or Judeo-Christianity), or were simply dismissed since interpreting them proved too difficult.
These motifs fall into place within the Yezidi system of beliefs and become easier to
understand once light is shed on their origin. Placing these motifs in the context of a religious
language originating in Late Antiquity could be the key to a better understanding of Yezidi religion
and the way it developed, as well as of the working of oral tradition in the region. In this context,
establishing the Late Antique origins of some motifs demonstrates the way literacy interacted with
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T oikumene, to see that even the Yezidi Kurds, living much later on what used to be the periphery of
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the development of both the Christian and Islamic cultures.
Naturally, through Christianity and especially Islam, which contributed much to the
1 The Peacock Angel (Tawusi Melek), believed to be the chief of angels, God’s viceroy on earth, and the special
protector of the Yezidis, is habitually identified with the Devil by Yezidi’s Muslim neighbors. As personally I have seen
nothing among the Yezidis and in Yezidi text that would even distantly imply that there was any truth in this accusation
of worshipping the Devil, or identifying the Peacock Angel with him, I mostly consider this accusation a time-honored
method of discrediting the “other” (or rather “another faith”) along with the charge of sexual licentiousness, both wide
spread since Late Antiquity, and shall not deal with it in this thesis.
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development of Yezidi religion, Yezidis have inherited a great deal from Late Antique religious
thought, as is obvious to anyone slightly familiar with Yezidi myths. However, the present study
aims at studying motifs where such a connection is not immediately apparent because these motifs
have since sunk into oblivion in mainstream Islam or Christianity.
To appreciate the relevance of such a piece of research, it is necessary to place it against the
background of Yezidi studies: Yezidism, a religion based on oral tradition,2 has always proved
difficult to understand for people educated according the premises of book-based religion, whether
Muslim or Christian. Interpreting Yezidi oral tradition and comprehending their religion was, until
recently, to a large extent hampered by a lack of material. Researchers had to base their studies on
the two alleged “sacred books” of the Yezidis, that is, two short tracts which surfaced at the end of
the nineteenth century, on some brief and generally not too accurate observations from the pen of
travelers in the region, and scant reports, even less accurate and reliable, from mostly hostile
Muslim sources. Another problem was that Yezidi “teachings” were subjected to the same criteria
as religions based on written texts and, as oral traditions function along rather different lines, Yezidi
religious concepts were promptly found wanting coherence and even essence.
As a result, Western researchers of the nineteenth and early twentieth century tended to
dismiss Yezidi religious texts3 as inadequate, because they did not conform to their ideas of
scholarly theology. G.R. Driver writes (referring to myths, some of which will be discussed in this
study): “Their beliefs seem to be a confused medley of Jewish legends overlaid with the crassest
superstitions, of many of which it is now quite impossible to trace the source.”4 R. Lescot, in his
seminal work on the Yezidi tribes of the Sinjar and Syria, speaks of the incoherence of the texts,
their confusion and naïveté.5 The editor of M.N. Siouffi’s “Notice sur des Yézidis,” in the Journal
Asiatique, the first detailed account of Yezidi mythology, applies the term “puérilité” in the
introduction to the article, where he offers an apology for publishing such childish myths.6 Such
opinions were shared by most students of Yezidi religion, who were at a loss what to make of the
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2 Not only did Yezidis not have written books, but even reading and writing (and especially the writing of religious
texts) was forbidden them, with the exception of the Adani lineage of sheikhs. Religious knowledge was transmitted
orally by special “experts.” See chapter “Yezidi Religion.”
3 Following the conventions of linguistics I will use “text” for both written text and speech, that is, spoken text.
4 G.R. Driver, “The Religion of the Kurds,”BSOAS2.2 (1922): 200-201.
5 R. Lescot, Enquète sur les Yezidis de Syrie et du Djebel Sinj(cid:407)r (Beyrouth: Institut Français de Damas, 1936), 54, 55,
60.
6 M. N. Siouffi, “Notice sur des Yézidis,”Journal Asiatiqueser. 7. vol. 20 (1882): 252.
7 C. Allison,The Yezidi Oral Tradition in Iraqi Kurdistan (Richmond: Curson Press, 2001), 36.
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