Eros and the Pearl

1.1. Problems with Yezidism

In 2019, Feqîr Hecî Şemo (b. 1924), one of the greatest authorities on the oral Yezidi tradition, who belonged to the illiterate generation and the illiterate tradition of Yezidism, died in Ba’adra. On two occasions, I had the opportunity to visit him in this Iraqi town, the former seat of the Yezidi Mîr (‘prince’, Ar. emir). Each time I had the impression that he embodied the dignity and mystery of the Yezidi religion. For many years, Feqir Haji had been an authority on theological and religious issues. Thanks to him many works of the Yezidi oral tradition have been preserved. The Yezidis, and especially his son Bedelê Feqîr Hecî, recorded his recitations and then published them in print.⁴ During the annual Festival of the Assembly, he was entrusted to play a key role in the sema’ ceremony, leading a procession of religious hierarchs around the fire that was lit in the courtyard of the main temple. When in the same year I talked about his death, or rather ‘changing the shirt’ (‘kiras guhorîn’, as say Yezidis who believe in reincarnation) with Dimitri Pirbari, the pir said: “It is an end to a certain era for the Yezidis.” The current shape of Yezidism and the knowledge about it are becoming increasingly tied to writing. The authority of a living person is slowly being taken over by the written word, or rather the text displayed by an electronic machine.

The multi-ethnic and multicultural origin of the Yezidi community, the caste system, hundreds of years of persecution, the religious taboo on literacy and increasing migration from their homeland have made it difficult to conduct research on Yezidism and answer the question: which elements belong to the original Yezidi tradition and which do not. Even among the Yezidis themselves, no consensus about it has been reached. In many cases, belonging to a particular tribe ←24 | 25→or caste determines the perception of the whole community and its history. For example, those of the Yezidis who belong to the very influential Shamsani group of the Sheikh caste consider themselves the descendants of ancient pre-Islamic traditions, especially Zoroastrian and Mithraic ones, and have a different attitude towards the presupposed Yezidi origins than others. In turn, the most numerous Yezidi caste, the Murids, who make up the vast majority of the entire population of the Yezidi people, possess less knowledge of the arcana of their own religion than the representatives of the two remaining castes – Sheikhs and Pirs (their very names denote ‘the elder’, in the sense of spiritual teachers). But also, many pirs and sheiks are not aware of some of the principles of their religion. As the author of the monograph The Yazidis, Their Life and Beliefs, Sami Ahmed wrote, “one must realize that the Yezidis, even the educated among them, know very little of their own doctrine, although they claiming otherwise. Their beliefs are in truth known to a very few men, probably not more than three or four (Baba Sheikh, Baba Gavan, and Baba Chawish), who are, in turn, not in agreement with each other regarding the dogma.”⁵ In this situation, the researcher faces a fundamental problem: – Which vision of Yezidism is closer to the truth? Is it the one presented by the few, or the one that is more common and widespread? This provokes even more questions: – Is it at all possible to speak about one truth and one Yezidism in this matter?

Caste differentiation entails another problem. Especially in recent years, the majority of Yezidi migrants to the EU countries or Russia, usually recruited from the caste of Murids. They are also susceptible to indoctrination and political propaganda. It proves to be most evident in the intense agitation carried out by politicians, who treat the Yezidis as a pawn in their geopolitical game. Furthermore, many murids, when confronted with various scientific and popular theories about their religion and culture, often either directly (as university students) or indirectly (through the media), uncritically accept them as facts and then reproduce them among members of their own community, granting them with a kind of ‘secondary identity’.⁶

An example of such a feedback mechanism can be found in the numerous attitudes that speak of the Zoroastrian or Mithraistic core of Yezidism, which are often based not so much on one’s own tradition, as on becoming familiar with the theories first put forward by Taufiq Wahby⁷ and later by Philip Kreyenbroek. Such theories even found support among representatives of the Yezidi aristocracy, as exemplified by the activities of Yezidi prince Mu’awiyah (the son of Ismail Chol), ←25 | 26→an author of To Us Spoke Zarathustra,⁸ who also founded a Yezidi-Zoroastrian Religious Society (Koma Ezdiya-Zerdeştiya) in Bonn. It is symptomatic that, for example, in the Yezidi religion textbooks, published by the Union of Kurdish Teachers (Yekîtiya Mamosteyên Kurd) in Germany, Zoroaster is presented as a Yezidi prophet,⁹ a phenomenon that can be observed especially among the German diaspora, which, in turn, has an increasing influence on the beliefs of other Yezidis.

Taking place in contemporary Yezidism, these processes cause of numerous internal conflicts and accusations against the Yezidi intelligentsia. Those concern mainly falsifying their religion. As Chaukeddin Issa, a Yezidi, wrote in 1997 in the Yezidi journal Dengê Êzidiyan (The Voice of the Yezidis), “It is sad and at the same time shameful that some members of the Yezidi religion are still trying to question our identities and origins. With this criticism, I am aiming in particular at the group of so-called intellectuals. (…) It was the pseudo-intellectuals who provided the outsiders, the non-Yezidis, with the breeding ground for the fruitless discussions of the last ten years.”¹⁰

One should also notice a huge number of false theories circulating among Yezidis on the Internet. While some are reproduced because of sheer ignorance and a wish to build one’s own identity (e.g., describing every ancient image of a peacock as a trace of the Yezidi religion), others result from intentional manipulation (e.g., extreme nationalistic websites that fabricate false anti-Kurdish statements imputed to the former Yezidi spiritual leader).

Some Yezidis support the theory of the original Kurdish identity of their milet, while others, on the contrary, reject any connection with the Kurds, pointing to the Arabic origin of their people, or even make a sign of equality between the Quraysh and the Yezidis. The fact that there exist such strong and opposing pressure groups among the Yezidis themselves shows that they are not certain – as a whole community of people defining themselves with the word ‘Yezidis’ – of their own identity. The Yezidis themselves are well aware of this problem. The issue is not entirely new, as in the history of this community, disputes between families of different genealogies have sometimes come to the fore, posing a threat of its disintegration.

Since I am speaking about this issue, I would also like the Reader to know my opinion on the ethnicity of the Yezidis. I am convinced that they meet the conditions to be considered a separate nation (constituted on the basis of a multi-ethnic community).¹¹ This is particularly evident in: a) the self-declarations from ←26 | 27→many Yezidis, b) the binding caste structure in the community, c) the strict prohibition of exogamy, d) their own religion, e) their own political (Mîr) and religious (Bavê Şêx) power, f) their own historical territory and its own name (Êzîdxane/Êzdîxane),¹² g) a coherent vision of parts of their own history, and h) their own anthropo- and ethnogenic myth that clearly distinguishes their milet from other.

Nevertheless, it is important to be aware that not all Yezidis consider themselves a separate nation, and some strongly identify with the Kurds. By the same token, it is even hard to say if we are dealing with one Yezidism, a single universal system of the Yezidis’ beliefs and practices, or rather with a few separate visions relative to the Diasporas in which they were originated and which are the more different from one another, the less they have contact with the old religious centre in Iraq. An example of such discrepancies can be Yezidis’ eschatological beliefs. Some Yezidis believe in reincarnation, others believe in Hell and Paradise, where the soul of the deceased is supposed to go, and yet another group do not see a logical problem in accepting both visions simultaneously. Obviously, it is possible to create a system in which these variants would not be mutually exclusive, but either this system does not exist at present (which does not exclude the possibility that it may have existed earlier), or it could be one of the many pieces of evidence that the Yezidi religion does not constitute a ‘system’ in the sense of the religions that have codified their principles in the form of some Summa Theologiae or Ihya’ Ulum al-Din. It is significant that, for example, among the Yezidis of Armenia and Georgia, there are festivals which are not celebrated in Iraq (e.g. Kuloça Serê Salê) and vice versa – one of the most important Yezidi festivals, the Çarşemiya Sor, has been forgotten by the South Caucasus diaspora and only recently there have been attempts to revive it. This diversity makes it necessary for the researcher of Yezidism to exercise great care towards any received information and to clearly note the place and the group that the person providing such information belongs to.

One of the factors that contributed to the said lack of unanimity among the Yezidis was the religious ban on the use of writing (with only one family being exempt) that used to be in force over the centuries. For ages, writing was considered a sin. Undoubtedly, this allowed the Yezidis to protect their religious secrets from non-Yezidis, but as a result, they do not have any holy Book that could be a kind of universal compendium of religious principles, so helpful when many of them live in diasporas isolated from the Iraqi centre. On a wider scale, the ban on the use of writing was abolished relatively recently, in the first half of the 20^th c., when the Yezidis living in the Soviet dependent territories of the South Caucasus were subjected to the general education system. Apart from the Soviets, the gradual ←27 | 28→openness of the Yezidi people to contacts with non-Yezidis also had an impact on the lifting of this ban, especially the awareness that knowledge of writing allows not only to increase the level of education and economic advancement, but, above all, to save one’s own tradition from oblivion. Thus, a significant precedent was the publication of a book in 1934, which almost ten years earlier (in 1925) had been dictated by the illiterate prince of the Yezidis, Ismail Beg Chol.¹³ He had done so in full awareness and premeditation, in spite of the resistance of the Yezidi elders (just like when he sent his children to school), in order to “write down the principles of our religion and publish them in all European languages so that our faith would be known before it dies.”¹⁴

It is only in recent decades that the aspirations (answering to the need arising from the confrontation with other religions) to collect and catalogue in writing the corpus of religious output of the Yezidi religious poetry have emerged.¹⁵ This is especially true of the sacred hymns (qewls), which play a role comparable to that of the holy books in other religions. For several decades, Yezidis have been intensively recording and writing down their works of oral tradition. Nevertheless, even nowadays one can hear voices of disapproval towards the use of written word, which tells how strongly the ban has been rooted in the community.

A few extensive publications have been published in Iraq so far, including a transcription of several dozen hymns and prayers, to which Khalil Jindy Rashow and Pir Khadir Sulayman, who actively collaborate with the Yezidi qewals and the greatest authorities on the Yezidi oral works, especially Feqir Haji, have greatly contributed. The efforts to commit the Yezidi religious legacy into writing also come to the fore in the publications of the young generation of Yezidi academics, e.g. Kovan Khanki (Iraq), Dmitri Pirbari (Georgia), Bedel Feqir Haji and Khanna Omarkhali (Germany). The book of the latter, The Yezidi Religious Textual Tradition: From Oral to Written. Categories, Transmission, Scripturalisation and Canonisation of the Yezidi Oral Religious Texts, can be perceived as laying the foundations for the work on canonisation of the corpus of Yezidi religious works.

Apart from the lack of sufficiently developed sources, another factor that hinders the research on Yezidism undoubtedly lies in the hermetic nature of the community. The Yezidis are an endogamous group (of multi-ethnic roots), which neither accepts representatives of other ethnic groups in its community, nor does it allow religious conversion. Moreover, because of the secret nature of their religion, which is considered Satanism by representatives of neighbouring groups, the Yezidis have been facing hatred and persecution for centuries. Apart from minor ←28 | 29→incidents, they list over seventy (72, 73 or 74) acts of genocide that their community have suffered from. Incidentally, this number shows the strength of the influence of the ethnogenic myth among them. The Yezidis believe that they descend from Adam himself, while the other nations, in the number of 72, are the descendants of Adam and Eve. The number of genocides is therefore a symbolic assertion of the suffering experienced from all nations. Yezidis are filled with the greatest dread towards the Muslims, whom they fear not only because of the accusations of Satanism hurled by them, but also because of one of the interpretations of their ethnonym, which derives the Yezidis from the followers of an Umayyad caliph, Yezid ibn Mu’awiya. Yezid has gained poor reputation among the Muslim community as a man who broke the rules of Islam. Above all, however, he has attracted much hatred of the Shi’ites, who accuse him of murdering Husayn ibn Ali, considered the third imam by Shi’a people. Taking into consideration the acts of persecution which, for the reasons mentioned above, have been affecting the Yezidis, a researcher of their religion often encounters resistance from respondents while attempting to engage in sensitive topics and may not be given answers that they perceive as potentially threatening to the entire community. And even if he gains the confidence of his interlocutor and such answers are obtained, he is often bound by a word of honour that he will not make them public. Thus, the researcher faces a moral dilemma, whether to be faithful to an academic oath that obliges him to seek the truth and share it with others, or to be faithful to the word given to the interlocutors who trusted him.

The Izidies believe that they existed since ancient times. It is believed that the name “Izidism” conveys a religious more than an ethnic meaning on the basis of which they claim that in the past their kings reigned over various parts of the world such as Rome, France, India, Mongolia, China and Persia. The Izidies think that they had a great figure named, Peer Bob, who is believed by the Izidies to be Beelzebub. The Izidies also believe that Ahab – an Israeli king, Nebuchadnezzar, Ahasuerus – a Persian King, and Agricola of Constantinople and others were all Izidy Kings. Perhaps Izidies want to say that they belong to the primitive religion of humanity from which others separated because of schisms.¹⁶

←29 | 30→What can be stated about the Yezidi community without any doubt is that it bears a clear influence of Adi ibn Musafir, called ‘Sheikh Adi’ and ‘Shikhadi’, who as a Muslim mystic himself, had a significant impact on the Yezidi religion as its founder or reformer, or at any rate, to whom it owes to a large extent its present form. When asked if they knew any testimony about their religion prior to Sheikh Adi’s time, and how they would relate to the hypothesis that he was the actual founder of Yezidism, my interlocutors usually replied that Adi’s achievement was to put in order previous beliefs, which generally consisted in worshipping celestial bodies and the forces of nature. As Shivan Bibo writes further in the article cited above:

By the time Sheikh Adi appeared among the Izidies, Izidism, of course, was already there but was actually deteriorating because ignorance was descending upon the followers of this religion. (…) Soon after Sheikh Adi settled down in Lalish, he gathered the leaders and chief men of this community to enlighten them about their religion. Some Izidies were and are still known as Shamsanis i.e. the sun worshipers.¹⁷

However, there are also contrary positions. Many Yezidi people believe that ‘pure’ Yezidism is the one that has not been tainted by Sheikh Adi,¹⁸ and which would be the indigenous religion of all Kurds. One of the reasons for that may be an attempt to distance oneself from any connections with Islam, and thus from possible influences of Sufism, which was represented by Adi as the founder of Sufi order, tariqa al-Adawiyya. On a side note it should be added that Yezidis use the term ‘dervish’, ‘feqir’ and ‘qalandar’ to describe early mystics such as Hasan al-Basri and Mansur al-Hallaj (who were more concerned with practice than with the theoretical construction of religious doctrine), rather than ‘Sufi’, as they consider Sufism a purely Islamic movement from which they dissociate themselves. This particular linguistic sense can also be witnessed in their oldest religious works that belong to the oral tradition.¹⁹ As Pir Dima told me:

←30 | 31→Until Sufism was forced into the framework of Islam by al-Ghazali, it was a separate teaching of a gnostic and ascetic nature. They called themselves ascetics – derwesh, i.e., an ascetic. Later, a term tassawuf appeared. After some time, when some of the dervishes associated with the term tassawuf – Sufis – were recognised by the Islamic tarikats, i.e., brotherhoods, the Yezidis did not agree to this. They became dervishes separately, outside the framework of any religion. (…) The Yezidis (in fact dervishes – zahed – are ascetics, as they used to be called in the past) have great respect for the first greatest dervishes, such as Rabia al-Adawiyya, Dhul-Nun al-Misri, Hasan al-Basri, Bayazid Bastami, Junayd al-Baghdadi.²⁰

During my fieldwork, I have also met with opinions of both Yezidi pirs and murids, who radically rejected the figure of Adi and everything connected with him, claiming that Yezidism is not a religion, but a “philosophy” related to practice, where the central role has been occupied by the cult of natural forces, which, in turn, dates back to the most ancient Mesopotamian traditions. These voices, although they contradict the historical state of knowledge, should not be ignored, as they are one of the contemporary trends shaping Yezidism.

A straightforward resolution to the issue of Adi ibn Musafir’s influence on Yezidism is also not facilitated by strong Kurdish propaganda, which uses Yezidism as a tool of cultural policy, presenting it as the original pan-Kurdish religion. This concept was particularly strongly promoted in the 1930s, as reflected in the speeches and manifestos of Bedir Khan brothers seeking a factor that would cement Kurdish identity. Making Yezidism the original Kurdish religion, which also contains elements of Zoroastrianism, would allow to ideologically bring together all Kurds and provide them with a distinctive identity and value based on the belief in their ancient origin. On a side note, the strength of this concept can be witnessed in the fact that it has met with approval also among the Kurds who declare themselves to be Muslims (such reactions I have also observed on numerous occasions in those parts of Turkish Kurdistan that are not inhabited by the Yezidis). The idea was also raised by the leaders of the political autonomy of Kurdistan in Iraq – Masoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, who were seeking political support in the Yezidi territories. And even though the concept was not entirely fictional, since in the 14^th c. some powerful Kurdish tribes indeed declared themselves to be Yezidis, it completely disregarded the fact that not all Yezidis were of Kurdish origin. Significantly, in the Yezidi community forming in the 12^th and the 13^th c., Arabs (and representatives of other ethnicities) constituted a considerable group. This fact, in turn, was emphasised during the rule of the Ba’ath Party in Iraq, when there were insistent attempts to Arabise the Yezidis by pointing to their connections ←31 | 32→with the Umayyads. Both Kurdisation and Arabisation had their advocates among the Yezidis themselves, which only exacerbated internal divisions in the community.²¹ Also today, supporters of either position can be equally met. This applies not only to Yezidis but also to those scholars who sometimes go beyond academic study to become involved in political propaganda.

The lack of clarity in relation to their own history is increasingly encouraging Yezidis to seek their roots and origin. And while they still refer to the ethno- and anthropogenic myth concerning the character of their mythical forefather, Prophet Shehid ben Jarr, the son of Adam, many are not satisfied with it. A good example of the quest to find their ‘scientifically proven’ origins can be an article printed in the already cited Yezidi journal “Lalish”, entitled Izidian Religion. Another Look, which expresses a very popular attitude among the Yezidis. It attempts to derive Yezidi roots from the Sumerians by listing “elements of similarity between the Izydian religion and the Assyrian and Babylonian religions which had the Sumerian origins”²² and formulating the following directive:

The Izydian religion is a very ancient one and its roots reach the Sumerian and Babylonian periods. To make sure of that we must study objectively and carefully the traditions and rites that Izydians are still keeping them and we must compare them with the rites, traditions and liturgies of other people that alternated the Izydians living in Mesopotamia.²³

At some point, every researcher of Yezidism is confronted with the fact (devastating for a man educated in the Western scientific and academic paradigms) that the history of the Yezidi community functions simultaneously on several non-parallel levels. Mythical and historical themes intertwine here, but they often get tangled up and intersect to form a peculiar a-linear and a-chronological grid of connections. This is best seen in the case of the Yezidi holy figures, who have manifested themselves many times throughout history. As angels, they form relationships different from those they had as actual persons of this world. Therefore, obtaining particular information about a certain character from the Yezidi history is often connected with the vagueness as to which level it concerns. At the same time, the Yezidis themselves are often unable to indicate whether they refer to a myth or to specific ancient events, because the myth and the reality have formed a kind of amalgam, which is difficult to break down. The figures of two Yezidi saints, Sheikh Shams and Sheikh Fakhradin, can serve as an example here. They are considered brothers, sons of some Yezdina Mir. At the same time, they are identified with the two angels created by God at the dawn of time, as well as with the Sun and the Moon. Likewise, the former is considered to be a Muslim mystic ←32 | 33→from Tabriz living 1185–1248, whereas the latter was a Christian monk from the 7^th c. Nonetheless, from the perspective of historical research, they are sometimes considered to be the sons or brothers of Hasan ibn Adi II (one of the then leaders of the Yezidi community, a relative of Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir) living in the second half of the 13^th c. Such a multidimensionality of the Yezidi history shows the specificity of their thinking and its dominant principle of ‘emanationism’, but at the same time it hinders research for which the chronological aspect – as understood and assumed by European science – is important.

1.2. Problems with comparatism

The threads of the primordial Pearl and the world-forming Love make up the cosmogonic motif that is characteristic of the Yezidi myth of the creation of the world. Also, in the cosmogonies described by members of other cultures and religions connected with the area where Yezidism occurs, we can find parallel threads – either identical or similar enough to be considered their equivalents. However, only in a few cases do we notice the simultaneous presence of both elements, and even less often can we witness a situation where they constitute a single motif. Most often we encounter one of them – the Pearl, or something that resembles it, e.g. the Egg, or the Stone, that appears in the descriptions of the beginnings of the world. It also happens that some tradition refers to both similar threads, but they do not appear directly in the cosmogony, as is the case with early Christian literature, which, despite reaching for the symbolism of the Pearl, does not use it in a cosmogonic context, and despite declaring directly that “God is Love”, in the cosmogony described in the prologue to the Gospel of St. John, lacks any of the two themes of interest to us. The thread of the Pearl, or its equivalents, can be found in the cosmogonies known to other Middle Eastern religions, especially Yarsanism and Zoroastrianism, but in none of them has it been associated with Love seen as an active factor in the creation of the world.

This is why I paid special attention to those myths about the origin of the world in which the resemblance to the Yezidi cosmogony proves to be the greatest, such as those present in popular Muslim cosmographies, but particularly those written about by these Muslim mystics, who use both symbols pertaining to our subject, the Pearl and Love. However, it is important to be aware that their versions of cosmogony have never become the ‘official’ cosmogony of Islam. This is for the simple reason that neither the Pearl nor Love is mentioned in the cosmogonic context in the Quran.

Of the cosmogonies that have to some degree earned the title of ‘official’ in the sense that they are commonly associated with a given culture or religion, two in particular have a significant similarity to the Yezidi one. First, it is a cosmogony attributed to the Orphics, and second, a Hindu cosmogony (which, in turn, resembles the ‘Orphic’ one). Although the symbolism of the Pearl is not present in either of them, there is an element very similar to it – the Golden Egg and the ←33 | 34→Golden Embryo respectively – from which a deity associated explicitly with Love emerged.

While comparing the threads in question, one has to remember about the difficulties that this process poses and the danger of over-interpretation. As the Reader will see in the course of further discussion, among the cosmogonies in which I will try to trace the parallel threads to the Yezidi cosmogony, the ones described by the Greeks and their late antique commentators (to which the Gnostics and the Sufis, in turn, also referred) occupy a special place. This is especially true of the cosmogony they associate with the Orphics. Such a juxtaposition is far from obvious, mainly on account of time and territorial distance between the Greeks and the Yezidis. It also causes complications in terms of methodology. In order to compare the Yezidi threads and the parallel Greek ones, the fact that the compared content comes from different eras, different cultural areas as well as different forms of expression has to be taken into consideration. In the case of the Yezidis, the comparative material is provided especially by their oral work,²⁴ while in the case of the Greeks we have literature on our hands.