Peacock Angel: The Esoteric Tradition of the Yezidis

This book is dedicated to the Yezidi martyrs.

PEACOCK

ANGEL

"If as some Yezidis maintain, we are all angels enjoying a temporary existence as men and women, we need no rulers, regulations, or exoteric religions. In Peacock Angel a lifelong defender of anarchism blends poetry, erudition, and spiritual insight to honor this misunderstood and persecuted group, perhaps our closest link with the primordial tradition itself."

JOSCELYN GODWIN, AUTHOR OF MYSTERY RELIGIONS IN THE ANCIENT WORLD

"Peacock Angel penetrates the esoteric secrets of Yezidi spirituality. The Yezidi, who believe they are followers of the oldest of religions, likely go back more than 10,000 years. Wilson explores Yezidism as a pure religion that rejects the law in order to be free to choose religious spontaneity, freedom, and passion: the way to be mad for God. Delving into their oral and shamanic roots, Wilson shows how the Yezidi ferociously practiced their love of the divine. This lovely book is a pearl of wisdom that reveals the Yezidi passion to know God in our soulless world. A must-read for spiritual seekers in our times."

BARBARA HAND CLOW, AUTHOR OF AWAKENING THE PLANETARY MIND AND THE MIND CHRONICLES

Only the heterodox intellect of Peter Lamborn Wilson could expose the deeper truth behind today’s tragic headlines: that one of the world’s most brutally persecuted religious sects, the Yezidis—reduced by the thoughtless to be worshippers of a Satan that the thoughtless neither understand nor wish to understand—may hold the key to the revitalization of didactic religion. As Wilson’s enthralling arcanum reveals, the question is less whether the Yezidis can survive but whether we can survive without them.

MITCH HOROWITZ, PEN AWARD–WINNING AUTHOR OF OCCULT AMERICA, THE MIRACLE CLUB, AND UNCERTAIN PLACES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks especially to Charles Stein, my collaborator and also an editor of this book. Also, to Mark Amaru Pinkham, Bishop Mark Aelred Sullivan, Bob Podgursky, Erik Davis, Martin van Bruinessen, Raymond Foye, Ed Sanders, T. J. J. Altizer, Jim Fleming, D. Levi Strauss, Susan Meiselas, David Larsen, Richard Grossinger, and to the Interlibrary Loan Department of the Woodstock (NY) Public Library—sine qua non.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATIONS

In this book words from Kurdish, Persian, Arabic, Syriac, and other languages appear, and within quotations from other writers various systems of transliteration are used. Rather than attempting any scientific and unified system(s), I have avoided diacritical marks and approximated pronunciations, favoring Kurdish where possible (e.g., feqir and not faqīr). Some words appear in a variety of spellings (due to differing transliteration systems used in various sources). Scholars will recognize the words, and others presumably won’t care.

CONTENTS

Preface: Who Are the Yezidis?

Introduction

Chapter 1. Books

Chapter 2. Cosmogony

Chapter 3. The Delirium of Origins

Chapter 4. Sheikh Adi and the Sufis

Chapter 5. The Redemption of Satan

Chapter 6. Angelology

Chapter 7. Ritual

Chapter 8. Symbolique

Chapter 9. Color and Alchemy

Chapter 10. Esoteric Antinomianism

Chapter 11. Legend and Life of the Caliph Yazid ibn Mu‘awiya

Chapter 12. Poems of the Caliph Yazid

Appendix: India

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

WHO ARE THE YEZIDIS?

The Yezidis comprise an ethnic religious group sometimes included among the Kurds (most of them speak Kurmanji Kurdish) but sometimes considered a separate entity. The name derives either from the second Umayyad caliph Yazid I (d. 683 CE), or from the Old Iranian word yazata meaning divinity.*1 Aside from Caliph Yazid, the historical founder of the tradition was a Sufi from Lebanon, Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, of Umayyad descent, who settled in the remote Hakkari mountains of Iraq circa 1111 CE. Sheikh Adi is buried in the holy valley of Lalish, the sect’s chief site of pilgrimage. A popular hypothesis, which I share, is that a pre-Islamic sect already existed in that region, and Sheikh Adi was accepted by them as a teacher. However, either he or his descendants were in turn so influenced by the original sect that, in effect, they departed from Islam, and by the fifteenth century the sect was known to worship the Peacock Angel, Melek Ta’us, a figure often identified as the devil or Satan—hence the sect is known as devil worshippers. As we’ll see, however, the actual situation is far more complex than this.

Figure 1. The Holy Valley of Lalish.

Photographer unknown

There may be about a million Yezidis in the world today—no one knows. Many have fled from Turkey and recently from Iraq on account of persecution. There are some in Syria, in Germany, and in the United States, and also in the former Soviet regions of Armenia and Georgia. It is believed that Yezidis were once to be found in Iran and in India. There is no doubt that remarkable parallel traditions indeed exist in these countries, and need to be discussed. In Iraq there are two Yezidi population centers, one in the Hakkari region near Mosul, the other in Jebel Sinjar.

After the fall of the Umayyad dynasty, there seems to have existed a restorationist resistance movement that carried out guerilla warfare in the region now inhabited by the Yezidis. But scholars have proposed other origins for the sect. For some they comprise a post-Islamic form of Sufism, or a schismatic sect influenced by Sufism; for others they are a gnostic survival, or they are Mesopotamian or Harranian pagans, or crypto-Christians, or crypto-Jews, or crypto-Manichaeans, or Mandaeans, or (recently a popular notion) Zoroastrians, perhaps Mithraists, or even Hindus. They are very clearly related somehow to another Kurdish sect of angel worshippers called the Ahl-i Haqq (People of Truth) found amid Shiite milieux in Iran. Yezidis have been identified as Magians, Assyrians, Hittites, Mittani, Sumerians, and other ethnic and religious groups. In brief, their origins are mysterious.

As for the religion itself, that is the subject of this book, but for a brief and cogent summary, see the Encyclopaedia of Islam article on Yezidis by Philip Kreyenbroek, the present doyen of European Yezidi studies, whose major writings are a sine qua non for my work.

INTRODUCTION

The Yezidi religion could be considered from any of a number of perspectives—for instance, as an ethnically bound, orally transmitted folk religion structurally similar to other isolated Eurasian cults such as the Druse, the Dünmeh, the Alevis, the Asheks, the Mandaeans, the Ahl-i Haqq. (In past times such cults persisted even in Europe—witch covens, for instance, or the Baltic pagans, or, later, the Frankists.) Membership in such small religions is usually closed—at least in theory—and this ethnic finitude may come to characterize even former world religions like Zoroastrianism.

In truth, matters are more complex. For instance, in Kurdistan nowadays many people are not converting to Zoroastrianism, but discovering that their families were always Zoroastrians, practicing dissimulation (as nominal Christians or Muslims) to escape persecution. It might happen that al-Qaeda and ISIS give Islam such a bad name that it loses its hegemony in the region, perhaps especially among non-Arab peoples like Kurds, Persians, and Indians.

In this dramatic context, the outside world has grown more aware of the Yezidis since political and religious warfare in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey, and the Middle East in general has drawn attention to the suffering of oppressed religious minorities. Once an obscure, marginal folk whose fascinating faith was known only as a rumored devil worship, the Yezidis have in recent years been murdered, oppressed, dispersed, enslaved, and tortured by fundamentalist Islamist bigots and sadists, and have earned the pity of a media-bemused world. The contention of this essay is that admiration would be a more just response to the facts of Yezidism. By all means let us support their resistance to oppression, but let us not define them merely as victims.

I have been writing for some time about the need for a new revelation in the sphere of spirituality, a turn toward heresy so to speak, which I identify under the rubric of the re-paganization of monotheism. This is not the place for a full-scale critique of institutional religion since the invention of civilization in the fourth millennium BCE. For one thing, I’ve already carried this out; for another, the thing is obvious. I’m not alone in dreaming of such a movement; recently, for example, I came across the contemporary Persian philosopher Wahid Azal’s call for a post-Islamic Sufism (based on classical neo-Shiite Babism, heterodox Sufism, and ayahuasca shamanism).*2 Such ideas are in the air and have been since at least the 1960s. More recently, one might be forgiven for arguing that the need has reached crisis level. My intention here is limited to a discussion of Yezidism as a proto-version of the very repaganization I propose, as an antinomian response to the killing letter of monotheist puritanism, and as a Nietzschean religion dating back at least to the thirteenth century—a poetic inspiration for a serious movement to save religion from itself, from slavery and death, and (re)turn it to the shamanic values of mastery and life.

This essay (literally, attempt) concerns some aspects of the Yezidi religion, and not others. For example, I have very little to say about Yezidi history (which has been dealt with by other writers, e.g., John Guest’s Survival among the Kurds) or anthropology (inadequately studied, but see Henry Field, The Yezidis, and Birgül Açıkyıldız, The Yezidis) or folklore (see Christine Allison’s The Yezidi Oral Tradition in Iraqi Kurdistan for marvelous transcriptions and annotated translations of folksongs), or tribal structure, customs, costumes, foodways, and so forth. Having never visited the Yezidis myself, I must leave picturesque descriptions to those who have, such as Layard in the nineteenth century and, Seabrook, Edmonds, and Lady Drower in the twentieth.¹ What I offer is a review of other people’s writings, with an emphasis on the theme of esoteric antinomianism.*3

For the history, folklore, festivals, pilgrimages, and geography of the Yezidi world, the bibliography can be a readers’ guide. I intend a different experiment. Yezidism is a religion with secrets. (Because it remains largely a nonliterate tradition, some of these secrets are not known even to the majority of believers; moreover, orality leads to variants in the traditions.) I believe that such secrets can be discerned in general terms, if not in specific details, by an esoteric hermeneutics (as Henry Corbin put it) in which structural parallels with other esoteric traditions can be used to elucidate the Yezidi symbolique. I’ll try to show that Yezidism constitutes to a certain degree a conscious critique of orthodoxy and puritanism, that it has always proposed a re-paganization of monotheism, and that it has developed in a dialectical relation with religion in such a way as to constitute a classical antinomianism. I do not apologize for presuming that Yezidism has a use for readers who are not themselves Yezidis, and that it can be experienced as revelation through reading. Although not a religion of the Book, and quite clearly on the side of face-to-face encounter rather than action at a distance, Yezidism has accreted (like a pearl) a nimbus of textuality—and it is here that my attention is engaged. Obviously I cannot pretend to offer some sort of final account of Yezidism—or even a very accurate one. Let this text, then, be defined as poetry—as subjectivity—rather than scholarly prose. Any errors are mine—and precious to me.

Regretfully, I must limit my remarks about the current political situation of the Yezidis to a general statement of outrage on their behalf, due to continual Islamist persecution (murder, rape, enslavement) by elements such as ISIS. Fatwas against the Yezidis issued by the Ottoman ulema in the nineteenth century (see the appendix in Sami Said Ahmed’s The Yezidis) already advocated murder and enslavement of these unbelievers. Hyper-orthodoxies such as Wahhabism or Salafism may be distortions of orthodox Islam, but they do not violate historical programs. If moderate Islam today does not launch an effective critique of Salafism, perhaps this is from fear that the ugliest bigots are not misrepresenting the religion, but are practicing it to the letter, which killeth. Sufism and other heterodox forms of Islam appear to be precluded from making a robust resistance against Islamism—because, as one Sufi shaykh put it, We believe in peace and love, and not in violence or even militant self-defense. This constitutes, in the classical sense, a true tragedy.

As some of my readers will know, I have devoted decades of my life to the study of such heterodox forms. During this time, I have gone from a position of sympathy with Islam per se to a quite different view of the matter. I have waited in vain for a reasoned response from within mainstream Islam to the fundamentalist puritanism infecting it. When I first fell in love with esoteric forms of Islam in Iran, Afghanistan, and India in the 1970s, it often seemed that Sufism was the dominant mode, and that heterodoxies such as Ismailism or the Ahl-i Haqq (whom I also came to know and appreciate) were living limbs, so to speak, of the greater body of faith. In effect, what I liked were the medieval accretions and impurities that are now being condemned and repressed, from the firebombed Sufi shrines of Pakistan to murdered mystics in Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, and to persecuted Druzes, Asheqs, wandering dervishes, Yezidis and other minorities everywhere in Dar al-Islam. The time has come to say, finally, that the exoteric religion itself must be held to blame for these horrors.

I agree with Wahid Azal that the age now demands the proclamation of the precedence of the esoteric (batini) over the exoteric (zaheri).*4 Therefore, the aspect of Yezidism that will chiefly concern me is its esoteric essence. In a sense, the religion can be interpreted as a pure form of esotericism and, moreover, an antinomian manifestation of the purely esoteric. For dialectical reasons, which I’ll discuss, Yezidism can be situated and understood in opposition to Islam and its law; also, it must be seen as both a pre-Islamic religion and a post-Islamic form of Sufism. In making the argument, I intend not to rely in a final sense on contemporary interpretations of Yezidism, either by scholars or by practicing Yezidis. My sole source of evidence must be Yezidi texts, by which I mean largely transcriptions of oral traditions.

Until recently, the Yezidi caste of mirids (commoners), and even most of the Sheikh and Pir castes, were supposed to be deliberately uneducated and unable to read. Western scholars often assumed the rule was meant to keep them ignorant and in thrall to the mir or ruler. But I see the rule as part of their antinomian praxis. Surely we are post-progressist enough by now to admit that literacy is at best a mixed blessing. The text has always (since about 4000 BC) been a means of enslaving humans to a status quo of the state and its official ideology or religion. By refusing literacy, the Yezidis signified their refusal of law as oppression. The pen is in the hand of the enemy, as the old Persian proverb puts it. The magic of writing comprises both the blessing and the curse of Hermes-Thoth. According to a legend, when Thoth tells Thamus (= Ammon = Zeus) he’s invented writing, and that from now on humans will never forget anything, Thamus answers, "On the contrary, my son—now they’ll forget everything. Writing is the death of memory, and hence the origin of unknowing. Its spell binds us to the power of the author(ity). In this sense, in adhering to an oral tradition—and not an illiterate or preliterate" one—the Yezidis can be seen as deliberately (not accidentally) free. In their so-called scripture, the Kitab al-Jilwah, Melek Ta’us the Peacock Angel says, "I lead to the straight path without a revealed book; I direct aright my beloved and my chosen ones by unseen means" (italics mine). Islam calls itself the religion of the Book. It acknowledges that Judaism and Christianity are also religions of the Book (and, according to some Sufis, also Hinduism with its Vedas). All others, bookless, are illegitimate. But Yezidism goes further. It rejects the Book. It opposes the Book. In this dialectical opposition is formed its true essence and glory.

1

BOOKS

They say our hearts are our books, and our sheikhs tell us everything from the second Adam until now and the future.

APPENDIX TO MESHAF RESH

The Yezidi religion appears to possess two revealed books—the Kitab al-Jilwah (Book of Revelation) and Meshaf Resh (The Black Book)—whose author (whether God or Melek Ta’us) maintains that Yezidi teachings are not contained in books, and that the Book of Revelation was (as opposed to the Bible or Qur’an) not a revealed text. The two books seem to have been unknown till the late nineteenth century, when versions of them began to appear in the very dodgy manuscript markets of Iraq. Were they forgeries, concocted for sale to credulous Western tourists and scholars? Yezidi legend says no, they are authentic, and that their originals were stolen by the British and hidden in the British Museum. And the texts as received contain real Yezidi teachings. It is true that books cannot be revealed, and that most Yezidis are forbidden to learn to read. Their tradition is canonical only as orally transmitted. Yezidism is not illiterate (or preliterate) but anti-literate, as we said above. The pen has been in the hand of the enemy ever since writing was invented as a means of magical control, of propagating ideology and alienation. Writing is paradoxically the sign of absence: when knowledge is reduced to data, it falls into a black hole of cultural amnesis because it is no longer contained in the soul, but merely in books (which can be lost). Only presence assures authenticity. Mediation is separation—and loss.

In the twenty-first century the Yezidi stricture on literacy has loosened, of course, under the influence of whiggish modernism, which has no concept of the positive valence of orality or the inherent dark side of the written (and especially the printed) word. Education must be good—any other attitude would constitute backwardness and reaction. The existence of what might be called revolutionary anti-progressism—the idea that liberal social control (including literacy and enlightenment) can easily become a form of oppression, and must be dialectically critiqued and in some cases actively opposed in the cause of liberation—this perspective is generally condemned as Romantic at best. For the record, then, allow me to say that I perceive an esoteric value in the Yezidi defense of orality. The limits imposed by the very structure of media can only be transcended by breakthroughs into pre-sentience and heart-to-heart transmission of knowledge—that is, of wisdom, which is existential—and not of mere information.

The pure orality of the Yezidi tradition has resulted in a wild poly-valence and delirium of mythopoesis. Answers to theological questions can differ from village to village, and from one believer to another. However, from the scholar’s perspective, coherence is not lost. One benefit (for outsiders at least) of modernity has been the transcription and publication of a great deal of oral material, most importantly the qewls or hymns that are memorized by hereditary bards (qawwals) and performed during rituals, and the stories that are told to contextualize and comment on the poems. These oral texts have only begun to appear since the latter half of the twentieth century, and they are still concealed by their rather obscure appearances in print, for example, in the English-language translations of Kreyenbroek. These hymns have come from the sky in a quasi-revelatory mode: God (or Melek Ta’us) taught them to the angels who transmitted them to the sheikhs, who revealed them to the Yezidi people—or, they are the work of Sheikh Adi—or by the wise and saintly men of Adi’s day.¹

Let not our hearts be corrupted [by] . . . interpreting books.*5 ²

In one qewl it is said that the Pen of Power is in the hand of Soltan Ezi, the angel identified most often with the caliph Yazid.³ In a sense, this motif shadows that of the Tablet and Pen in the Qur’an; it represents creation itself as a kind of writing. In the beginning was the Word—already the written word. Here, however, we must speak of a paradoxical Pen of non-writing, of non-literacy. (It reminds one of the sword of non-killing, which is said in Zen to be the highest form of the martial art of fencing.) Again, we are dealing here not with simple preliteracy or peasant backwardness, but with a subtle dialectic. The pen of non-writing reflects the motif of the lost book. In Eliade’s Shamanism we read that once upon a time shamans had a book in which their secrets were written, but the spirits became angry at its misuse and took it back—similar to the secret identity of soma/haoma, the entheogenic plant of immortality in Indo-Iranian tradition, which was lost, just as Gilgamesh lost the magic herb given to him by Utnapishtim.†6 The fact is that wisdom is always already lost—otherwise it would not be wisdom; whereas simultaneously it is common as dung (as the alchemists say) and can be found in any cheap paperback edition of any decent mystical text—provided one reads with the angel.‡7

According to another legend, the Black Book is in reality simply the Qur’an, with every mention of the name Satan covered over by black wax. This image haunts my thinking about Yezidism, even if it’s not true.⁴ John Guest, who gives the most complete account of the incredibly tangled history of the discovery and publication of the Jilwah and the Meshaf Resh (most of which need not concern us, since we are interested solely in their esoteric message) remarks that a scholar named Browski in 1884 claimed to have seen the Yezidi sacred book with seven seals, and that on its title page was the name Hasan alBasri. Browski’s published articles "contain no direct quotations from the Meshaf Resh, but they accurately summarize portions of it.⁵ Clearly this text was the Black Book. But Browski also mentions traditions about Melek Ta’us advising Nebuchadnezzar to destroy Jerusalem, rescuing Jesus Christ from the cross and inspiring Caliph Yazid to defy Islam,"⁶ none of which appear in the text we have today (although they may yet be canonical and subject to esoteric interpretation), suggesting that Browski had a second source, now lost.

Kreyenbroek points out that the qewls and other inspired/revealed oral material could have led to the assumption that a kind of Ur-book, the archetype of the Jilwah and the Black Book, could have existed and is now hidden and lost.⁷ Given Islam’s tolerance of other religions of the Book, and its condemnation of religions without books as unbelief, it may be that some Yezidis have wished into existence (at least as legend) a book of their own. Thus, a poem in praise of Sheikh Adi (translated by Badger in Nestorians and Their Rituals) mentions a Book of Glad Tidings, "a work which is still referred to by some Yezidis (under the title of Mijde) as the ‘original’ Yezidi sacred book, now probably lost and probably influenced by the Christian Evangelium or Good News. Some Yezidis believe hymns cannot be written; others believe the true books are destroyed or lost, and a minority" accept the existing texts as canonical.⁸

As mentioned above, the transference of the Black Book from heaven to earth is attributed to Hasan al-Basri, a historical figure and early mystic predating Sufism. According to Guest, this is a mask-identity for Hasan (Kurdish Hesen) ibn Adi, the martyr and reviver of the Yezidi faith who was a great-grand-nephew of Sheikh Adi.⁹ One clan of Sheikhs descended from Hesen, called the Adanis, are the only family of Yezidis enjoined to learn reading and writing, and are the custodians of the