Peter Lamborn Wilson - 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 todays tragic headlines: that one of the worlds most brutally persecuted religious sects, the Yezidisreduced by the thoughtless to be worshippers of a Satan that the thoughtless neither understand nor wish to understandmay hold the key to the revitalization of didactic religion. As Wilsons enthralling arcanum reveals, the question is less whether the Yezidis can survive but whether we can survive without them.

MITCH HOROWITZ, PEN AWARDWINNING 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 Librarysine 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 faqr). 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 wont care.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

WHO ARE THE YEZIDIS?

T he 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. 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 sects 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 Taus, a figure often identified as the devil or Satanhence the sect is known as devil worshippers. As well 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 todayno 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

T he Yezidi religion could be considered from any of a number of perspectivesfor instance, as an ethnically bound, orally transmitted folk religion structurally similar to other isolated Eurasian cults such as the Druse, the Dnmeh, the Alevis, the Asheks, the Mandaeans, the Ahl-i Haqq. (In past times such cults persisted even in Europewitch covens, for instance, or the Baltic pagans, or, later, the Frankists.) Membership in such small religions is usually closedat least in theoryand 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.