Yazidi

God created the world and entrusted it to seven angels, and the chief of the seven is Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel. That delegation is the whole architecture, and almost everything a reader needs to understand about Yazidi religion follows from it.

The supreme God is not directly the object of cult in the way the Seven are. Having created, he committed the administration of the world to them, and it is with them that religious life is conducted. The Seven are a fixed number and a fixed set, and there is no mechanism for adding to them.

Tawusi Melek refused an order to bow to the first man. In Yazidi understanding this was obedience to a deeper command, since he would bow to none but God, and he was restored. That episode is the one on which the tradition has been most persistently and most damagingly misread by neighbours, who have identified him with a figure their own traditions condemn, and the misreading has repeatedly been the pretext for massacre.

Divinity enters the human world by descent rather than ascent. Sheikh Adi, the twelfth-century figure whose shrine at Lalish is the tradition's centre, is understood as a manifestation, and this is a religion in which the divine takes human form rather than one in which a person is promoted.

Yazidi society is organised in endogamous castes and the religion is not entered by conversion.

Yazidi religious knowledge is transmitted orally, in qewls, sacred hymns in Kurmanji held and recited by specialists, and for most of the tradition's history it was deliberately not written down. That is the first and most important fact about its attestation.

Two short books circulated in the early twentieth century as Yazidi scriptures, and their authenticity has been seriously questioned since. The manuscripts appeared through intermediaries during a period of intense outside interest, and the scholarly consensus treats them with considerable caution, though the material they contain is not simply invented and its relationship to genuine tradition is still discussed.

The result is that older Western writing about the Yazidis is often built on a foundation the tradition itself does not recognise. That writing also carried, and amplified, the identification of Tawusi Melek with a figure of evil, which is the single most consequential misrepresentation in the entire literature about this religion.

Serious study of the qewls, including work by Yazidi scholars, began in earnest in the later twentieth century and is the appropriate basis for anything said about the tradition now.

The community's recent history bears directly on the record. The attacks and enslavement carried out against Yazidis in Iraq from 2014 caused displacement on a scale that threatens oral transmission itself, and documentation has since become a matter of survival rather than of scholarship.