This is natural, and suggestive of the criminal under sentence of
death, who, when asked if he was not afraid to meet his God, replied,
'Not in the least; it's that other party I'm afraid of.' Yet it
is hardly doubtful that the worship of Nyang began in an era when
he was by no means considered morally baser than Zamhor. How the
theory of Dualism, when attained, might produce the phenomenon
called Devil-worship, is illustrated in the case of the Yezedis, now
so notorious for that species of religion. Their theory is usually
supposed to be entirely represented by the expression uttered by one
of them, 'Will not Satan, then, reward the poor Izedis, who alone have
never spoken ill of him, and have suffered so much for him?' [18]
But these words are significant, no doubt, of the underlying fact:
they 'have never spoken ill of' the Satan they worship. The Mussulman
calls the Yezedi a Satan-worshipper only as the early Zoroastrian held
the worshipper of a deva to be the same. The chief object of worship
among the Yezedis is the figure of the bird Taous, a half-mythical
peacock. Professor King of Cambridge traces the Taous of this Assyrian
sect to the "sacred bird called a phoenix," whose picture, as seen
by Herodotus (ii. 73) in Egypt, is described by him as 'very like an
eagle in outline and in size, but with plumage partly gold-coloured,
partly crimson,' and which was said to return to Heliopolis every
five hundred years, there to burn itself on the altar of the Sun,
that another might rise from its ashes. [19] Now the name Yezedis
is simply Izeds, genii; and we are thus pointed to Arabia, where we
find the belief in genii is strongest, and also associated with the
mythical bird Rokh of its folklore. There we find Mohammed rebuking
the popular belief in a certain bird called Hamâh, which was said to
take form from the blood near the brain of a dead person and fly away,
to return, however, at the end of every hundred years to visit that
person's sepulchre. But this is by no means Devil-worship, nor can we
find any trace of that in the most sacred scripture of the Yezedis,
the 'Eulogy of Sheikh Adi.' This Sheikh inherited from his father,
Moosafir, the sanctity of an incarnation of the divine essence,
of which he (Adi) speaks as 'the All-merciful.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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