Note 4 — Chapter IV · The Abgott.

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?’4 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 phœnix,” 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.5 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.’