Note 29 — INTRODUCTION THE ORIGIN OF THE MANUSCRIPT

Professor Jackson, of Columbia University, seems to trace it to the “old devil-worship in Mazandaran” (J A O S, XXV, 178). But it is not certain that the Yezidis believe in Melek Ṭâ´ûs as an evil spirit. In the history of religion the god of one people is the devil of another. Asura is a deity in the Rig Veda and an evil spirit only in later Brahman theology. In Islam the gods of heathenism are degraded into jinns, just as the gods of North Semitic heathenism are called še‘îrîm (hairy demons) in Lev. 17:7; or as the gods of Greece and Rome became devils to early Christians. See W. R. Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 120; Fihrist, pp. 322, 326.

Professor M. Lidzbarski (Z D M G, LI, 592), on the other hand, argues that Ṭâ´ûs is the god Tammuz. His contention is based on the assumption that the word Ṭâ´ûs must embody the ancient god; that in Fihrist, 322, the god Tâuz has a feast on the 15th of Tammuz (July); that in Kurdish, the language of the Yezidis, m is frequently changed to w. This theory also is untenable, for one might guess at any ancient god. The exact form of the name “Tauz” is uncertain (see Chwolsohn, Die Ssabier, II, 202); the statement that in Kurdish m is frequently changed to w is not true, if one would set it up as a grammatical rule to explain such phenomena; the Kurdish-speaking people never pronounce Tammuz, “Tauz;” and, finally, in the Yezidi conception of Melek Ṭâ´ûs there are no traces of the notion held respecting Tammuz.