The Yezidis do not believe that the Peacock Angel is the Supreme God. Tawsi Melek has taken on many other forms throughout time. He does not, however, always manifest within these diverse traditions as a peacock. They contend that Tawsi Melek is the true creator and ruler of the universe, and therefore a part of all religious traditions. The Yezidis believe that they possess the oldest religion on Earth, the primeval faith that features Tawsi Melek, and that all other traditions are related to them through the Peacock Angel. But he is not just the possession of the Yezidis, he belongs to the entire world. Tawsi Melek, the “Peacock Angel” and “Peacock King,” is the most import deity of the Yezidis. Over the course of 700 years, nearly 23 million Yezidi people have been murdered, thus bringing their civilization to the brink of extinction. Or even worse, some Moslems have pronounced the Yezidis as heretics who were once orthodox Moslems – an allegation that puts them in the lowest rung of humanity. Moslems also contend that the Yezidis are not “People of the Book”, i.e., that they don’t have a sacred revealed scripture like the Holy Bible or the Koran at the center of their religion, so they claim justification in their massacre of them. According to the current Yezidi belief, however, the Caliph Yazid was a Moslem ruler who eventually became disenchanted with his religion and converted to Yezidism.Įven with all of their ostensible connections to other faiths, the Yezidis have for hundreds of years been under constant attack from Moslems who promulgate the idea that the Yezidi’s principle diety, Tawsy Melek, the “Peacock Angel”, is Satan. Other scholars have associated the name Yazidi with Yazid bin Muawiyah, a Moslem Caliph ofthe early Umayyad Dynasty. According to Eszter Spat in The Yezidis, the name is derived from ez Xwede dam, meaning “ I was created by God.” Some Yezidis maintain that it translates as “ Followers of the true path.” The term Yezidi or Yazidi is also very close to the Persion/Zoroastrian word Yazdan, meaning “ God“, and Yazata, meaning “ divine” or “ angelic being“.įor this reason scholars have theorized a Persian origin for the Yezidis. Since their founding many thousands of years ago in India, these people have always been known as the Yezidis or Yazidis.