Sultan Ezid

Sultan Ezid (Êzîd) is one of the three divine hypostases of Yezidism, completing the triad of which Tawûsî Melek and Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir are the other two. In the sacred hymns he is an ambiguous figure who appears at times as God himself and at times as an angel, and his identity is frequently merged with that of the Peacock Angel and of Sheikh Adi, so that the three are treated as interchangeable manifestations of a single reality. His annual feast, the Îda Êzî, is among the principal festivals of the Yezidi calendar. The etymology of his name is debated: many scholars connect it with the Iranian word for a divine being (yazata / yazad, Kurdish êzdan), from which the community's own self-designation Êzidî is also often derived, while others have linked it to the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, a connection the Yezidis themselves emphatically deny.

Domains

• divine kingship

Powers

• to manifest the one God to the community as a sacred king

Epithets

• Siltan ÊzîdPhilip G. Kreyenbroek and Khalil Jindy Rashow, 'God and Sheikh Adi are Perfect: Sacred Poems and Religious Narratives from the Yezidi Tradition', Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2005. (secondary)

Relations

• subordinate to: Tawûsî Melek, the Peacock AngelAs the third person of the divine triad his identity is treated as interchangeable with that of the Peacock Angel, chief of the Heptad.Philip G. Kreyenbroek and Khalil Jindy Rashow, 'God and Sheikh Adi are Perfect: Sacred Poems and Religious Narratives from the Yezidi Tradition', Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden, 2005. (secondary)

Sources

• Sultan Ezid is a divine figure of Yezidism, the third of the three hypostases of the one God alongside Tawûsî Melek and Sheikh Adi, sometimes appearing as God and sometimes as an angel.: Christine Allison, 'Yazidis i. General', Encyclopaedia Iranica, 2004. (secondary); Philip G. Kreyenbroek, 'Yezidism: Its Background, Observances and Textual Tradition', Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. (secondary)