Khoyl

Khoyl, in modern romanization Qojl, names the heavenly power and patron-deity of the Yukaghir family and clan. Linguistic and ethnographic study traces the word to the cult of the deified shaman-ancestor: a powerful shaman, after death, could be dried, divided into relic-amulets and venerated by the clan as its protecting qojl. After the eighteenth-century Christianization of the Yukaghir, the same lexeme was transferred to the Christian God and to icons and saints, so that today qojl simply means 'God' or 'divinity'.

Domains

• heaven sky
• shaman ancestor patronage

Powers

• to protect the family and clan as their patron from above

Epithets

• QojlL. N. Prokopyeva, 'Yukaghir language vocabulary associated with the word Qojl "God": semantics and formation', Tomsk State University Journal of Philology, 2020 (secondary)

Relations

• subordinate to: PonAs the heavenly/sky power and clan-patron, Khoyl belongs to the celestial tier beneath Pon, the diffuse Owner of the firmament.Waldemar Jochelson, The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus, Memoirs of the AMNH XIII (1926) (secondary)

Sources

• Khoyl (Yukaghir qojl) is the heavenly/celestial deity and shaman-patron of the family, whose figure derives from the cult of the deified shaman-ancestor and whose name later became the Yukaghir word for 'God'.: L. N. Prokopyeva, 'Yukaghir language vocabulary associated with the word Qojl "God": semantics and formation', Tomsk State University Journal of Philology (Vestnik TGU. Filologiya), 2020 (secondary); Waldemar Jochelson, The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History XIII (1926) (secondary)