Yukaghir · deity · Yukaghir traditional religion; continuing · deity
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
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
Waldemar Jochelson, The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History XIII (1926)