Khoyl
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
Epithets
- Qojl
Relations
- subordinate to: Pon
Sources
- 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)