Knowing Time in Yezidi Tradition

This study examines the ways in which time is ordered, reckoned, seasonally located, and forecast in a source-specific body of Yezidi material recorded and published by Bedel Feqîr Hecî. It distinguishes between material transmitted by Feqîr Hecî Şemo, the Qewlê Meha recorded from Pîr ‘Ebo al-Khatari, and a separate forty-stone procedure attributed to Adil Ahmad Ishkaftandawi. Rather than presupposing a single “Yezidi calendar” or a homogeneous astronomical system, the study treats these materials as a documented corpus containing different temporal functions. The mathematical analysis shows that the recorded lunar procedure employs an annual value increasing by eleven, a month number counted from March, and the day of the month in order to determine the Moon’s age. Comparison with the Old Style epact sequence for 1989–2001 reveals a constant offset of 12 modulo 30 throughout all thirteen tested years. The procedure also displays a highly specific operational affinity with historically documented epact-based rules for determining lunar age. The study does not, however, identify the recorded annual value directly with the epact, present the +12 offset as an emic rule, or treat technical similarity as sufficient evidence for a specific historical route of transmission. At the stellar level, linguistic and regional comparison strongly supports the identification of Pêro with the Pleiades and Quregh with Sirius, while the case of Terazû/Libra shows that the three markers do not constitute a homogeneous class of observational astronomical phenomena. Independent material concerning the hesabdar in Hakkari further corroborates regional parallels in stellar markers, forty-day seasonal periods, and traditional turning points in the year. The study concludes that the corpus does not document one temporal system, but several adjacent functions of temporal knowledge: ordering time, calculating it, locating seasonal position within it, and forecasting what may follow.