Sheikh Shams

On the fifth day of the autumn assembly a bull is walked down into the valley at Lalish. The crowd around it is loud. The animal is not. It is brought to a stone basin in front of a small shrine with a ribbed cone for a roof, southwest of the sanctuary where Sheikh Adi lies buried and a short climb above the spring the Yazidis call Kaniya Spi, the White Spring. The building is roughly nine hundred years old. The being it belongs to is older than the world.

Sheikh Shams is the sun. Not a god who drives it across the sky, not a figure later compared to it by tidy-minded scholars, but the light itself, the part of God’s brightness that human eyes are actually allowed to see. Fire is the same power brought down to a size people can keep in a room. His name in Kurmanji collapses in ordinary speech to Şêşims, run together like one word by the people who say it most often. In the formal register he is Melek Şemsedîn, which is Arabic, and which means the sun of the faith. That Arabic honorific sitting on a Kurdish holy being is the first sign of how tangled his history is.

Yazidi accounts of the beginning start with God and a pearl. The world existed first in that small enclosed state, for forty years or forty thousand depending on who is telling it, and while it waited God called seven beings into existence out of his own light, made a covenant with them, and handed them the running of everything that was about to happen. These are the Heft Sirr, the Seven Mysteries, and the Peacock Angel Melek Taus stands first among them. Sheikh Shams is one of the seven. So, in most listings, are Sheikh Adi, Sheikh Hasan, and the three who come as a set with Shams himself: Fexredîn, Nasirdîn and Sicadîn, the four who are named together as the Mysteries. The lists do not fully agree with each other. Sometimes Sheikh Obekr is added; sometimes Sheikh Adi is folded into Melek Taus and the arithmetic quietly changes. Nobody in the tradition seems bothered by this.

What makes the whole structure hard to describe from outside is that the Seven come down. They take human shape in a person called a xas, and the Kurmanji phrase for it is kiras gehorrin, changing the shirt. So there is also a man. He was a son of Ezdina Mir, a local prince, and he was living at Lalish in the twelfth century when an ascetic of Umayyad descent named Adi ibn Musafir came up out of Baghdad into the Kurdish mountains and settled in the valley. The four sons met him there. What grew out of that meeting became a religion that its own founder would not have recognised. The angel and the man are not two competing subjects with a boundary between them. They are one being in different clothing, and both facts are held at once, without strain, by everyone who prays there.

He left his name on a bloodline. The Yazidi shaikhs divide into three branches that do not marry outside themselves, and the Şemsanî are his. From that branch and no other comes the Baba Sheikh, the Father Sheikh, who leads the shaikhs, is taken by most Yazidis as the spiritual head of the community, and without whose presence a good many of the ceremonies at Lalish cannot legally begin. A twelfth-century man is therefore still exercising authority in the twenty-first, through grandsons counted in the dozens of generations.

His shrine takes the weight of the community’s honesty. Oaths are sworn at its doorway, and a Yazidi who swears there and lies has done something that the community does not treat as a small matter. A man comes up the stone path with a dispute behind him, stands at the threshold with the cool of the masonry against his palm, and says a thing he cannot afterwards take back. That is the ordinary daily business of the place, and it happens far more often than the bull does.

The bull happens once a year, at the Feast of the Assembly, the seven-day gathering in autumn that draws Yazidis to Lalish from Sinjar and Sheikhan and from as far as Germany. Its religious centre is the belief that the Seven assemble in the valley at that moment. A second bull is killed in summer, at the forty-day festival called Chilê Havînê. Through all of it, from the doorway of the sun’s own shrine, there is the sound of the daf, the frame drum, and the thin breath of the shebab flute, played by the qewwals of Bashiqa and Behzane, the two villages that supply the reciters.

For eighty years outsiders have looked at that bull and seen Mithra. The identification has a serious pedigree, and it is not stupid: Philip Kreyenbroek traced real structural parallels between Yazidi cosmogony and old Iranian material in 1992, and Sheikh Shams does share a good deal of ground with Mithra, the sun, the binding of oaths, the autumn killing. It has also hardened into something close to fact, repeated by scholars and by politicians and by many Yazidis who took it on the authority of both. Artur Rodziewicz pulled it apart in 2024, arguing from his own observation of the ritual at Lalish and from the hymns themselves that the evidence underneath the claim will not carry it. The honest position is that a Yazidi sun angel and an Iranian sun god resemble each other, that nobody has demonstrated descent, and that the resemblance has been doing more work than it earned.

What the Yazidis have of him is not narrative. It is a hymn, the Qewlê Şêşims, held in the oral corpus of qewls that the qewwals recite and that was for most of its history never written down at all, alongside the three-day fast kept in his name in December and the old practice of praying toward the rising, noonday and setting sun. That last one is worth stating plainly, because travellers loved it and repeated it endlessly: it was never universal, and it is now an ideal more than a habit.

His powers follow from what he is rather than from anything he did. He gives light and the heat that makes growing possible; he is present in every fire; he holds an oath in place; and as one of the Seven he carries a share of the world’s running that God handed over before there was a world to run. His limits follow just as directly. He has no death, no battle, no enemy, no seduction, no cycle of adventures, because the sun does not need a plot. Nobody has ever drawn him. And the record of him has been under strain for a century: the two books printed in 1911 and 1913 and sold to Europeans as the Yazidi scriptures were written by non-Yazidis, which is now generally accepted, even though what they contain runs broadly with the oral tradition. The sun over Lalish is not in any doubt. Almost everything written about it by outsiders has needed checking.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sheikh Shams in Yazidism?

Sheikh Shams is the Yazidi divinity of the sun, one of the seven holy beings known as the Heft Sirr or Seven Mysteries whom God created from his own light and entrusted with the world. He is also understood as a twelfth-century man, a son of Ezdina Mir, because Yazidi belief holds that the Seven take human form. Both identities are held at the same time rather than treated as alternatives.

What is Sheikh Shams the god of?

Sheikh Shams is the sun, the light and heat that keep the world alive, and the divine light of God made visible. Fire is treated as his counterpart on earth. He is also the being by whom the most binding Yazidi oaths are sworn, taken at the doorway of his shrine at Lalish.

Why is a bull sacrificed at the shrine of Sheikh Shams?

A bull is killed at a stone basin in front of the shrine of Sheikh Shams on the fifth day of the Feast of the Assembly, the week-long autumn gathering at Lalish whose religious centre is the belief that the Seven Mysteries meet there. A second bull sacrifice takes place at the summer festival called Chilê Havînê. Scholars have long read the rite as evidence of Mithraism among the Yazidis, but that reading was challenged in detail by Artur Rodziewicz in 2024.

Is Sheikh Shams the same as Mithra?

No connection has been demonstrated. Sheikh Shams and the old Iranian god Mithra share a striking amount of ground, including the sun, the binding of oaths and an autumn bull killing, and the comparison has been standard for about eighty years. Recent work argues that the resemblance has been mistaken for descent and that the Yazidi hymns do not support the Mithraic reading.

What are the Şemsanî and how are they connected to Sheikh Shams?

The Şemsanî are one of the three endogamous lineages of Yazidi shaikhs, and they take their name and their descent from Sheikh Shams. The Baba Sheikh, leader of the shaikhs and widely regarded as the spiritual head of the Yazidi community, must come from this branch. Many of the ceremonies at Lalish cannot be held without him.

Related Entries

Melek Taus, Angels, Israfil, Gabriel, Michael, Amesha Spenta, Ahura Mazda, Zoroaster, Mithra, Shamash, Helios, Ra, Surya, Amaterasu