THE YEZIDI BLACK SNAKE SACRED SPRING
At the Temple of the Peacock Angel in the Yezidi holy city of Lalish, you find this entrance to a Sacred Spring with a carved black snake, revered by Yezidis as they believe a black snake stuck itself into a hole in Noah’s Ark and saved humanity.
The Yezidis are among the most ancient of all peoples in the Middle East. Their heartland is in what is now Northern Iraq, or Iraqi Kurdistan. You may know of them through the horrific butchery perpetrated upon them by the medieval terrorists of ISIS which gained worldwide notoriety.
They are a fascinating people whose syncretic beliefs are a mélange of Zoroastrianism, Syriac Christianity, Sufi Islam spiced with their own interpretation of all three. In other words, they are their own people, no one else like them – peaceful, at ease with themselves, and immensely likeable.
Their protectors are the Kurds – an extraordinary people in their own right. We’ll be visiting Iraqi Kurdistan and the Yezidis once more next year. (Glimpses of Our Breathtaking World #89 Photo ©Jack Wheeler)




[This Monday’s Archive was originally published on April 3, 2007. The map you see are the regions of four countries where the great majority of people there are Kurds: Syrian Kurdistan in yellow, Iraqi Kurdistan in green, Iranian Kurdistan in blue, and Turkish Kurdistan in rose red. With the fall of the Assad dictatorship in Syria this week that was engineered by the dictator of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, the map above becomes enormously relevant.

Barack Obama had long been rumored as the catalyst for the 2020 Biden nomination—and thereafter played the whispering puppeteer behind the subsequent lost Biden administration years.
Whoever would have thought that chopping off the healthy breast tissue of 14-year-old girls could mean you end up in court?

Vladimir Putin’s loss of a key regional ally in Bashar al-Assad has weakened Moscow at a crucial moment.
An acquaintance the other day asked me what I do, and I told her that I’m a Marriage and Family Counselor, as well as a Life Coach. Then she asked an interesting question: “Is compromise the key to a happy marriage?”

