SUPERNATURAL BEINGS
The Shaits are a curious class of supernatural beings, for among them are classed all the martyrs of Islam and many Kurds who have fallen in defence of their tribe, and they, like the living, are a wandering tribe of beings, beneficent, and desirous of helping the mortal Kurd to his desires. In fact, they are regarded in a light very similar to the Pir, and may be appealed to at their halting-places—often enough great trees on the hill-sides.
The Peri—whence our own word and idea of fairies—are essentially the same beings as our own folklore teaches us, for as our lore has come from the northern Aryans, so are our fairies the same little folk as the Peri.
As to the Jinn, they have adopted the unfortunate Arabic fellow, just as Muhammad, perhaps in his turn borrowing from tradition, introduced him, “a being made of fire, but like men, dependent upon food for existence, and like men, some malignant and some well disposed, and not all malignant like the devils.”[102]
As to the Div—devils—they exist, as they did in the days of Zoroaster, but the Kurd, living the strenuous life he does, seems to think but little of them.
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER XIII:
[75] Creagh, Armenians, Koords, and Turks, vol. ii., p. 167.
[76] One of the many stories invented on account of the fear and dread they inspire in the people around them.—Sharaf Nama.
[77] Speculation has had its day even with the origin of the Kurds, in the theory put forward by some that they are the descendants of the Parthians, a theory quite impossible to consider, now that the Parthians are known to be of Scythian race, of a type ethnologically and linguistically different from the modern Kurd, who is a pure Aryan.
[78] Ragozin, Assyria.