Eszter Spät completed her PhD at Central European University in 2009. She has written on Gnosticism, Manichaeism and on Yezidi oral tradition. She is the author of "Yezidis," based on her fieldwork in Iraqi Kurdistan.
The Yezidis are a Kurdish-speaking religious minority who practice a highly syncretistic religion based exclusively on oral tradition. Their myths and motifs, besides showing the influence of both Sufism and a pre-Zoroastrian Western Iranian mythology, are related to the religious movements of Late Antiquity, and reveal the vestiges of a common cultural substratum once shared by the people of the region.