God created the world and entrusted it to seven angels, and the chief of the seven is Tawusi Melek, the Peacock Angel. That delegation is the whole architecture, and almost everything a reader needs to understand about Yazidi religion follows from it.
The supreme God is not directly the object of cult in the way the Seven are. Having created, he committed the administration of the world to them, and it is with them that religious life is conducted. The Seven are a fixed number and a fixed set, and there is no mechanism for adding to them.
Tawusi Melek refused an order to bow to the first man. In Yazidi understanding this was obedience to a deeper command, since he would bow to none but God, and he was restored. That episode is the one on which the tradition has been most persistently and most damagingly misread by neighbours, who have identified him with a figure their own traditions condemn, and the misreading has repeatedly been the pretext for massacre.
Divinity enters the human world by descent rather than ascent. Sheikh Adi, the twelfth-century figure whose shrine at Lalish is the tradition's centre, is understood as a manifestation, and this is a religion in which the divine takes human form rather than one in which a person is promoted.
Yazidi society is organised in endogamous castes and the religion is not entered by conversion.