Daeva

A daeva (Avestan: 𐬛𐬀𐬉𐬎𐬎𐬀 daēuua) is a Zoroastrian supernatural entity with disagreeable characteristics. In the Gathas, the oldest texts of the Zoroastrian canon, the daevas are "gods that are (to be) rejected". This meaning is – subject to interpretation – perhaps also evident in the Old Persian "daiva inscription" of the 5th century BC. In the Younger Avesta, the daevas are divinities that promote chaos and disorder. In later tradition and folklore, the dēws (Zoroastrian Middle Persian; New Persian divs) are personifications of every imaginable evil. Over time, the Daeva myth as Div became integrated to Persian mythology.

Daeva, the Iranian language term, shares the same origin of "Deva" of Hinduism, which is a cognate with Latin deus ("god") and Greek Zeus. While the word for the Vedic spirits and the word for the Zoroastrian entities are etymologically related, their function and thematic development is altogether different. Originally, the term was used to denote beings of cultural folklore which predate use in scripture.

Equivalents for Avestan daeva in Iranian languages include Pashto, Balochi, Kurdish dêw, Persian dīv/deev. The Iranian word was borrowed by Old Armenian as dew, Georgian as devi, Urdu as deo, and Turkish as dev with the same negative associations in those languages. In English, the word appears as daeva, div, deev, and in the 18th century fantasy novels of William Thomas Beckford as dive.

It has been speculated that the concept of the daevas as a malevolent force may have been inspired from the Scythian gods.

Old Avestan daēuua or daēva derives from Old Iranian *daiva, which in turn derives from Indo-Iranian *daivá- "god", reflecting Proto-Indo-European *deywós with the same meaning. For other Indo-European derivatives, see Dyeus. The Vedic Sanskrit cognate of Avestan daēuua is devá-, continuing in later Indo-Aryan languages as dev.

Because all cognates of Iranian *daiva have a positive connotation, but "no known Iranian dialect attests clearly and certainly the survival of a positive sense for [Old Iranian] *daiva-", in the 19th- and 20th-century a great deal of academic discussion revolved around questions of how Iranian daeva might have gained its derogatory meaning. This "fundamental fact of Iranian linguistics" is "impossible" to reconcile with the testimony of the Gathas, where the daevas, though rejected, were still evidently gods that continued to have a following. The same is true of the daiva inscription, where the daiva are the gods of (potential) rebels, but still evidently gods that continued to have a following.

The issue is related to the question of how Zoroaster's own contribution to Iranian religion might be defined. In the older early/mid 20th-century view (so-called reform hypothesis), in which Zoroaster was perceived to be a revolutionary reformer, it was assumed that the daevas must have been the "national" gods (see comparison with Indic usage, below) of pre-Zoroaster-ian Iran, which Zoroaster had then rejected. This attribution to Zoroaster is also found in the 9th/10th-century books of Zoroastrian tradition, and Gershevitch and others following Lommel consider the progression from "national" gods to demons to be attributable to the "genius of Zoroaster". Subsequent scholarship (so-called progressive hypothesis) has a more differentiated view of Zoroaster, and does not follow the unprovable assumption that prehistoric Iranian religion ever had "national" gods (and thus also that the daevas could have represented such a group), nor does it involve hypothetical conjecture of whose gods the daevas might/might not have been. While the progressive hypothesis gives Zoroaster credit for giving Iranian religion a moral and ethical dimension, it does not (with one notable exception) give Zoroaster credit for the development of the daevas into demons. It assumes that the development was gradual, and that a general distrust of the daevas already existed by the time the Gathas were composed.

Although with some points of comparison such as shared etymology, Indic devá- is thematically different from Avestan daēva.^{[citation needed]}