daevas

Me, I wonder about the relationship between Hindu devas, which are benevolent, and Zoroastrian daevas, which are basically demons.

The daevas, on the other hand, were regarded by the Iranian Prophet as being maleficent powers, the henchmen of Angra Mainyu or Ahriman, whose real origins remain obscure.

It seems plain, however, that the cult of the daevas co-existed with orthodox Zoroastrianism until the reign of Xerxes, when it seems to have been suppressed, at least officially.

The Zoroastrians used the word ahura (cognate with Sanskrit ashura) as a word for ‘a god, any god,’ and Ahura Mazda is their highest God, whereas the daevas (cognate with Sanskrit devas) were demonized.

The Zoroastrian reform, however -- which put an exalted monotheism in the place of the more ancient polytheism which the Iranians had formerly shared with their Aryan cousins who had moved on into India -- this Zoroastrian reform was far too radical and politically too weak to eliminate the worship of the daevas altogether.

In what was later to become Zoroastrian orthodoxy, a place was made for many of the old ahuras like Mithra and Anahita, but not for the old daevas, whose cult was in all probability associated with bloody sacrifice; and it is this cult, in my opinion, which reappears in Mithras' sacrifice of the Bull in the Mithraism of the Roman Empire.

Hindus: benevolent Devas and their ~enemies Asuras Persians: good gods Ahuras vs bad gods Daevas Then we have the term "devil", which sounds a lot like "deva/daeva".