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A div (earlier Persian dēv, Middle Persian dēw, Avestan daēva) is an evil spirit in Persian mythology that loves to cause harm and destruction. However, some divs may be benign actually helping the protagonist. Usually, such a myth contains both benign and evil divs, the former helping the protagonist overcome the latter.
Etymology
Daēva is the Avestan form of the reconstructed Proto-Iranian word *daivah, an exact cognate of Proto-Indo-Aryan *daivas, Sanskrit devaḥ, meaning "god" or "deity".
Both *daivah and *daivas descend, via expected sound-changes, from Proto-Indo-European *deywos, an adjective meaning "celestial" or "shining", whose other descendants include Latin deus and Lithuanian dievas "god", and via the Proto-Germanic Teiwaz and Tîwaz, the Old Norse deity Tyr.
Cognate to the Sanskrit asura is the Avestan and later Persian ahura, which by the time of Zarathustra (Zoroaster) was the term for the "right" kind of divinity that opposed the daeva, the "wrong" kind of divinity. As such, by c. 1000 BCE, the Avestan terms were the moral opposites of their Sanskrit equivalents.
The process by which a general term for any divinity acquired the sense of "evil spirit" has occasioned much speculation; however, the semantic shift is prehistoric, and the only certainty is that words descended from *daivah have evil connotations in all Iranian languages.
Description
A div is usually pictured as a being with combined human and animal characteristics; they have two arms and legs like a human, but they may be dark blue, bright red, chalk-white or spotted; they are often hairy, and have a tufted tail like a lion; their faces are bestial, with sharp fangs, horns, and animal-like snouts, or in some cases the beak of a bird; for feet they might have clawed talons or hooves (though ordinary feet are more common); and though they are fond of gold ornaments, they wear very little in the way of clothing, and often display enormous genitalia.
Div literally means "demon," seen in Div-e-sefid, meaning "White demon," from the story of Rostam and the White demon.
In popular culture
- In Final Fantasy X-2, Daeva is a demon-like enemy.
See also
Persian legendary creatures | Persian mythology | Indo-European mythology | Legendary creatures
"Div (Persian mythology)"