Deva

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The word names a brightness before it names a person. In Sanskrit a deva is a shining one, and the root beneath it carries the sense of light, of the luminous daytime sky — the same image that makes day the bright half of the turning and the heavens the dwelling of the radiant. To call a being a deva is first of all to say that it shines, and only then that it is what the European languages translate, for want of a closer word, as a “god.” The class so named is the great population of powers in the religions of India: distinct from human beings below, distinct from the dead, set apart by the quality of their light.

That root reaches far past Sanskrit. Deva belongs to a word-family descended from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to shine” and “the day-lit sky,” and along its branches stand the Latin deus and divus, “god” and “divine” — deva and deus are the same lexeme worn into two languages. From a closely neighboring stem of the same root come the names of the sky itself made into a god: the Vedic Dyaus, the Greek Zeus, the Latin Jupiter, each the bright sky-father of its own pantheon. The two strands run side by side — deva paired with deus, Dyaus paired with Zeus — and together they form one of the oldest shared inheritances the languages of Europe and India still hold in common, a single ancient word for the powers above surviving the breakup of the people who first spoke it. The faint Germanic cousin Tiw, preserved in the name of a weekday, belongs to the same kinship. It is among the most durable religious words in the world.

The shining ones of the Veda

In the hymns of the Rigveda the devas are not abstractions but the working powers of a cosmos kept running by exchange. Indra, the storm-king, drinks the pressed soma and smashes the serpent Vṛtra to release the imprisoned waters and let the rivers and the dawn go forward; he is the most-hymned of all, the warrior on whom the ordered world depends. Agni is fire — the hearth-flame, the lightning, and above all the altar-blaze that carries the offering upward, the priest of the gods and the god of the priests, the mouth through which the sacrifice passes from earth to sky. Varuna keeps the binding order of things: the regularity of the seasons and the heavens, the truth of oaths, the moral law whose breach he punishes, watching the world with a thousand eyes. Sūrya is the sun, the visible eye of heaven; Mitra the covenant, Soma the pressed draught that is at once plant, drink, and god, and Uṣas the dawn — the whole company of luminous functions through which the day, the year, and the right course of the world are sustained.

The relation to them is reciprocal, a traffic of offerings upward and favor downward. The devas are invoked by name, praised in metered hymns, and fed by the fire-sacrifice; in return they are asked for cattle, sons, victory, long life, and the steady turning of the seasons. This is not yet the temple religion of later India but a religion of the spoken word and the kindled altar, in which the hymn well-made and the offering rightly placed move the powers to act. The keeping of that exchange — the science of the sacrifice and the priesthood that guarded it — hardens in the centuries after the hymns into the ordered ritual world of Brahmanism, where the rite itself is held to sustain the cosmos and the devas are the parties it addresses.

Devas and asuras

Set against the devas in the texts stands another class, the asuras. The relation between the two is not fixed; it moves across the strata of the literature, and the movement is one of the most telling things the records preserve. In the oldest layers the line is not yet hostile. Asura is a word of power and lordship, and certain of the greatest gods wear it as an honor — Varuna above all is called an asura, and so at times are Mitra and even Indra. The two terms name, in this earliest usage, less two warring camps than two registers of divinity: the asuras the elder lords of moral and cosmic sovereignty, the devas the bright active powers. Only as the Vedic period gives way to the classical does the boundary harden. The asuras drift toward the role of adversaries — the anti-gods, the elder kin of the devas who contend with them perpetually for the ordering of the world, churning the ocean alongside them and warring against them without end. By the time of the epics and the Purāṇas the opposition is fixed: deva and asura are the two halves of a divided cosmos, and the word once borne with pride by Varuna has become the name of what the gods must overcome.

The Iranian inversion

A striking reversal runs along the Iranian border, and it has shaped how the whole inheritance is understood. In the Avesta, the scriptures of the Iranian tradition, the cognate words have changed places. The ahuras — the Iranian form of the Sanskrit asura — are the true and worshipful lords, headed by Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord. The daēvas — the exact Iranian cognate of deva — are demons, false gods to be renounced; the very act of conversion is framed as turning away from the daēvas. One of the priestly law-books of the Avesta takes its name from this renunciation, “given against the daēvas.” And the inversion is not merely abstract: the storm-king Indra himself, chief of the Vedic devas, appears on the Iranian side of the line as a named daēva, a demon among demons.

The two systems are mirror images. What India exalts as the shining gods, Iran condemns as the demons; what India lets slide toward the role of adversary, Iran keeps as the supreme lords. Scholarship reads this crossing as one of the clearest signs that the Indian and Iranian traditions descend from a single Indo-Iranian inheritance that later split — that there was once a shared religious vocabulary of daiva and asura which the two daughter cultures sorted in opposite directions, each making demons of the other’s gods. The cause of the Iranian reversal is debated; the reform attributed to Zarathustra, which set a single Wise Lord above a hierarchy of bounteous attributes and pushed the old polytheistic powers downward, is the usual explanation. What is not in doubt is that the two vocabularies are one vocabulary divided, and that the divergence of deva and daēva is the linchpin of the case for a common ancestral religion behind both.

Exalted, and conditioned

For all their splendor the devas are not, in the developed thought of India, the final term. The Upanishads and the philosophical schools that grow from them subordinate the gods to a deeper ground — brahman, the single reality underlying all that is. Against that ground the devas become exalted but conditioned beings. They are vastly long-lived, luminous, mighty; they are also within the world they govern rather than beyond it, themselves subject to the round of birth and death, themselves dependent on the one reality that is neither born nor dies. A famous Upanishadic scene presses the point hard: the devas, having won a victory and grown proud of it, are confronted by a mysterious presence they cannot identify; fire cannot burn a blade of grass laid before it, wind cannot blow it away, and the gods learn that their powers are lent, that the brightness they wear is borrowed from the brahman that is the real victor. The shining ones are real and worthy of honor — and they are not the source of their own shining.

Buddhism inherits this framing and sharpens it. In the Buddhist cosmology the devas are entirely real: they fill the higher heavens, fortunate beings of immense lifespan and radiant ease, born into those states by the ripening of past merit. But that is precisely the diagnosis. A deva’s heaven is the reward of karma, and like every other ripening of karma it is finite; when the merit that raised a being to a heaven is spent, the being falls, and the very pleasure of the long divine life is the reason the gods feel no urgency toward release. The deva is therefore, in the Buddhist reading, fortunate and doomed — long-lived but bound to rebirth, splendid but no refuge, a high station on the wheel and not a way off it. The texts are exact about this. Even the gods grow old; even the gods must one day fall. To be a deva is to occupy the brightest of the conditioned states, and the brightness changes nothing about the condition.

This places the deva in a particular position among the kinds of divine being that traditions across the world have named. It is not the single creator-god of the monotheisms, the term beyond which there is nothing — for that, the broader concept and its many framings belong to the study of deity and the discipline of theology at large. The deva is, rather, a being of a class: one of many, exalted within a hierarchy that does not stop with it, named for a quality — light — rather than for a unique sovereignty. Within the living traditions of Hinduism the devas remain objects of devotion, addressed in temple and household, propitiated and loved; the doctrine that they too are conditioned does not lessen the worship, any more than knowing a king is mortal lessens his crown. In the ritual currents that visualize and identify with a chosen deity — the deity-centered practice of the tantric schools, treated under Vajrayāna deity yoga — the divine form becomes the very ground of contemplative work, though by a logic and an architecture proper to that path and reserved to it.

The word in the philologists’ hands {#research}

The modern study of the deva is inseparable from the nineteenth-century discovery that deva, deus, and the rest were a single inheritance. When comparative philology established the kinship of Sanskrit with Latin, Greek, and the Germanic tongues, the shared root linking deva to deus and to the Germanic Tiw became a cornerstone of the reconstructed ancestral religion of the speakers of those languages — evidence that a common word for the luminous sky-powers stood at the head of the whole family. The standard nineteenth-century synthesis of the Vedic gods, Arthur Anthony Macdonell’s Vedic Mythology (Strassburg: Trübner, 1897), devotes itself to the question directly, with sections asking what the devas are and what the word truly means; Macdonell, Boden Professor of Sanskrit at Oxford, set the treatment of Indra, Agni, Varuṇa, and their company that later scholarship worked from, and his volume is freely available (Internet Archive). The etymology itself — deva as “the shining one,” from the root “to shine” and “the bright sky,” cognate with deus and kin to Zeus — is laid out in the standard reference works on the history of the word (Online Etymology Dictionary).

The deva/asura material, and the Iranian inversion that runs through it, has been a continuous subject of Indological and Iranological scholarship. Wendy Doniger’s The Rig Veda: An Anthology (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981) remains a widely used selection of the hymns in which the devas first speak, arranged thematically with annotation tracing the gods’ functions and their shifting relation to the asuras. The Iranian side — the demotion of the daēvas and the elevation of the ahuras, and the appearance of Indra himself as an Avestan demon — is treated in the field’s principal reference, the Encyclopaedia Iranica, whose articles on the ahura type of deity and on Indra lay out the shared-then-divided Indo-Iranian inheritance in detail. The primary texts in which the devas are praised, subordinated, and finally diagnosed as conditioned are hosted in the archive’s own library: the early hymnody behind the gods stands in the Rigveda; the subordination to brahman is read in the Upanishads in Max Müller’s translation; the devotional address of the gods within a single supreme principle is the matter of the Bhagavad-Gîtâ; and the Buddhist verdict that even the heavens are impermanent runs through the Dhammapada.

The word has also traveled outside the texts. Through the same nineteenth-century channels that made deva a term of comparative philology, it entered the vocabulary of Western esoteric and Theosophical writing, where it was often narrowed to mean a nature-spirit or an angelic intelligence presiding over some department of the natural world — a usage at a considerable distance from the Sanskrit sources, in which the deva is a high cosmic power and not a sprite of a particular garden or grove. What the older texts keep insisting on is harder and plainer: the shining ones are powers worth honoring, and not the last thing there is.

→ In the library: The Upanishads (Müller) · The Bhagavad-Gîtâ (Arnold) · The Dhammapada (Müller)

→ Related: Theology · Syncretism · Indra · Agni · Varuna · Rigveda · Hinduism · Brahmanism · Brahman · Buddhism · Avesta · Karma · Reincarnation · Deity · Vajrayana Deity Yoga · Zeus