The Rogue Biologist and the Daevas

Hi there Anon!

Short answer - and this is my opinion but hopefully there’s good evidence for why I think this - the idea of drawing paralles between them make me cringe. I’d avoid it, UNLESS I was going for a story where, say all the good gods were actually angels, the bad gods were demons, and screw history because we’re going for a cool idea and it’s going to be wild.

Long answer:

No, I mostly don’t see correlations, with one notable exception - Aeshma, who probably became Asmodeus. There’s a little bit of information here.

Now, the thing to keep in mind is this - Christian demonology is largely descended from Jewish demonology, with later additions and evolution such that we end up with a very complex picture of Satan and Lucifer which has nothing to do with the Bible at all.

Jewish demonology though has smatterings of all kinds of deities from the Middle East. Ba-al is for example, “Lord” in Canaanite, and the title of any number of Canaanite gods, (eg. Ba-al Hadad). We have Astarte who is an amalgamation of a few Canaanite Goddesses. Moloch could be derived from a few deities in nearby regions. Honestly, Jewish demonology has a lot more Canaanite derived demons than anything else.

The Zoroastrian Daevas? Not really so much though.

Now, historically there was a lot of cultural crosstalk about demonology and angelogy which seemed to have effects on both Judaism and Zoroastrianism, after the Persian empire conquered the Babylonian empire and liberated Jewish slaves, some of which had been cultural isolated for quite some time. There’s important concepts that seemed to have filtered across (pg 35 onwards), but the Daeva which actually got adopted seems to be Aeshma, who appeared in Early Christianity fairly early on in the Book of Tobit (authored ~100AD, found in the Dead Sea Scrolls). He seems to be an exception rather than a rule.

Zoroastrianism doesn’t really have quite the same concepts of demons as Christianity, and while arguably its monotheistic structure might have influenced Christanity, including via syncretic offshoots such as Manicheism, the Daevas weren’t quite captured in the same way. The Daevas existed very much as opposite numbers of the Amesha Spentas, the “archangels”/demigods of Zoroastrianism. It was a very duotheistic religion, and so Vohu Manah (good thought) naturally had opposite numbers such as Aka Manah. It was also pretty clear in the scriptures that the Daevas chose to become these things. They didn’t fall, they weren’t rebel angels, and they weren’t made to become something that was corrupted because Ahura Mazda didn’t make them at all. There was no problem of evil or questions like how the angels got free will to rebel like in Christianity, because free will and good being a choice is central in Zoroastrianism. But additionally, they were born or created from an entirely different lineage to Amesha Spentas, and indeed much of creation.

Christianity? Well, the mythology there is that one God created everything and so the demons either rebelled or were corrupted by distance from God. What it means to be a demon is theologically fairly different, and I daresay this means there isn’t really space for most of the Daevas to conceptually fit, because they don’t make as much sense out of context aside from being Bad ™.Tey don’t have the same lineage at all, and while Christianity is great at indiscriminately calling other things demons, this doesn’t mean there’s much of a shared history or relationship between Christian demons and the Zoroastrian ones. You can’t try and find parallels there historically or theologically because they’re not really the same.

Also, you’ve mentioned Vedic terms - and I’m assuming you mean Avestan here? If you’re going Vedic I’d probably avoid it too, that’s Ancient Hinduism territory, and drawing parallels there are even more fraught! Actually, that makes for a nice segue for the other reason why the Daevas and Christian archdemons aren’t the same.

The Daevas entered Zoroastrianism as demons much in the odd, muddled kind of way that demons entered the Abrahamic religions. The thing to remember is that in ancient polytheism concepts of absolute good and evil didn’t really exist, and as far as I can tell Ancient Judaism (and modern Judaism?) still doesn’t have the big Good vs Evil thing going on that Christianity and Zoroastrianism did and still do. The ancient world was full of complicated gods that were amoral (not immoral, more that morality is irrelevant to what they were).

As soon as you impose a black and white view of the world though, anything that’s not white starts to look black, which is why you get the Zoroastrians suddenly having named demons. They were deities around the area or in the region that the newer religion moved into, that failed to be syncretised. Zoroastianism absorbed some local deities like Anahita because she fit in conceptually and wasn’t at odds with the religion. But some more complex deities, like Indra? Appears as a Daeva (”freezes the minds of the faithful!”) and as a Fravashi (or at least, his epithet, Verethragna, the slayer of obstacles) because it looks like they were too complicated to fit in one box.

Many of the Daevas pop up in other forms around the Ancient Near East and Asia as gods, not as demons! Despite this though, they still don’t show up as demons in ancient Jewish demonology. Were I to hazard a guess, I’d say it’s because they probably didn’t deserve to be classified as demons. The Ashvins, who became Naonhaithya? Healers. Why demonise that? Aeshma makes sense, given he was all about the rage and smiting and violence. Everyone else? Eh.

So, uh, why on earth would Naonhaithya, also known as the Ashvins, the divine healers, or the Dioscuri to the Ancient Greeks, who later formed part of the Roman Imperial Cult, have any relation to Christian demons at all? Why would Indar, also known as Indra, who is still the Hindu king of the Gods? Why would Saurva, possibly an early form of Shiva? They barely make sense as demons, but at least there’s a historical reason why the Zoroastrians had them in that pantheon. To draw parallel for Christian demons sounds like fundamentalists calling everything not Christian a demon, or like overly wishful thinking. They may have the same sort of general domains of influence, but so does Jesus, Mithra and Horus - and most Christians would be pretty offended if you conflated them. It’d be historically inaccurate to call them identical (even if you acknowledged yes, there’s historical links).

Finally, resources. Well shit, I can’t give you a whole lot there, actually. The information we have about the Daevas is kinda fragmented, and mostly footnotes in the Zoroastrian scriptures. Best place to try is Avesta.org, which has the open source versions of the text. The Avesta and the Vendidad are probably your best starting places, and maybe the Denkard. Wikipedia has the various names of the major Daevas with a few important spellings for you to search, as their names differ based on translation from the Avestan and Middle Persian. It also lets you look up individual Daevas to see who their Vedic equivalents are, so you can then search the Rig Veda. The Rig Veda is incredibly hard to read though - it’s mostly prayers, but they do at least praise the deities for specific things, so you can get an idea about what they do, sort of. That combination is how I got my information about the Daevas, plus a whole bunch of UPG, and reading whatever I could find on JSTOR.

A word of warning: If you do get doing the random Google route, I’d suggest ignoring any results from Michael W. Ford, his stuff is a hot mess. He uses the same sources as I’ve recommended above, however he’s a rather odd Satanist who also crams in almost everything demonic he can together in a truly strange mish-mash kind of way. It’s confusing and a bit side-eye even to other left hand path worshippers, and I’ve found his stuff profoundly unhelpful given that he’s essentially trying to do Christian Satanism without the Christianity part and inserting a bunch of other demons who don’t really make sense in that context.

However, if you are interested in the historical development of demons in Christianity, season 8 of Phil Harland’s podcast is all about the development of Satan, evil and demons in Christianity. There is an episode on Ancient Persia, which talks about the development of good and evil as concepts, and how this ties into Christianity.

Not specifically, no. It’s not really come up very much in my reading.

That said, I’ve had a bit of a search around to try and answer your question… but most of what we see is both too recent recent (written in the AD - far too late for the two Persian empires of antiquity - which I’m guessing you’re referring to in this instance).

The scriptures tend to talk about disability as a metaphor, such as being blind to the truth (ie. Zoroastrianism).

For example, we have this passage in the Menog-i-Khrad:

1.The sage asked the spirit of wisdom (2) thus: ‘Is a blindeye worse, or a blind mind (dil)? 3. Is the ill-informed worse,or the bad-tempered?’

4.The spirit of wisdom answered (5) thus: ‘He who is blind-eyed,when he has understanding in anything, and accomplishes learning,is to be considered as sound-eyed. 6. And he who is sound-eyed,when he has no knowledge and understanding, and even that whichthey teach him he does not accept, then that is worse than evena blind eye.

7.‘The ill-tempered is less evil than the ill-informed; (8)because the ill-tempered, except by a decree, is not able to seizeanything away from any one; (g) and as to the ill-informed man,his desire of every kind is then for oppression and plunder. 10.Concerning him who is ill-informed it is declared that, apartfrom predestination, he is born free from fresh understanding.’

Source

The fact vision impairment and disability aren’t explicitly mentioned particularly much in scriptures is in some ways noteworthy, given the Daevas are blamed for all kinds of malady and miseries befitting people. From that perspective, I don’t think it’s too far a stretch to assume there was possibly some blaming of disability on the Daevas, but it probably doesn’t follow that they were being singled out for anything specifically or it probably would have come up.

It’s also worth looking at from a medical perspective. I can actually help with this somewhat, as I’m currently doing research in the field of opthalmology!

So. We’re at least 1000 years too early for this bloody impressive ophthalmology textbook which was published after the collapse of the Sananian Persian empire. However, if you are setting it in the Sasanian Empire (a later Persian Empire than the first one that everyone tends to think of) you could probably stretch a bit and say that in some places they may have had some of the Greek texts available and built on this knowledge to be better with some facets of eye disease. Might be a moot point given that the Greeks were apparently informed by the Persian texts written at the time of the first Persian empire.. This would mean, practically speaking, there’s a conception of eye diseases as disease, but unfortunately there’s not necessarily huge amounts of treatment options for something that is blinding and permanent. Much earlier on, and you’re fresh out of luck.

Further back you’re in this kind of territory (and maybe this if the Greek texts made it over and were translated in that part of Persia). That is, doctors used a combination of medicine (or questionable worth), surgery, and prayer to treat diseases they didn’t really understand well. They did have medical schools! However, the bar for being a doctor in that era was not very high:

36. O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! If a worshipperof Mazda want to practice the art of healing, on whom shall hefirst prove his skill? on worshippers of Mazda or on worshippersof the Daevas? 

37. Ahura Mazda answered: 'On worshippers of the Daevas shallhe first prove himself, rather than on worshippers of Mazda. Ifhe treat with the knife a worshipper of the Daevas and he die;if he treat with the knife a second worshipper of the Daevas andhe die; if he treat with the knife for the third time a worshipperof the Daevas and he die, he is unfit for ever and ever.

Source

In short, you start with non-Zorostrians and if enough survive the treatment then we’ll let you practice on the faithful. There’s not actually anything here about curing them, just that it’s illegal to be a very bad doctor who kills people. Though I daresay you’d not get many clients if your reputation was that bad, and for that matter destroying someone’s eye with a failed surgery could result in your execution. So there were clearly standards that doctors were held to, and they were expected to have some effiacy. While yes, in the ancient world there was also an emphasis on prayer as treating the source of disease and being more important than both surgery and medicine as a result, so there’s that. But at the same time, with a religion that had such a focus on wisdom and knowledge as Zoroastrianism, I think we can also assume that medicine was taken seriously as a science and not just as superstition. After all, some of the Amesha Spentas are literally deities embodying the concepts health and immortality.

Now, with that in mind, the attitude towards the disability may well vary depending on why that person is blind, and how well the treatment worked, as the doctor could be held as responsible. Ophthalmology is a very old field, there’s been cataract operations since the Ancient Egyptians - but this was removing the opaque lens, with the improvement being the person could now see light and colour (but not really distinguish much beyond blurred shapes). Still amazing when you consider this actually allows someone a lot more independence than no vision at all. Even more so when you consider they didn’t have antibiotics so surgery always came with the risk of infection and death.

So you could go, “This child, through the grace of Ahura Mazda and skill of the surgeon, had some of his vision restored,” or you could go down the pious route and say that the Daevas did something horrible to that person’s eyes. Extremely shitty people might even question that person’s moral virtue for being blind, because That kind of person has always existed and still does to this day.

There’s other kinds of blindness. Blindness related to the optic nerve and brain would have been fairly baffling, and a detached retina downright alarming. Detached retinas result in extremely sudden vision loss and are hard to treat these days. Not treatable then, and with no obvious cause in many cases (though it sometimes happens following abrupt head injuries). Something definitely that could be blamed on demonic influence. But they may also have been seen as being medial in source.

Stuff like congenital blindness? Maybe a trade-off“This baby was born far too young, too small and too sickly. But we prayed and fed her as best we could, and it was a miracle but the baby survived. She is nearly blind, frail and cannot breathe well, but she lives.”

Something related to the cornea - the clear part at the front of the eye - causes blindness in a very gnarly, visible way. These are generally either traumatic injury (eg. stabbed in the eye) or disease (bacterial infection that caused horrific ulcers and scarring that physically occludes light). Disease was absolutely seen as something the Daevas caused, so this could be blamed on them. Traumatic injury? I mean, shit dude, the ancient world was violent, and I don’t think it’d be seen as anything other than misfortune. People were maimed all the time. If that person didn’t die of infection that’s kinda fantastic actually.

A very practical thing to consider though is this: how people lived. Vision loss in huge parts of the world today is a huge issue. In parts of the modern world there’s not really great healthcare or government support available you work or you starve. Being blind means you can’t work, and it’s hard to navigate in a world that’s not particularly disability friendly. This means that odds are your family is supporting you both financially and physically, the latter involving practical stuff like helping you navigate traffic and unfamiliar places safely. There are still ways to be somewhat independent and contribute, but it’s harder in places that aren’t as developed. Wind back the clock and this becomes more so. So religion and medicine aside, for your novel you may want to consider this dynamic. People even these days have mixed reactions to a disabled relative, including, at the shittier end, resentment. Inserting the pious aunt who resents the vision-impaired character for being a burden and who deserved it, is equally as likely as the doctor aunty who apparently has the blessings of the fravashi to have carried out so many cataract surgeries without deaths. Her prayers against infection are just that good.

Yes? If I didn’t, why would I have a blog about it?

I’ve... not used this blog for about two years, and it was a few years prior to that that I posted regularly. I’ve had a few asks which have been blissfully unnoticed in my inbox for a while, which I’ll get to.

I suppose my main caveat for this entire blog really is that it’s outdated. My conceptions and interactions with all the deities I’ve mentioned have changed significantly. The stuff I’ve quoted and cited from texts is still as accurate then as it was now, but my interpretation of them is unlikely to be the same.

That said, I’m still kicking around, and still working with (some) of these deities still. The others I’m not working with or worshipping mostly because my practice these days is fairly focussed. I honour them, sure, but they’re rarely relevant on a daily basis.

I’ve had this in my inbox for a while and thought about how to reply to this. Short version is that I’m not going to be writing a long post with receipts like I did for Galina Krasskova, because I actively followed her blogs (and some of the rest of the Wordpress Piety Posse) at the time. Honestly, it was pretty easy to pull receipts on her, and a lot of the incentive to do so was a sense of betrayal from someone who had seemed interesting and informative enough to read but turned out to be really gross. Plus, a few people I was chatting to online at the time had a personal bone to pick, and liked revving people up about them. I stopped following all of the Wordpress Piety Posse, including Sannion, a few years ago, and to research would mean wading through a few years of archives for people I’d really prefer not to read.

That said, I can at least give my own, personal reasons, as to why Sannion was one of the first of the Piety Posse I stopped reading. But as no receipts, well, your mileage may vary, and please do recall I’m going by memory of posts from a few years ago.

Sannion was someone I followed mostly because his posts were interesting and cited a lot of literature, which for long-time readers is going to be no surprise as something I liked. Pretty quickly however it, when people started calling out a lot of the Piety Posse, it became clear he was a bit of a douchebag. He tended to mock people in extremely cruel ways when replying to them, and in general his way of justifying his own practice was to try and humiliate others for theirs. He, like Krasskova has more recently, tended to lump everyone on Tumblr in as all being ridiculous children, when realistically there’s a range of views on this blogging platform, most of which are constantly arguing with each other, and so are hardly a monolith. His tone was generally very arrogant and dismissive of all other views, and it really rubbed me up the wrong way, especially as he seemed to be holding up his practice (and deities) as superior to all others, and his blog as bestowing nuggets of wisdom to the readers.

You could argue that he was doing right by his own religion, and that there’s a long history of satire - and that’s what he was doing, in a very cutting way. That said, he was punching down, not up. I don’t see much value in randomly bullying people on the internet. Particularly not when most of the friends in his circle join in, and if I recall correctly he was also picking on those much younger than him and newer to their religions. Tess Dawson was involved in much of the Piety Posse bs as the time too, and more than once I recall newbies coming onto the levpag tag, who were interested in the Canaanite religions, turn away, probably forever. When people who are among the most easily found practitioners at a religion of the time are seen to bully everyone else, it’s harmful for the religion as a whole.

There are, thankfully, many other bloggers on the Hellenic religions now, including other followers of Dionysus, so like much of the rest of the Piety Posse he’s faded back into irrelevance. I think that ignoring him, as there’s little of value in his writings, is a good way to deal with arrogance like that. He’d not notice, or even care, but I don’t need that kind of shit clogging up my feed.

250ml spiced rum, the drink of the dead 1L water, the liquid of life 6 apples, for immortality, the kind that for some comes only after death 1 stick cinnamon, for protection and purification Honey for the doctors, the hands that keep us from death Pomegranate molassess, for those who choose to reside there Port to taste, a glass raised in memory.

1/ Core and peel the apples, then juice in a processor, keeping the pulp.

2/ Add water, cinnamon stick and apple slush to a pot. Heat and add a little honey. Any remaining apple chunks should be cooked.

3/ Add rum, and more honey to taste. Keep warm, but well below boiling temperature or the alcohol will evaporate.

4/ Shove everything through a sieve.

5/ Reserve apple pulp, make into rum flavoured apple pie using short crust pastry, a coating of whisked egg and oil on the pastry lid, and a pie tin. 180C until done. If in doubt it is done shove thumb into centre to check temperature.

6/ Anyway...

7/ To the liquid add pomegranate molasses (1 tsp/cup) and port to taste.

7/ Drink. It is very good, makes a good offering, and so does the pie.

Absolutely! Not in the least of which because I’ve seen the textual eyeball rolls made at Tess Dawson. You’ve kinda become Tumblr’s main person to go to for Canaanite stuff, so that’s good roguing right there.

But oh, this place has a garden, it’s a house, not a tiny shoebox flat, and there’s so much storage. I am growing things, and have converted a cupboard to a self-contained shrine. My gods have never had so much altar space before, and it looks stunning.

Otherwise, work is busy, but I’m reading interesting religion things on lunch break. I’ve also been having unexpected Prithivi and Aditi feelings, and was not prepared for this. There aren’t very many important Vedic Goddesses, and most of my practice has focused on male deities. Not any more apparently?

I am continuing to be slightly amazed by the sheer amount the Twins have got around well, everywhere. My Croatian housemate has been talking about the cults of the Thracian horseman in the Balkans, and I’ve read archeological reports on Dioscurism across Europe. I expect that writing about this for this blog is going to have to be a thing. It’s honestly fascinating.

Hello to all of you, I’ll warn you I’m fairly slow traffic these days - in part because of lack of reliable access to internet at present. When real life gets a little less crazy, if you stick around eventually I’ll get around to informational posts (I keep telling myself optimistically).

Re: more recent happenings, my understanding is that Krasskova and her posse are once more ragging on Tumblr (and elevating people I follow to inadvertent minor fame apparently?) because people they don’t know have opinions they don’t like. Accordingly, apparently this website is a cesspit and all her prospective students will be banned from using it.

Honestly, while it carries on their previous pattern of ridiculous behaviour and declaring theirs to be the One True Way to polytheist, it registers are more hilarious to me as anything.

They want. To ban. A blogging platform.

Because mean people don’t agree with them.

Well, now that they’ve reduced themselves to old man yelling at cloud status, I guess we can safely discount everything they say. Honestly, it makes one wonder what would happen if the Tumblrites they didn’t like migrated to Word Press. Would they delete their blogs out of spite? Quit the internet? It’s a platform.

And what’s banning their students from Tumblr meant to prove? If they’ve taught them well I’m quite sure they’re able to read Tumblr and discount anything that seems rubbish for themselves. Part of the point of being a teacher is to teach critical thinking.

Banning a blogging platform. Lordy.