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"In Sanskrit Asura means evil people (demon), in Persian Asura becomes Ahura which means Lord." In the essay I refer to elsewhere in this thread [1], Zaehner writes: "What do we know of these so-called "demon worshippers"? The Persian for demon is div (Middle Persian dev , Old Persian daiva, Avestan daeva). All these words correspond to the Sanskrit deva and are etymologically connected with the Latin deus. Originally, they must have been gods. In the Avesta there are two words for supernatural beings, ahura and daeva , and these correspond etymologically exactly to the Sanskrit asura and deva. In the Rig-Veda, the earliest literary monument of the whole Indo-European group of races, both terms mean divine beings, the asuras being more remote from man, the devas closer to him. In the course of time, however, the asuras, who always had an uncanny element in them, became purely maleficent powers, whereas the devas remained gods similar to the gods of Greece and Rome and other Indo-European peoples. In Iran, however, exactly the opposite happened. Owing to the reform of the Prophet Zoroaster, no ahura was any longer allowed to exist in his own right, and Ahura Mazdah, the "Wise Lord", was raised to the position of the one true God, maker of heaven and earth and all that in them is. 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. 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. 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. It maintained an underground existence, however, in all probability up to Muslim times as the constant attacks on it in the Pahlavi books show..." [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27522709 |
Latin also contains a cognate of "deus" that retains more features of the PIE form, namely Jupiter.