Deva

Smoke from the fire altar climbs straight up into a windless sky, and somewhere past the clouds it arrives as food. The gods who eat it are not distant abstractions. They are the rain that breaks a drought, the flame on the hearth, the wind that turns the season, the sun that climbs each morning over the same horizon. The people of the Vedas called them devas, the shining ones, and the name carries most of what they are. It comes from a root meaning to shine, kin to the bright sky itself, and from the same ancient word that gave Latin its deus and the Greeks their sky-father. A deva is first of all a thing that gives off light.

In the oldest Indian scripture, the Rig Veda, the singers praise thirty-three of them. Later tradition sorted that number into ranks: eight Vasus, the gods of the elements, earth and water and fire and wind, sun and moon and sky and stars; eleven Rudras, fierce and storm-born; twelve Adityas, the solar sons of the boundless mother Aditi; and above them Indra the king and Prajapati the lord of creatures. In time the count swelled past all reckoning to thirty-three crore, three hundred and thirty million, which was never a census so much as a way of saying the divine cannot be tallied. Thirty-three was only ever a doorway onto something without an edge.

The devas were born, which is the first thing that separates them from the gods of some other faiths. Most accounts make them the children of the sage Kashyapa and Aditi, while their half-brothers, the asuras, came from the same father by her sister Diti. Brothers, then, and enemies. The devas hold the light and the settled order of things; the asuras, powerful and proud, contest it. There is a strange fossil buried in those two words. Carry them west into ancient Iran and they turn inside out. The cousins of the Indian asuras, the ahuras, became the highest good, and the cognate of deva, the daeva, was cursed by Zoroaster as a demon. The same word that means god in Sanskrit means devil in Avestan. Somewhere in deep prehistory a people split, and each half kept the gods the other had thrown away.

In their own heaven the devas live well. Indra’s court of Svarga is a place of music and ease, where the apsaras dance and the gandharvas play and the air is thick with the scent of garlands that never wilt. They drink soma, the pressed sacred draught that quickens and elates, and they are served by the rites of the world below, every sacrifice a meal sent upward in smoke. It is a generous arrangement and a fragile one, because it runs both ways. The gods feed the world and the world feeds the gods, and neither half can stop without the other failing.

No single face belongs to all of them, because deva is a class and not a person. What the stories agree on is how to spot one. In the tale of Nala and Damayanti, four gods come to a mortal woman’s wedding wearing the bridegroom’s own form, and she knows them anyway: their eyes do not blink, their skin does not sweat, the flowers around their necks stay fresh, and their feet hover just clear of the dust while a man’s would press into it. A god is radiant and ageless and faintly, unmistakably wrong to look at, too perfect to be standing where it stands.

Their deathlessness was not original equipment. It was won, and the winning is the great myth of the devas. Weakened and stripped of their fortune, losing ground to the asuras, they were told by Vishnu that the only remedy lay at the bottom of the ocean of milk: amrita, the nectar of immortality, which could be drawn up only by churning the whole sea. They could not do it alone. So the shining gods made a truce with the brothers they were fighting and churned the ocean together. They laid the mountain Mandara on the back of Vishnu in his tortoise form, wound the great serpent Vasuki around it for a rope, and pulled, devas at the tail and asuras at the head, for an age. The sea gave up its treasures one by one. First came a black poison that threatened to scald the cosmos, until Shiva drank it down and held it in his throat. Then came the physician of the gods, rising from the water with the pot of nectar in his hands, and at once the asuras snatched it. Vishnu took the shape of Mohini, a woman so lovely the asuras forgot themselves, and while she served them she made certain the devas drank and the asuras did not. One asura slipped into the gods’ line and stole a mouthful; the sun and moon saw, and he was beheaded before the nectar passed his throat. Immortal at last, the devas drove their kin out of heaven, and the war went on, but now only one side could truly die.

Their powers are the powers of the world divided among them. Agni is the fire that carries the offering, Varuna the binding waters and the keeper of oaths, Surya the wheeling sun, Vayu the wind, Yama the unbribable judge of the dead, Indra the thunder and the rain and the strength that breaks fortresses. Each grants what lies in his gift, takes what shape he pleases, moves unseen, and ages not at all. But the cracks are there if you look. They are gods who can be defeated, exiled from their own heaven, and humbled by a sage’s curse or by a mortal ascetic whose penance has grown hot enough to frighten them. Cut off the sacrifices and they weaken. And in the Buddhist reckoning the matter is plainer still: to be reborn a deva is the most fortunate of fates and not an escape from fate at all. A deva enjoys an immense and shining lifespan in the heavens, then spends the merit that bought the seat, and the garland wilts, and the radiance fails, and the god slips back down the wheel to be born again as something less. Even a god holds his immortality on a lease.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a deva in Hinduism?

A deva is a benevolent celestial deity in Hindu mythology, a “shining one” who governs a force of nature such as fire, wind, sun, or rain. The Rig Veda praises thirty-three devas who uphold cosmic order, a number later expanded to 330 million to express the boundlessness of the divine. Devas are the gods who receive sacrifice and stand opposed to the asuras.

What is the difference between devas and asuras?

Devas and asuras are rival classes of supernatural beings in Hindu myth, often described as half-brothers: the devas are the children of Aditi and represent light and cosmic order, while the asuras descend from Diti and contest the devas for control of heaven. The two are locked in an endless war. In a curious reversal, the related Iranian tradition flipped the words, making the asura-kin (ahuras) supreme and the deva-kin (daevas) into demons.

Are devas immortal?

Devas are not immortal by nature. In Hindu myth they gained their deathlessness by churning the ocean of milk to win amrita, the nectar of immortality, and before that they could be defeated and even killed. In Buddhism a deva enjoys an enormously long life in the heavenly realms but eventually exhausts the merit that placed him there and is reborn into a lower existence.

Who are the thirty-three devas?

The thirty-three devas of Vedic tradition are usually counted as eight Vasus (gods of the elements), eleven Rudras (storm gods), and twelve Adityas (solar deities), together with Indra and Prajapati. Later Hinduism multiplied the figure to thirty-three crore, or 330 million, not as a literal count but as a symbol of the infinite forms the divine can take.

What role do devas play in Buddhism?

In Buddhism, devas are beings who inhabit the heavenly realms as a result of good karma, but they are not gods in the Hindu or Western sense. A deva is not a creator, is not omnipotent, and is not immortal; it lives a long and blissful life and is then reborn. Buddhist devas are still bound by the cycle of rebirth that an enlightened being seeks to escape.

Related Entries

Indra, Agni, Varuna, Surya, Soma, Yama, Aditi, Rudra, Vishnu, Shiva, Brahma, Asura, Daitya, Daeva, Anunnaki