Div (also Dīv, Dev, Deev)

The sky over Mazandaran turned the colour of wet iron, and then it began to throw stones. Hail came first, then boulders, then whole tree trunks, hurled down on the Persian army until the men could not see their own hands. When the dark lifted, Kay Kavus and his champions were blind, roped together, and dragged into a pit. The thing that had done this slept by day in a cave deeper in the mountains, a body the size of a hill, and it was only one of its kind.

To call a div a demon undersells the strangeness of where it came from. In the oldest layers of Indo-Iranian religion the daevas were gods, kin to the shining devas still worshipped across India. Zoroaster’s reform turned that inheritance on its head. The daevas became false gods, servants of the Lie, and the prophet’s followers were defined in part by their refusal to honour them. From that demotion the div descends, a deity scraped hollow and refilled with malice. In the later cosmology the dark spirit Ahriman fashions the divs as his answer to every good thing Ahura Mazda makes, an army of spite built to spoil an ordered world.

The epics give them flesh, and a great deal of hair. A div is usually black-skinned and enormous, its body matted with thick coarse fur, its mouth set with long teeth and the tusks of a boar, its lips black and its eyes a strange cold blue. Curved horns rise from the skull. The hands end in claws. Some have several heads, or ears and teeth grown monstrous past any use, and the most famous of them stands as tall as a hill. They keep contrary hours, sleeping through the daylight and prowling once the sun is down, and an approaching div can be read in the air before it is seen: a drop in temperature, a foul smell carried on no wind.

Their defining flaw is built into the word the poets use for them, varuna, meaning backwards or inside out. A div tends to do the opposite of whatever it is told, a habit that makes it dangerous and, now and then, easy to ruin. They are fond of human women and steal them outright, carrying a bride down to a hall at the bottom of a well. There the demon lays its heavy head in her lap and sleeps for days on end, trusting her to sit still while it dreams. It is a domestic scene assembled entirely out of menace.

The divs are not scattered loners. They hold land, the legendary Mazandaran of the Shahnameh, with their own kings and generals, cities, fortresses, farms, and herds, an entire civilisation of monsters. When Kay Kavus marched his army there in his pride, the chief of that country answered him. The Div-e Sepid, the White Demon, conjured the black storm that buried the Persian host under hail and stone, then blinded the king and his paladins and shut them in a pit. The blinding was sorcery, not steel. No ordinary rescue could undo it.

Freeing them fell to Rostam, who crossed Mazandaran through seven trials to reach the cave where the White Demon slept out the day. He woke it the way demon-slayers always do in these stories, with a blade through the foot, and then the two of them tore at each other in the dark. Rostam won. He cut the heart and liver from the body and carried the blood back to the prisoners, and where it touched their ruined eyes their sight returned. Then he took the demon’s head and wore it as a helmet, and in the old paintings he is shown that way, crowned in the face of the thing he killed. The cure for the magic was the monster itself.

Not every encounter ends with a sword. The demon Akvan once found Rostam asleep on open ground, scooped earth and hero together into the air, and offered him a choice: to be flung into the sea or dashed onto the mountains. Rostam knew what he was dealing with. Knowing the creature would do the reverse of whatever he asked, he begged to be thrown on the mountains, where the fall would have killed him. Akvan, contrary to the end, hurled him into the sea, and Rostam swam to shore. The trick was simple. Tell it the truth backward.

Their gifts run deep. A div can raise storms and weave illusions, throw a battlefield into darkness, and change its shape into a man, a lion, a dragon, or most often a horse or wild ass to pass unnoticed. The largest are strong enough to lift a sleeping champion off the earth. And they build. The primordial kings who mastered them put that power to work: Tahmuras, called the binder of demons, beat the divs into submission and forced them to teach him the art of writing, so that the first scripts of the world were tribute paid by the conquered.

For all that, they are not hard to undo if you know the rule. Many a div keeps its soul outside its body, hidden in a box, or a small fish, or some animal far away, and the demon cannot truly be killed until that hidden thing is broken. When it is, the div comes apart into smoke and is gone. Their contrary minds can be steered by anyone willing to lie in reverse. Sunlight makes them slow and stupid, and most of them die because they sleep too long. Folk belief armed ordinary people against them as well, holding that a div flinches from the bark of a dog and the crow of a white rooster, and blaming the creatures for fevers, for nightmares, and for the particular ruin the language still calls divanagi, the demon-struck state, madness.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a div in Persian mythology?

A div (also spelled dev or deev) is a demon or monstrous fiend of Persian and Zoroastrian tradition, typically a black-skinned, horned, hairy giant with boar-like tusks and clawed hands. Divs wield sorcery and shape-shifting, devour humans, and serve as the principal adversaries of Iran’s legendary kings and heroes in the Shahnameh.

What is the Div-e Sepid, the White Demon?

The Div-e Sepid is the most famous div, the chieftain of the demons of Mazandaran and a being said to be as huge as a mountain. He destroyed the army of King Kay Kavus with a conjured storm of hail and boulders, then blinded the king and his champions and imprisoned them, until the hero Rostam slew him and used his blood to restore their sight.

How are divs defeated or killed?

Many divs hide their soul outside their body in a box, a fish, or another animal, and cannot be truly killed until that hidden object is destroyed, at which point the demon dissolves into smoke. Divs are also sluggish in sunlight and sleep for long stretches, so a hero often wakes a sleeping div by piercing its foot before the fight, and a div that is overpowered rather than killed can be forced to serve as a slave.

Why are divs called demons when “deva” means god in India?

Divs descend from the daevas, deities of the early Indo-Iranian religion who share an origin with the gods called devas in India. Zoroaster’s religious reform recast the daevas as false gods and agents of the Lie, opposed to the cosmic order of Ahura Mazda, so the same word that names gods in India came to name demons in Iran.

Where do divs live?

In the Shahnameh the divs hold the legendary land of Mazandaran, a demon country complete with its own kings, generals, cities, fortresses, and herds. In folktales individual divs are often found dwelling at the bottom of wells or in remote mountain caves, where they sleep for days and hoard the women they have stolen.

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