O Del

Also Known As: also Devel, Dēl, and the vocative Devla; Romani for “God”, from Old Indo-Aryan devá- “god” and devátā- “godhead”
Region/Culture: Central and Eastern Europe
Mythos: Romani Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Gods and Deities
Mythical Attributes: He makes the earth by speaking his own name over a handful of sand raised from the floor of the primordial water, and that same name scalds anyone else who tries the trick.
Role in Mythos: He is the single God of Romani belief, the source of goodness and light, paired in the worldview but never in rank with Beng, the devil.
Relation to Humans: People came out of him by accident rather than design, shaken loose as leaves from the tree he grew out of a thrown stick, and he has been close to them ever since, invoked at daybreak, at partings, in curses and in oaths. He is spoken to as an old friend and occasionally shouted at, and the tellings allow a poor man to shoulder a stick and set out to hit him over the head without the story treating that as blasphemy.

There was water and nothing else, and the one being awake on it had run out of patience. He wanted to make a world and could not think how to begin. He had no brother. He had no friend. He was walking above the great water on the clouds, leaning on a stick, and in temper he threw the stick down into it. Where the stick went under, a tree came up, huge, its roots settling somewhere in the dark, and in the shade beneath it sat the devil, smiling, already talking.

“Good day, my good brother. You have no brother and no friend. I will be brother and friend to you.”

“Not my brother,” said God. “Only my friend. I may not have a brother.”

They kept company for nine days on that water, and God watched him and saw there was no love in him. It was Beng who broke first, complaining that two was a poor number and someone should make more, and admitting when pressed that he had always meant to make a great world himself and had never worked out the method. God gave him the method for nothing. Dive, he said, and bring up a handful of sand from the deep, and I will speak my name over it, and the sand will be an earth.

The devil went down through the cold water thinking he would say his own name instead. He found the bottom, took the sand in both hands, and spoke. The sand went hot in his fists and he dropped it. He came up empty and said he could find none. He tried again the next day and the next, nine days of it, and the sand burned worse each time, until he surfaced on the ninth day scorched black to the bone. He had been white before that, the colour the people would be who had not yet been made.

“You have turned black,” said God, “and you have been a bad friend. Go down and bring sand, but do not speak your name this time, or it will burn all of you.” The devil obeyed. God took the wet sand, said his own name over it, and there was an earth.

Beng liked it enormously. He sat down in the shade and announced that he would be living under this tree, and God could find somewhere else. What followed was quick. An enormous bull came out of nowhere, took him on its horns and carried him off across the new world, and the tree shook. The two oldest tellings disagree about the last thing that happened, and it is the most important thing in the story. In the Transylvanian version, flesh fell from the great tree to the ground and men sprang out of its leaves. In the Hungarian one, the devil’s shrieking as the bull ran with him shook the leaves down, and the leaves turned into people on the way. Either way, humanity is debris.

The engine of the whole story is a name. Sand becomes earth because God says what he is called, and the words work only in his mouth; borrowed, they cook the hands holding them. This is not a god who wrestles or builds. He speaks and the thing is so, and the one power he cannot lend out is the one that matters.

Nobody describes what he looks like. There is no icon, no attested body, not even a beard, and the tellers seem uninterested in supplying one. What they give instead is behaviour: he is old where Beng is young, bored, quick to anger, patient for nine days at a stretch with someone he has already seen through, and capable of standing in the sky scratching his head while trying to remember how creation is done. He has three standing epithets in the language and all three are warm rather than grand: baro, great; gulo, sweet; sunto, holy.

The name itself is old Indic stock, cousin to the Sanskrit words for a god and for godhead, and it survived every migration and every conversion the Roma went through. That survival is where he really lives. Among Slovak Roma the dawn is not a sunrise but a gift, o Del diňa tosara, God gave the morning. What God gives will be, runs the proverb. We are all of us out of God. Roma get up with God and go to sleep with God. Goodbye is stay with God, or go with God. Stories open by addressing him before anything else happens, my sweet God, blessed and just, and the strongest thing that can be said about a hero is that God is first and he is second after God.

That closeness runs both ways, and it is not always reverent. One Hungarian telling has a poor man look at his empty table, tell his wife to fetch him the big knobstick, and set off to find God and hit him on the head for the unfairness of it. A Lovara tale sends a man with a violin into an empty church, where he plays so well that even the wooden God on the wall starts to cry.

What he asks of people is balance. Romani thought sorts the world into pairs, clean and defiled, luck and misfortune, God and the devil, and the pairs are held in a state Vlax speakers call kintala. Behave wrongly and the balance tips, and what comes back is prikaza, the accident or the run of bad luck that tells you which way you leaned. There is a law that belongs to God and a separate law that belongs to men, and the tribunal that judges the second one knows the difference. The wise-woman who reads a future does it by his name and with his help.

His limits are written into his own creation story. He begins ignorant and has to think of something. He is forbidden a brother, by his own flat statement, with no reason offered. He cannot get the sand himself and has to send the one creature present who wants him to fail. And when the devil finally earns his punishment, he is not killed or unmade, only chased off over the horizon by a bull, which leaves him out there. The account that reaches us in print comes from Heinrich von Wlislocki, who published it from Transylvania in 1886, and much of the wider “Romani pantheon” credited to him is contested, suspected of tidying and embroidery. This tale is not his alone. Vladislav Kornel printed a Hungarian version in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society four years later, and Alberto Melis recorded one from Xoraxane Roma in Sardinia in 2006, the only one of the three that keeps the Romani names Del and Bengh rather than translating them. What the story is doing there is unsettled: Domenico Giuseppe Muscianisi reads the pattern as Iranian inheritance from the centuries the Roma spent crossing Sassanid territory, pointing at the two Avestan spirits who exist before creation, the frog-shaped evil one of the Zoroastrian book of creation and the golden-horned bull who drives a demon out of the cosmic sea; Yaroslav Vassilkov looks at the same material and finds its closest relatives among the mythologies of India’s tribal peoples.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is O Del in Romani belief?

O Del, more fully Devel, is God in Romani, and Romani religious belief is monotheistic: he is the one supreme and benevolent power, described as omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent. His three commonest epithets are baro (great), gulo (sweet) and sunto (holy). The name is inherited Indic vocabulary, related to the Old Indo-Aryan words for a god and for godhead, and it is used across almost all European Romani dialects.

How did O Del create the world?

In the Romani creation tale he throws his walking stick into a limitless primordial water, where it grows into an enormous tree, and then sends Beng, the devil, down to fetch sand from the bottom. He speaks his own name over the sand and it becomes the earth. Beng tries the same method using his own name and the sand burns him black instead, which is how the devil is said to have lost his original white colour.

What is the difference between O Del and Beng?

O Del is the source of goodness and light and Beng is the source of evil and darkness, and Romani belief pairs them without making them equals. The worldview is dualistic while the belief itself remains monotheistic. In Slovak Romani the word beng is most often used simply for a bad person, while the general unclean force set against God is called bižužo.

Is O Del the same as the Christian or Muslim God?

In practice, yes: Romani communities generally adopt the dominant religion around them, and among European Roma, Devel is treated as the Christian, Jewish or Islamic God, supremely good and all-powerful. The Romani material adds things those traditions do not, including the creation tale with Beng, and a God who can also be bored, angry, and argued with. The word Devel is far older than either conversion.

Where does the Romani creation story come from?

It survives in three closely matching versions from three different Romani groups, all recorded in translation rather than in Romani. Heinrich von Wlislocki published a Transylvanian version in 1886, Vladislav Kornel a Hungarian one in the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society in 1890, and Alberto Melis a Sardinian Xoraxane version in 2006. Because Wlislocki’s wider Romani material is contested, the independent Kornel and Melis versions matter: they show the tale is not his invention.