Div (dev)

The div, or dev, is a demon or monster of Persian and wider West Asian lore. In the Shahnameh, divs are the chief enemies of the hero Rostam.

Wikipedia describes divs as monsters from the lore of West Asia, probably Persian in origin. It traces them to the Vedic devas, which it says the Persian religion later cast as demons, the daēva, in a monotheistic reworking. This entry covers the div of epic and folk tale; in the Shahnameh the divs are the main opponents of Rostam.

Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner's English Shahnameh gives the plot of one div story in its second volume (1906). A div lures Kai Kaus into invading Mazandaran, and he and his whole army are taken prisoner and blinded by the White Div. Rustam, as the Warners spell the hero's name, sets out to rescue them, meets a series of adventures on the road, and frees the Shah and his men. In their first volume (1905) the Warners explain that they keep the word div as it stands. Spelled with a capital it means Ahriman or Iblis, apart from the White Div and the Black Div; in lower case it can stand for a demon or for someone from a wild or foreign tribe.

Mahmoud Omidsalar's 1995 Encyclopaedia Iranica entry says the div is often mixed up with the ghūl and the jinn, in folk as well as written tradition, and that the word can mean ogre, giant or even Satan as well as demon. He points out that those who translated Ṭabarī's commentary turned the Arabic eblīs, meaning Satan, into dīv, and rendered jinn in Persian as dīv or parī, which he reads as a blurring of the two pairs of ideas.