Deva

The deva (Sanskrit: देव, deva) is, in Hindu, Buddhist and Jain cosmology, a luminous celestial being of an order above human beings, its name from the Indo-European root for "shine, be bright" that also gave Latin deus. Hindu texts make the devas the gods of the heavenly realm under Indra, their king, and administrators of the universe whose lives last hundreds of millions of years; Buddhist texts show even Sakka, the chief of the devas, "not devoid of passion, not devoid of aversion, not devoid of delusion"; and Jain texts sort the devas into four orders. Where Sanskrit deva means "god", its Iranian counterpart, daēva, became the Zoroastrian word for "demon".

Michael Salla's 2026 briefing for public officials lists "devas" among the names that different religions give the Level Seven beings, the highest of its seven levels of the phenomenon. Three further writers treat the deva as a real order of non-human intelligent beings. The Vaishnava author Richard L. Thompson sets the Vedic devas, a hierarchy of beings with subtle bodies, beside the humanoids of UFO close-encounter reports; the philosopher Jason Reza Jorjani identifies them with the Olympians, the Elohim and the Anunnaki of Enlil, the controlling faction of two, and says they are "worshipped by, I don't know, a billion Hindus or something"; and the Theosophist Geoffrey Hodson described devas he said he perceived by clairvoyance, an order of "Intelligences, quite distinct from man" in this solar system.

The religion scholar Robert Pearson Flaherty reports that folklorists and mythologists hold the extraterrestrials of contemporary lore to be the gods, angels and demons of tradition "euhemerized as humanoid, albeit superhuman", which would make the likeness between devas and UFO occupants a borrowing from the religions and leave the writers who report it sincere. Jorjani says of Thompson, whose book he credits for the Vedic evidence, that Thompson writes "out of a Hare Krishna tradition" with "his own religious commitments". Hodson's perceptions rest on a clairvoyant faculty he describes using over some thirty years, and Jorjani's identification rests on his own reading that two factions recur across the Hindu, Greek, biblical and Sumerian traditions.

Hindu usage

In the Vedas deva and asura were at first close to interchangeable: W. J. Wilkins found them "synonymous expressions in a multitude of texts", and later Sanskrit made the asuras the devas' enemies, in the Puranic wars between the two. The Bhagavad Gita turns the pair into qualities of persons: "There are two kinds of beings in this world—those endowed with a divine nature and those possessing a demoniac nature." In Thompson's exposition of the Puranic cosmos the devas stand below the sages, who give themselves to meditation, and are "organized in a military hierarchy" that "engage in politics and warfare".

Buddhist and Jain usage

In the Pali canon the Buddha tells of a time "the devas & asuras were arrayed for battle", and of the deva-king Sakka, who "feels fear, feels terror, feels dread. He runs away." Varuna ranks among the deva-kings with standards of their own, although a Vedic hymn addresses him as "wise asura and king". The Jain Tattvārtha Sūtra divides the devas into residential, peripatetic, stellar and heavenly orders.

Daēva in Iran

The Iranian cognate went the other way: daiva "originally signified 'god'", and its change "from 'god' to 'demon'" is, in Gherardo Gnoli's phrase, a "demonization" characteristic of Zoroastrianism; Gnoli names Indra, Śarva and Nāsatya as Indian deities that became archdemons in later Zoroastrianism. In an inscription at Persepolis the Persian king Xerxes records "a place where previously demons (daiva) were worshipped" and says "by the grace of Ahuramazda I destroyed that sanctuary of demons". The Iranian ahura, "lord", the counterpart of Sanskrit asura, remained a term for divine beings.

Level Seven beings

Salla's briefing describes the Level Seven entities as needing no technology to travel through space-time and as able, by psychic means, to influence surface humans and many of the entities of Levels One to Six; devas stand in its list of eight names beside gods, angels, Elohim, demons, asuras, planetary spirits and solar beings, among the interdimensional beings of its top level.

The Vedic humanoid reading

Thompson's Parallels sets the Vedic account of the universe against the UFO close-encounter literature. The devas are "administrators of the universe" who "live for hundreds of millions of years"; their bodies are "made of subtle forms of energy" and "do not contain DNA"; and humans "have descended from the Devas along several lines at different times", which Thompson says "partially confirms and partially contradicts the genetic intervention theory for human origins". Their flying vehicles, the vimanas, depend on "mystic powers and higher-dimensional aspects of material energy" that are "commonplace to the Devas", and were "generally used by Devas and Upadevas but not by human beings". He holds that such beings are still met: "People in India still report encounters with humanoids of the classical Vedic type", and the woman Thompson calls the smallpox lady, met by one Indian witness, "closely matches traditional Vedic accounts of female Devas (or goddesses)". Jorjani, citing Thompson's analysis once its devotional commitments are filtered out, concludes that "the Devas who are worshipped by, I don't know, a billion Hindus or something, are these entities."

Olympians, Elohim and the control system

Jorjani describes the Olympians and the Anunnaki as a ruling society as rigidly hierarchical as the Hindu caste system, "with themselves on top as the devas or gods and like a class of Brahmins serving them", and the Sumerian Enlil is "basically like Zeus or Yahweh or Indra, the lord of the Devas in Hindu mythology". The devas are, in his words, "extremely human in their behavior", and the other faction, the Asuras, are the Titans, "the rebels against the Devas and the control system of the Devas". He reports that the Buddha taught people not to worship the devas, who are "deluded and they play tricks on people", and that devas must be reborn as humans to reach enlightenment, being "so drunk on their power". He finds the same split between the Elohim and the "so called fallen angels led by The Satan", and among the jinn, whose Iblis he calls part of "the same group of rebels against the control system".

Theosophical devas

Hodson, whose book the Theosophical Publishing House issued in 1952, glosses deva as a Sanskrit word for "shining ones", self-luminous beings, "directors of all natural forces, laws and processes", and calls them "the Gods": "hierarchical Orders of Intelligences, quite distinct from man in this Solar System, but who either have been or will be men". He says he studied them with "positive clairvoyance" over some thirty years, and holds that the study "restores to its essential monotheism every apparently polytheistic religion". He quotes Helena Blavatsky's statement that "the whole Kosmos is guided, controlled, and animated by almost endless series of Hierarchies of sentient Beings", whether called Dhyan Chohans or angels. Hodson holds that the Intelligences active on the downward arc of creation, which people tend to regard "as Satanic", and those on the upward arc, whom they regard as redemptive, are "in reality... mutually equipoised powers working for temporarily opposite objectives".

Open questions

References

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