Aeshma Daeva

Aeshma is the daeva of wrath in Zarathustra's religion, and his name is almost a definition: Avestan aēšma means fury. He has no birth and no genealogy; the Avesta shows him already at work, as the impulse that seizes a man and hurls him at his neighbour. His standing epithet is xrvi.dru-, «he of the bloody club», and it is not idle: it exists to mirror, word for word, the epithet of Sraosha, Obedience, who is darši.dru-, «he of the strong club». The same weapon in opposite hands. When Darmesteter and Mills put the Avesta into English in the nineteenth century they rendered both epithets as spear, which is why so many later texts arm Aeshma with a weapon he never held in Avestan. The Yasna names him at the most solemn point of the liturgy: the prelude to the Ahuna Vairya is recited «to smite the wicked Angra Mainyu, and to smite Aeshma of the bloody spear».

The Pahlavi Bundahishn, compiled in Islamic times from far older material, credits him with seven powers with which he will destroy seven of the Kayanian heroes: only one will be left standing. But the most precise thing it says of him is not a number, it is a sequence. «Where Mitokht, falsehood, arrives, Arashk, malice, becomes welcome; and where Arashk is welcome, Eshm lays a foundation; and where Eshm has a foundation, many creatures perish.» Aeshma does not open the door: he comes in last, once lying and spite have made the house ready. That detail separates him from any tempter demon: he does not seduce, does not bargain, proposes nothing. He arrives when nobody needs convincing any more. The Saddar Bundahesh puts it as behaviour: he throws anger and malice into the hearts of men and makes sinners lose their fear of sinning. And the Iranian Manichaean texts add what explains his long life: Aeshma acts as an invisible power inside the body, with no shape of his own that can be struck.

Aeshma's adversary is not «the Amesha Spentas» in the abstract but one particular yazata: Sraosha, Obedience, who keeps watch while men sleep. The opposition is written into the epithets, into the liturgy and into the end of time. When the Bundahishn lists who overthrows whom at the Renovation, it pairs the six Bounteous Immortals one by one with the six arch-daevas, «Vohuman on Akoman, Ardwahisht on Andar, Shahrewar on Savar, Spandarmad on Taromat who is Naunghas, Hordad and Amurdad on Tairev and Zairich», and only then, outside that closed list, adds: «Srosh on Eshm». That loose line says two things at once. That Aeshma is not one of the six arch-daevas, however famous he is. And that he is still given an executioner of his own, precisely because none of the six is his match. In Yasht 19 he fights shoulder to shoulder with Akem Mano, Azhi Dahaka and Spityura, he who sawed Yima in two, for possession of the khvarenah, the Glory that cannot be seized by force; all four fail.

Aeshma is very probably the ancient demon who travelled furthest. The Talmud calls the king of the demons Ashmedai, and the Book of Tobit calls Asmodaios the one who kills Sarah's seven husbands one after another; both names are derived from Avestan aēšmō.daēva-, «the daeva of fury». The classic objection is that this exact compound does not occur in the surviving Avesta, but the surviving Avesta is a tiny fraction of the original, and Middle Persian Xēšm Dēw is attested in the Bundahishn and the Denkard, which reproduce older material. One oddity should not be papered over: the Asmodeus of Tobit is not a demon of wrath but of desire. The explanation surfaces in the Iranian Manichaean texts, where Aeshma is credited with three things together inside the human body: anger, greed and lust. The demon who reached Judaism, and from there Christianity, did not carry only the club: he carried the appetite as well.