or vanquished demon.

The most striking illustration of this process is to be found in the
word devil itself: To a reader unfamiliar with the endless tricks which
language delights in playing, it may seem shocking to be told that the
Gypsies use the word devil as the name of God. [96] This, however, is
not because these people have made the archfiend an object of worship,
but because the Gypsy language, descending directly from the Sanskrit,
has retained in its primitive exalted sense a word which the English
language has received only in its debased and perverted sense. The
Teutonic words devil, teufel, diuval, djofull, djevful, may all
be traced back to the Zend dev, [97] a name in which is implicitly
contained the record of the oldest monotheistic revolution known to
history. The influence of the so-called Zoroastrian reform upon the
long-subsequent development of Christianity will receive further notice
in the course of this paper; for the present it is enough to know that
it furnished for all Christendom the name by which it designates the
author of evil. To the Parsee follower of Zarathustra the name of the
Devil has very nearly the same signification as to the Christian; yet,
as Grimm has shown, it is nothing else than a corruption of deva, the
Sanskrit name for God. When Zarathustra overthrew the primeval Aryan
nature-worship in Bactria, this name met the same evil fate which in
early Christian times overtook the word demon, and from a symbol of
reverence became henceforth a symbol of detestation. [98] But throughout
the rest of the Aryan world it achieved a nobler career, producing the
Greek theos, the Lithuanian diewas, the Latin deus, and hence the modern
French Dieu, all meaning God.

If we trace back this remarkable word to its primitive source in that
once lost but now partially recovered mother-tongue from which all our
Aryan languages are descended, we find a root div or dyu, meaning "to
shine." From the first-mentioned form comes deva, with its numerous
progeny of good and evil appellatives; from the latter is derived the
name of Dyaus, with its brethren, Zeus and Jupiter. In Sanskrit dyu,
as a noun, means "sky" and "day"; and there are many passages in the
Rig-Veda where the character of the god Dyaus, as the personification
of the sky or the brightness of the ethereal heavens, is unmistakably
apparent. This key unlocks for us one of the secrets of Greek mythology.
So long as there was for Zeus no be