Deity · Persian · c. 1000 BCE
Aeshma
Also called Aeshma Daeva, Eshm, Khashm · also recorded as Aēšma (per Wikidata)
The demon of wrath and of the bloody club. He also supplies the most defensible etymology for Asmodeus: *Aeshma-daeva* to *Ashmedai* to *Asmodeus*.
Narrow source base
Aeshma is the best-evidenced case in the corpus of a named demon crossing intact from one religion into another. In the Avesta he is wrath itself, the daeva of fury and of the bloody club, standing against Sraosha, the yazata of obedience and discipline — a pairing that makes the Zoroastrian scheme unusually legible, because each side is an abstraction with a job. The Persian period puts Jewish communities in sustained contact with that scheme, and the name arrives with them: Aeshma-daeva becomes Ashmedai in the Talmudic material and Asmodeus in Tobit, where he kills seven husbands. What travels is the name and the temperament. What is dropped is the cosmology that made him intelligible.
Identity
Where does the name come from?
Where it was actually worshipped
None. A daeva, driven off rather than approached.
A figure with temples and a figure that only ever existed on a page are different kinds of thing, and the difference is easy to lose once both are entries in a list.
At a glance
Vitals
Vitals
Also known as
- First attested
- The Avesta · c. 1000-400 BCE
- Rank
- Daeva of Wrath
- Pantheon
- Persian
- Order
- Zoroastrian
- Base of operations
- None. A daeva, driven off rather than approached.
- Era
- c. 1000 BCE
- Traditions
- Zoroastrian
- Placed in
- The Paired OrdersDevas and Asuras
Traits
- Domain
- Wrath, fury, violence
- Traditional form
- Bearing a bloodied club
Stats
Known connections
Chain of command
Identified with
3 attributed
What is it said to do?
Where these powers cluster
The 3 offices attributed to Aeshma, grouped by kind. Segment width is the share of powers falling in each category.
A bar dominated by one colour means a specialist; an even spread means a figure the sources credit with almost anything.
- social1
- malefic2
social
malefic
- Burns & SlaysThe Avesta
- Tormentsno text cited
2 claims
What is it blamed for?
Harms attributed to this figure by a named text. An attribution is not a diagnosis, and where a claim carries a grading it is about how well it rests on the passage it cites.
Uncontrollable Rage
c. 1000-400 BCEWrath as a being: the daeva of fury and outrage, who drives men to violence and disorder.
Sraosha, obedience, who is named as his direct opponent and smites him.
Uncontrollable Rage
9th c. CE, from older materialRanked among the chief demonic powers in the systematised cosmology, opposed rank for rank by the good creation.
2 texts
Which texts say so, and where do they disagree?
When these texts were written
Each dot is one of the 2 texts that names Aeshma, placed at that text's approximate date.
A wide spread means the figure was carried across many centuries and traditions; a tight cluster means a single period produced the whole record.
2 texts spanning roughly 1,550 years
Where the texts differ
- Name: given as Aeshma, Eshm
Fury given a rank in the enemy order and a counterpart to face on the good side. His placement matters for this corpus more than his acts: this is the demon whose name crosses into Judaism and comes out as Asmodeus, and the Bundahishn is where the tidy demon-hierarchy that made such a transfer easy is fully set out.
Connections
What is it connected to?
Placement
Where does it sit in the hierarchies?
Answered from the sources
Common questions
Which texts mention Aeshma?
Is Aeshma the same as Asmoday?
What rank is Aeshma?
How else is Aeshma spelled?
What is Aeshma said to do?
How old is Aeshma?
Nearest in the corpus
If Aeshma is what you came for, these are next
Chosen by proximity rather than by popularity: the same pantheon first, then the same rank, then the same kind of figure.
Mithra
Lord of Covenant · Persian
God of the binding contract, worshipped from India to Roman Britain. No other deity in this compendium can be traced across three civilisations so cleanly.
Ahura Mazda
The Wise Lord · Persian
The uncreated god of Zoroastrianism, opposed by Angra Mainyu — the pairing that probably gave Judaism and Christianity their two-sided cosmos.
Angra Mainyu
The Destructive Spirit · Persian
The hostile principle, with his own army of daevas — the first fully developed adversary in the record, and the likely structural template for Satan.
Sraosha
Yazata of Obedience · Persian
He guards the soul for three nights after death and stands directly opposed to Aeshma. It is an angel's job description, written before there were angels.
The Amesha Spentas
Six Great Emanations · Persian
Six emanations of Ahura Mazda, each paired against a specific demon — the earliest ranked, functionally-paired hierarchy of spirits anywhere.
Zahhak
The Serpent King · Persian
The three-headed serpent of the Avesta, who becomes in the Shahnameh a tyrant with snakes on his shoulders fed on human brains, chained beneath a mountain until the end.
The books behind Aeshma
Every claim on this profile is attributed to one of these. They are public domain, listed oldest first, and each links to a full text where one is freely available.
The Avesta
Attributed to Zarathustra and later priests · c. 1000-400 BCE · Avestan
Read The Avesta in full ↗Cover: CC0 · Daderot · Wikimedia file page
Bundahishn
Anonymous Zoroastrian; tr. E. W. West · 9th c. CE, from older material · Middle Persian
Read Bundahishn in full ↗Cover: CC BY-SA 3.0 · The original uploader was Ploxhoi at English Wikipedia · Wikimedia file page
Corpus last revised 29 August 2026. A reference site’s credibility rests on being maintained, so this is the date the sourced records last changed — not the date the page was rebuilt.