Polytheism Quotes

Two thousand years of monotheistic brainwashing have caused most Westerners to see polytheism as ignorant and childish idolatry. This is an unjust stereotype.

Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another. Idolatry does not offer a journey but rather a plethora of paths leading nowhere and forming a vast labyrinth.

The fundamental insight of polytheism, which distinguishes it from monotheism, is that the supreme power governing the world is devoid of interests and biases, and therefore it is unconcerned with the mundane desires, cares and worries of humans.

You've a right to believe that we're governed by Nature and the hidden Force within her. You can think that the gods, including my Melitele, are merely a personification of this power invented for simpletons so they can understand it better, accept its existence. According to you, that power is blind. But for me, Geralt, faith allows you to expect what my goddess personifies from nature: order, law, goodness. And hope.

Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires; in refusing to await the time of promise, his life-story disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants.

The insight of polytheism is conducive to far-reaching religious tolerance. Since polytheists believe, on the one hand, in one supreme and completely disinterested power, and on the other hand in many partial and biased powers, there is no difficulty for the devotees of one god to accept the existence and efficacy of other gods. Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.

I have been called arrogant myself in my time, and hope to earn the title again, but to claim that I am privy to the secrets of the universe and its creator — that's beyond my conceit. I therefore have no choice but to find something suspect even in the humblest believer. Even the most humane and compassionate of the monotheisms and polytheisms are complicit in this quiet and irrational authoritarianism: they proclaim us, in Fulke Greville's unforgettable line, "Created sick — Commanded to be well." And there are totalitarian insinuations to back this up if its appeal should fail. Christians, for example, declare me redeemed by a human sacrifice that occurred thousands of years before I was born. I didn't ask for it, and would willingly have foregone it, but there it is: I'm claimed and saved whether I wish it or not. And if I refuse the unsolicited gift? Well, there are still some vague mutterings about an eternity of torment for my ingratitude. That is somewhat worse than a Big Brother state, because there could be no hope of its eventually passing away.

Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life.

Blindly inheriting idols reflected how polytheism froze critical thinking. A stone statue might be designed to appear awe-inspiring, but its inherent lack of physical dynamism signified a stagnant worldview. The Qur’an repeatedly invokes the Arabic term for idol—sanam—literally, “frozen in time.

One may observe all the laws and still be practicing a disguised polytheism. For if in performing a religious act one’s intention is to please a human being whom he fears or from whom he hopes to receive benefit, then it is not God whom he worships but a human being.

There is no doubt that Christianity teaches pluralism, but a very special kind of pluralism: plural institutions under God's single comprehensive law system. It does not teach a pluralism of law structures, or a pluralism of moralities, for this sort of hypothetical legal pluralism (as distinguished from institutional pluralism) is always either polytheistic or humanistic...

We cannot experience the world, even for an instant, without experiencing it through some myth, some narrative structure that sorts out our experiences and gives them meaning to us.

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world, this challenge is not even always a metaphor. Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison.

God did not create evolution--evolution created God. The evolution of religion is as follows: animism--polytheism--monotheism--agnosticism--atheism. As history progresses, people worship fewer and fewer gods, and the one God becomes the incredible shrinking god. He shrinks and shrinks until he becomes insignificant. More and more theists go about their business as if God isn't there. Some even become agnostics or atheists.

Freedom is the right to difference; being plurality, it postulates the dispersion of the absolute, its resolution into a dust of truths, equally justified and provisional. There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism.

What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars. Polytheists found it perfectly acceptable that different people will worship different gods and perform diverse rites and rituals. (…) Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions and religious discrimination.

For the natural polytheist who finds her gods in the rivers and mountains, in the deep-rooted giants looming above the canopy and in the tiny creatures that move beneath them, ecology gives us a glimpse into a kind of living anatomy of the divine, a theology of physical as well as spiritual life. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

As polytheism is in religious belief reflected in the recognition of moral complexity, so henotheism in religious practice is reflected in the recognition of moral diversity. To worship different gods is to align oneself with different ideals, and to embrace different moral standards. The example of the mother and the judge shows one way in which this works out in practice. The mother places parental love above impartial justice, while the judge does the opposite. In the language of Greek Paganism, the mother bows to Hera, the judge to Zeus Dikaios, and both are right to do so.

A good ritual facilitates, first and foremost, not only engagement with the Holy but the receptivity and vulnerability of head and heart space that makes that possible.

Questions about what counts as knowledge are at the heart of most dissensions about religion.

I have yet to understand the ritual of sacrifice in monotheism; to a supposed Creator who has supposedly given us what we will be eventually sacrificing. If I take a small mirror and reflect sunlight back to the sun, am I sacrificing to the sun?

To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.

If monotheism's true, anyone who doesn't worship that one God is a sinner. If polytheism is true, then my God can be real. You don't have to worship them or think they're good, but they can still exist. I can believe the Brighid's real, and Athena's real, and so is Jesus.

Alexis de Tocqueville on Islam: “I studied the Quran a great deal. I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. So far as I can see, it is the principal cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world and, though less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion more to be feared, and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.

The comprehensive organization of the church, with its solid roots and the manifold forms of charitable help to the many who were poor and in distress; • Christian monotheism, which commended itself as the progressive and enlightened position in the face of polytheism, with its wealth of myths; • The lofty ethic, which, tested by ascetics and martyrs to the point of death, showed itself to be superior to pagan morality;

A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude, that if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoroud the establishment of Polytheism. So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition. (...) an object much less deserving would have been sufficient to fill the vacant place in their hearts.

The ultimate triumph of Christianity was aided by the internal drive within Roman paganism toward some kind of monotheism. By 150 A.D., whatever vitality had once existed in ancient polytheism had mostly declined, and the gods played little or no role in individual lives. The state temples to the old gods became civic centers rather than religious entities. "But paganism went about reforming itself. It drew upon the Alexandrian mystical form of Platonism, taught by Plotinus -- what we call Neoplatonism -- to conjure an image of the deity as a single spiritual fountain of life that fructifies the world. "This Neoplatonic monotheism became popular in aristocratic circles in fourth-century Rome and gave such renewed vitality to paganism that the triumph of Christianity had to be bolstered by state proscription of this latter-day monotheistic paganism. By 390, Roman paganism was almost as close to monotheism as was Christianity.

The Greek, the Roman, and the Barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities. The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism of the ancient world.

The Hebrew word translated here as “God” is “elohim” and elohim is plural, so the first verse of the Bible should actually read:   “In the beginning gods created the heaven and the earth.”   This is no small thing. The difference between God, capital G, and gods, small g, is the difference between monotheism and polytheism.

Is insisting that one can only be saved by the best possible god so different from insisting that one will only ride in the best possible car?

Our ancestors have a vested interest in our wellbeing and so are more easily motivated to intercede for us and also are more closely connected to us.

Keeping the Gods first doesn’t mean that you withdraw from life, rather it informs every aspect of the way you engage with living.

Where monotheism is a moral worldview, polytheism is a sacral one. The sacred is not remote from the world; it is the very essence of the world.

Polytheism is inherently open-minded, and rarely persecutes ‘heretics’ and ‘infidels’.

All ancient polytheisms revered one high god above all others.

On reflection, my imagined Hindu litigator would have been as likely to play the ‘If you can’t beat them join them’ card. His polytheism isn’t really polytheism but monotheism in disguise.

If, these people worshiped one God alone, and no other, they would probably have some valid argument against the worship of others. But they pay excessive reverence to one who has but lately appeared among men, and they think it no offence against God if they worship also His servant.

A light elf guardian was in Ancient Scandinavia called a fylgja (follower, guardian spirit.). This was a spirit following you wherever you went, removing obstacles in your way, helping you find your way and avoid getting lost, protecting you from injury and death, from eating poisonous food and drinking bad water, from dangerous predators and so forth. It was your guardian angel. Some claimed that the fylgja even walked before you, in front of you, to spot any traps and harm before it could affect you. They were then, when seen by others walking before you, called vardeger (watchmen, guardians.).

The second half of the twentieth century in Japan saw the birth of scores of new religions – a phenomenon to which the Japanese have applied the appealing label kamigami no rasshu-awa, “the rush hour of the gods.

Personally, I thought it chancy to rely on only one god. It struck me as akin to placing all your drachars on one chariot at the races...It didn't seem logical that one god could ensure the proper working of the world.

It is a distinction, instead, between two entirely different kinds of reality, belonging to two entirely disparate conceptual orders. In fact, the very division between monotheism and polytheism is in many cases a confusion of categories.

. . . In all parts of our globe, fanatics have cut each other's throats, publicly burnt each other, committed without a scruple and even as a duty, the greatest crimes, and shed torrents of blood . . . Savage and furious nations, perpetually at war, adore, under divers names, some God, conformable to their ideas, that is to say, cruel, carnivorous, selfish, blood-thirsty. We find, in all the religions, 'a God of armies,' a 'jealous God,' an 'avenging God,' a 'destroying God,' a 'God,' who is pleased with carnage, and whom his worshippers consider it a duty to serve. Lambs, bulls, children, men, and women, are sacrificed to him. Zealous servants of this barbarous God think themselves obliged even to offer up themselves as a sacrifice to him. Madmen may everywhere be seen, who, after meditating upon their terrible God, imagine that to please him they must inflict on themselves, the most exquisite torments. The gloomy ideas formed of the deity, far from consoling them, have every where disquieted their minds, and prejudiced follies destructive to happiness.

Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committed’. Traditionally then, or tediously as some will think, I saw no reason to discard the Orwellian standard in considering modern literature. While a sort of etiolation, tricked out as playfulness, had its way among the non-judgemental, much good work was still done by those who weighed words as if they meant what they said. Some authors, indeed, stood by their works as if they had composed them in solitude and out of conviction. Of these, an encouraging number spoke for the ironic against the literal mind; for the generously interpreted interest of all against the renewal of what Orwell termed the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’—tribe and Faith, monotheist and polytheist, being most conspicuous among these new/old disfigurements. In the course of making a film about the decaffeinated hedonism of modern Los Angeles, I visited the house where Thomas Mann, in another time of torment, wrote Dr Faustus. My German friends were filling the streets of Munich and Berlin to combat the recrudescence of the same old shit as I read: This old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do. not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being. [italics mine] The path to this concept of enlightenment is not to be found in the pursuit of self-pity, or of self-love. Of course to be merely a political animal is to miss Mann’s point; while, as ever, to be an apolitical animal is to leave fellow-citizens at the mercy of Ideolo’. For the sake of argument, then, one must never let a euphemism or a false consolation pass uncontested. The truth seldom lies, but when it does lie it lies somewhere in between.

The Battle of Good and Evil Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes that evil is an independent power, neither created by the good God, nor subordinate to it. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle. Dualism is a very attractive world view because it has a short and simple answer to the famous Problem of Evil, one of the fundamental concerns of human thought. ‘Why is there evil in the world? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. One well-known explanation is that this is God’s way of allowing for human free will. Were there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil, and hence there would be no free will. This, however, is a non-intuitive answer that immediately raises a host of new questions. Freedom of will allows humans to choose evil. Many indeed choose evil and, according to the standard monotheist account, this choice must bring divine punishment in its wake. If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished for this by eternal tortures in hell, why did God create her? Theologians have written countless books to answer such questions. Some find the answers convincing. Some don’t. What’s undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the Problem of Evil. For dualists, it’s easy to explain evil. Bad things happen even to good people because the world is not governed single-handedly by a good God. There is an independent evil power loose in the world. The evil power does bad things. Dualism has its own drawbacks. While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order. If the world was created by a single God, it’s clear why it is such an orderly place, where everything obeys the same laws. But if Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war? Two rival states can fight one another because both obey the same laws of physics. A missile launched from Pakistan can hit targets in India because gravity works the same way in both countries. When Good and Evil fight, what common laws do they obey, and who decreed these laws? So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. Dualistic

Whatever you touch will touch you back. The simplest way that I can try to explain it is that when you spend time touching the core of the earth, soaking in the stars, communing with the moon, aligning with the elements, working with the gods and spirits—it changes a person.

The problem of evil is unanswerable if one believes that there is only one god and that he is omnipotent as well as infinitely good, merciful, and just. But as soon as one denies one or more of these premises, the problem disappears. The belief in two great gods, one good and one evil, is merely one way of doing that. Polytheism is another. Belief in only one god who is omnipotent but not infinitely good, just, and merciful is a third way. Belief in a god who has these moral qualities but who is not omnipotent is a fourth. Belief in no god at all, a fifth.

That the writers of the Bible recognized a plurality of gods -- were polytheists -- is proved by the following 'And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us' (Gen. iii, 22). 'Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods?' (Ex. xv, 11.) 'Among the gods, there is none like unto thee, O Lord' (Ps. Ixxxvi, 8). 'The Lord is a great God, and a great king above all gods' (Ps. xcv, 3). 'Thou shalt not revile the gods' (Ex. xxii, 28). Monotheism, the doctrine of one god, is not merely the worship of one god, but the belief in the existence of one god only. Many were monotheistic in worship -- worshiped one god, their national deity -- while at the same time they were polytheistic in belief -- believed in the existence of many gods. The Jews who worshiped Jehovah have been called monotheists. And yet, for a thousand years, they believed in the existence of Kemosh, Baal, Moloch, Tammuz, and other deities. They believed that Jehovah was their national god and that they owed allegiance to him; just as the subjects of an earthly king profess their loyalty to him without denying the existence of other kings.

How can such a love for Being be engendered? The things for the world clamor for our affection so incessantly that it may be marveled that Being who can neither be seen nor heard can ever become their rival. Enter Hinduism’s myths, her magnificent symbols, her several hundred images of God, her rituals that keep turning night and day like never ending prayer wheels. It is obtuse to confused Hinduism’s images with idolatry, and their multiplicity with polytheism. They are runways from which the sense-laden human spirit can rise for its “flight of the alone to the Alone.

[T]he practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing, that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition 

The spirit of polytheism, its affirmation of the sublimely disturbing polyvalence of life and its courageousness in the face of that polyvalence, has the power to shock us out of our satanic torpor and provide us with truly viable alternatives to the things to which so many of us so desperately seek alternatives. I

That first undifferentiated potential perception, that first principle of experience, is said to correspond to pure, absolute enjoyment, the innermost nature of existence.

The Soul is the sum of all the gods. "All the gods are this one Soul, and all dwell in the Soul." (Manu Smṛti 12.119. [13])

At least all Gods except one are man-made.

Some people have exercised their right to create their own God.

There are perhaps seven broad claims about the afterlife, with innumerable variations and combinations of belief.

Amythia,” the pathological lack of myths, has been diagnosed as the root cause of any number of modern sociological and psychological evils.

Dwell not in the shadows; it will only darken your mind.

One of the distinctions that religious scholars make about various religions is the monotheistic and polytheistic world views. It seems to me that if one were to describe to a Hindu the myriad of divine beings in Christianity (and by relationship Judaism and Islam), such as angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, putti, Satan and his crew, Mother Mary, Jesus the son of God – who threw out demons; not to mention the saints and martyrs, who can be contacted and prayed to as divine guides, etc., I dare say this Hindu would consider the Christians polytheistic like himself. If we then include holy relics, the cunning snake and the talking fiery bush, then we are moving towards animism. Monotheism in this light is actually referring to One ruling (and jealous) god over many lesser “gods,” deities, angels and souls, which is describing a polytheistic hierarchy and not monotheism. My conclusion: there is no monotheism. It may be heretical to say, but perhaps the Western religions have more in common with Hinduism and with the Roman or Scandinavian pantheons than they care to admit.

The irony here, and it’s not a small one, is that our culture is anything but bereft of myths.  Whatever the sources of our many problems, a myth shortage is emphatically not among them.

For the natural polytheist, whose gods arise in and from the natural material world ... Our gods not only have transcendent eyes and metaphysical hands. They have antlers and feathers, hooves and scales, fangs and horns and wings and fins and claws. They are in the lands we strip for veins of precious ore. They are in the waters we poison. - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Anatomy of a God

​With respect to Gods, however, as I have argued elsewhere,[81] the situation is different. The ‘space’ in such a system that is accorded to some particular deity does not, in the ultimate sense, come at the expense of another. This is on account of the essentially polycentric nature of genuine polytheism, a condition which is demanded by the very nature of divine individuality.

The mindset of antiquity lacked economic science and sociological theory. The ancients did rather well with political narrative, although, except for Thucydides, no first-rate political annalist and analyst emerged from the literary populace. But the ancients never showed a capacity, or even an inclination, to examine closely the urban world they themselves inhabited. "Neither, however, was the medieval world in the 500s through the 1500s, which succeeded antiquity, much better at economics and sociology. It was only in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that this kind of thinking emerged with Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville in response to industrial and political revolutions. "What interested the urban dwellers of antiquity were the gods. During the Hellenistic and Roman eras the theoretical capacity of the literate urban population was given over to thinking about the nature of divinity. The chief theological formats were polytheism (many gods); monotheism (one god); dualism (two dogs, one good, the other evil); and dying and reborn savior gods that could also be fitted into the other three categories of divinity.

Provided the gods of Rome are given their due, it doesn't really matter to them whether their worshippers believe in them or not. Having taken part in the official rituals, a citizen is free to worship whatever other deities he pleases. Rom'es gods are there to be obeyed and respected, not loved, and they no more mind sacrifices to other deities than the taxman minds people paying other dues elsewhere. Dealing with the gods is an exchange of duties and mutual respect. Confessing a deep love for a particular god is superstitio and the person concerned is probably emotionally concerned.

it’s a structured way of engaging with the sacred. It’s a container for such engagement to happen. It’s a protocol by which we can maintain right relationship in our direct engagements with the sacred.

The most serious disadvantage a Christian encounters is that of not being able to serve consciously more than one god, though he has the latitude to adhere, in practice, to several (the worship of saints!). A salutary adherence which has permitted polytheism to continue, in spite of everything, indirectly. Without it, an excessively pure Christianity would not have failed to found a universal schizophrenia.

My gods are not tame. They do not always come when they are called. This is not a failure of ritual or a weakness of belief. It is the nature of my gods. I would no more expect a god to “show up” in my ritual space than I would expect to be able to call a mountain into my living room. That is simply not the nature of mountains. If I want to meet a mountain, I am the one who must move." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Gods Like Mountains, Gods Like Mist

Perhaps there is a subtle danger today that, in their desire to eliminate the concept of a Creator completely, some scientists and philosophers have been led, albeit unwittingly, to re-deify the universe by endowing matter and energy with creative powers that they cannot be convincingly shown to possess. Banishing the One Creator God they would then end up with what has been described as the ultimate in polytheism – a universe in which every particle has god-like capacities.

The fundamental principle of polycentric polytheism is that all the Gods are in each God; and therefore, to the degree that a worshiper of some God finds in the nature, iconography, symbolism, or mythology of some other God something resonant for them, though it may be a new appropriation historically, may be regarded metaphysically as a new encounter for the worshiper of an attribute which has always belonged to the God in question, because the latter is, in him/herself, all Gods and all things.

Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.

There is an underlying polytheism in liberal democracy (call it an unconscious polytheism); conversely, every authoritarian regime partakes of a disguised monotheism. Curious, the effects of monotheist logic: a pagan, once he became a Christian, tended toward intolerance. Better to founder with a horde of accommodating gods than to prosper in a despot’s shadow! In an age when, lacking religious conflicts, we witness ideological ones, the question raised for us is indeed the one which haunted a waning antiquity: how to renounce so many gods for just one?

The relationship between authority and authoritarianism, after all, is not a matter of taking legitimate authority and multiplying it any more than polytheism is just more monotheism or polyamory is just more monogamy. The worship of many gods is a repudiation and a contradiction of the worship of one God. Sex with multiple partners is a repudiation and a contradiction of marital love. And authoritarianism—whether in a national or global movement or within the small places of a church or a family dinner table—is a repudiation and contradiction of authority.

Al-Ikhlas: The Unity (Revealed at Makkah: 4 verses) This is really the concluding chapter of the Holy Qur’an — the two chapters that follow only show how the protection of the Lord is to be sought — and it gives the sum and substance of the teachings of the Holy Qur’an, which is the declaration of the Unity of the Divine Being. Ikhlas means purification of a thing from dross, and as this chapter purifies the Unity of God of all dross of polytheism, it is called al-Ikhlas. The chapter is one of the earliest revelations. In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful.

It is the distinction between transpersonal and interpersonal relationships with deities which sets naturalistic polytheism apart from neopolytheism. Interpersonal relationships are between two or more persons and are focused upon individual perspectives. A transpersonal relationship extends beyond the individual perspective, transcending the distinctions of ego and personality. For example: A neopolytheist has a close personal relationship with a modernized personification of Thor, to whom she prays to daily. A naturalistic polytheist practices breathing as a sacrament which allows her to focus on life’s connection to the atmosphere, altering her perception of separateness, resulting in viewing the at-mosphere as a deity." - Glen Gordon, "Naturalism and the Gods

Yet the greatest impact of the rise of great gods was not on sheep or demons, but upon the status of Homo sapiens. Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind. Less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great drama of man’s relationship with the gods.

The Qur’ān began by criticizing two closely related aspects of that society: the polytheism or multiplicity of gods which was symptomatic of the segmentation of society, and the gross socioeconomic disparities that equally rested on and perpetuated a pernicious divisiveness of mankind. The two are obverse and converse of the same coin: only God can ensure the essential unity of the human race as His creation, His subjects, and those responsible finally to Him alone. The economic disparities were most persistently criticized, because they were the most difficult to remedy and were at the hear of social discord—although tribal rivalries, with their multiple entanglements of alliance, enmity, and vengeance, were no less serious, and the welding of these tribes into a political unity was an imperative need. Certain abuses of girls, orphans, and women, and the institution of slavery demanded desperate reform.

Know, child, that the One God—He is so vast that He cannot be moved, else the Universe falls. Nor can He answer, for the very act of opening His Mouth is Movement, indeed the greatest Act of all, for it is the Word. And this is precisely why He has made an infinity of lesser gods, creating them in His own image, so that we can do the lesser things on His behalf. We are His hands and arms and feet and mouths. We are His answers to your prayers, enacted along the great Framework of Being.

Therein, of course, lay a terrible problem for the Jews. One of their greatest gifts was the critical faculty. They had always had it. It was the source of their rationality, one of the factors which brought them to monotheism in the first place, for their critical sense would not allow them to accept the follies of polytheism. But they were not only critical; they were, perhaps above all, self-critical. And they were, or at any rate had been in ancient times, superb historians. They saw the truth, sometimes the ugly truth, about themselves, and they told it in the Bible. Whereas other peoples produced their national epics to endorse and bolster their self-esteem, the Jews wanted to discover what had gone wrong with their history, as well as what had gone right. That is why the Bible is littered with passages in which the Jews are presented as a sinful people, often too wicked or obstinate to accept God’s law, though they know it. The Jews, in fact, produced the evidence for their own prosecution.

Though the reasons for Israelite “convergence” are not clear, the complex paths from convergence to monolatry and monotheism can be followed. The development of Israelite monolatry and monotheism involved both an “evolution” and a “revolution” in religious conceptualization, to use D. L. Petersen’s categories. It was an “evolution” in two respects. Monolatry grew out of an early, limited Israelite polytheism that was not strictly discontinuous with that of its Iron Age neighbors. Furthermore, adherence to one deity was a changing reality within the periods of the Judges and the monarchy in Israel. While evolutionary in character, Israelite monolatry was also “revolutionary” in a number of respects. The process of differentiation and the eventual displacement of Baal from Israel’s national cult distinguished Israel’s religion from the religions of its neighbors. Furthermore, as P. Machinist has observed, one feature clearly distinguishing Israel from its neighbors was its apologetic claim of religious difference. Israelite insistence on a single deity eventually distinguished Israel from the surrounding cultures, as far as textual data indicate.

The greatest advantage of polytheism. — For an individual to posit his own ideal and to derive from it his own law, joys, and rights — that may well have been considered hitherto as the most outrageous human aberration and as idolatry itself; indeed, the few who dared as much always felt the need to apologize to themselves, usually by saying: 'Not I! Not I! But a god through me.' The wonderful art and power of creating gods — polytheism — was that through which this drive could discharge itself, purify, perfect, and ennoble itself; for originally it was a base and undistinguished drive, related to stubbornness, disobedience, and envy. To be hostile to this drive to have one’s own ideal: that was formerly the law of every morality. There was only one norm: ‘the human being’— and every people believed itself to have this one and ultimate norm. But above and outside oneself, in some distant overworld, one was permitted to behold a plurality of norms; one god was not considered the denial or anathema to another god! Here for the first time one allowed oneself individuals; here one first honored the rights of individuals. The invention of gods, heroes, and overmen (Übermenschen) of all kinds, as well as deviant or inferior forms of humanoid life, undermen, dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, and devils, was the invaluable preliminary exercise for the justification of the egoism and sovereignty of the individual: the freedom that one conceded to a god in his relation to other gods one finally gave to oneself in relation to laws, customs, and neighbors. Monotheism, in contrast, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type — that is, the belief in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo-gods — was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity. It threatened us with the premature stagnation that, as far as we can see, most other species have long reached; for all of them believe in one normal type and ideal for their species, and they have translated the morality of custom definitively into their own flesh and blood. In polytheism the free-spiritedness and many-spiritedness of humanity received preliminary form — the power to create for ourselves our own new eyes and ever again new eyes that are ever more our own — so that for humans alone among the animals there are no eternal horizons and perspectives.

It was in the wonderful art and ability to create gods — in polytheism — that this impulse could discharge itself, that it purified, perfected and ennobled itself; for originally this impulse was rather commonplace and unattractive, not unlike stubbornness, rebelliousness or envy. Formerly, hostility towards this desire for an ideal of one’s own was the law of every morality. There was only one type and standard: ‘man’ — and every people believed itself to be this type, to be in possession of this standard. But in a distant heaven above and beyond oneself, one could discern a multiplicity of standards; to worship a particular god was not to deny or blaspheme against the other gods! It was here that individuals were first permitted, that the rights of individuals were first honoured. The invention of gods, heroes and superhuman beings of all kinds, as well as of quasi-human and subhuman beings — dwarfs, fairies, centaurs, satyrs, demons, devils — was an inestimable preliminary exercise in upholding the interests and prerogatives of the individual: the freedom one allowed a god with respect to other gods, one eventually gave to oneself with respect to laws, customs and neighbours.

But the most remarkable aspect of India, and the one that defines it, is neither political nor economic, but religious: the coexistence of Hinduism and Islam. The presence of the strictest and most extreme form of monotheism alongside the richest and most varied polytheism is, more than a historical paradox, a deep wound. Between Islam and Hinduism there is not only an opposition, but an incompatibility. In one, the theology is rigid and simple; in the other, the variety of doctrines and sects induces a kind of vertigo. In one case, a creator god; in the other, the wheel of successive cosmic eras with its procession of gods and civilizations. India owes to Islam some sublime works of art, particularly in architecture and, to a lesser degree, in painting, but not a single new or original thought. . Hinduism is a conglomeration of beliefs and rituals; although it lacks missionaries, its power of assimilation is immense. It does not know conversion in the Christian or Muslim sense, but it practices, with great success, appropriation. Like an enormous metaphysical boa, Hinduism slowly and relentlessly digests foreign cultures, gods, languages, and beliefs. Hinduism does not convert individuals; it absorbs communities and tribes, their gods and rites.

Holding a precious book meant to Mendel what an assignment with a woman might to another man. These moments were his platonic nights of love. Books had power over him; money never did. Great collectors, including the founder of a collection in Princeton University Library, tried in vain to recruit him as an adviser and buyer for their libraries—Jakob Mendel declined; no one could imagine him anywhere but in the Café Gluck. Thirty-three years ago, when his beard was still soft and black and he had ringlets over his forehead, he had come from the east to Vienna, a crook-backed lad, to study for the rabbinate, but he had soon abandoned Jehovah the harsh One God to give himself up to idolatry in the form of the brilliant, thousand-fold polytheism of books. That was when he had first found his way to the Café Gluck, and gradually it became his workplace, his headquarters, his post office, his world. Like an astronomer alone in his observatory, studying myriads of stars every night through the tiny round lens of the telescope, observing their mysterious courses, their wandering multitude as they are extinguished and then appear again, so Jakob Mendel looked through his glasses out from that rectangular table into the other universe of books, also eternally circling and being reborn in that world above our own.

Nietzsche rejects this vision as "English." As Strauss points out, Nietzsche does not believe in "a science of morals which teaches the only true morality," and this specifically includes rational or utilitarian morality: rather for Nietzsche what is natural is only the binding or burdening of man to precisely unnatural and unreasonable laws. "Over and against the ruinous permissiveness of anarchism Nietzsche asserts that precisely long lasting obedience to unnatural and unreasonable nomoi is the ‘moral imperative of nature.' Physis calls for nomoi while preserving the distinction, nay, opposition of physis and nomos." Nietzsche's rejection of a rational morality is based on his rejection of a utilitarian morality; it is precisely the binding of man to arbitrary, even absurd laws, to laws which serve no particular benefit, that is the character of morality. Religion, premodern polytheism then, cannot emerge out of a utilitarian morality as in the model of Hume. Peoples themselves are the result of the founding acts of creative prophets; much as in Rousseau, Nietzsche believes such prophets or founders—legislators in the highest sense—are the origin therefore of mores and conventions by which peoples live. In this task the founder uses religion, but the religious experience of such founders, and by extension religious experience in general, is therefore not reducible to calculation of benefit or of self-interest.

human kind to the danger of a painful and comfortless situation. A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision. Their love of the marvellous and supernatural, their curiosity with regard to future events, and their strong propensity to extend their hopes and fears beyond the limits of the visible world, were the principal causes which favoured the establishment of Polytheism. So urgent on the vulgar is the necessity of believing that the fall of any system of mythology will most probably be succeeded by the introduction of some other mode of superstition. Some deities of a more recent and fashionable cast might soon have occupied the deserted temples of Jupiter and Apollo, if, in the decisive moment, the wisdom of Providence had not interposed a genuine revelation, fitted to inspire the most rational esteem and conviction, whilst, at the same time, it was adorned with all that could attract the curiosity, the wonder, and the veneration of the people. In their actual disposition, as many were almost disengaged from their artificial prejudices, but equally susceptible and desirous of a devout attachment; an object much less deserving would have been sufficient to fill the vacant place in their hearts, and to gratify the uncertain eagerness of their passions. Those who are inclined to pursue this reflection, instead of viewing with astonishment the rapid progress of Christianity, will perhaps be surprised that its success was not still more rapid and still more universal.

That great portion of what is generally received as Christian truth is, in its rudiments or in its separate parts, to be found in heathen philosophies and religions. For instance, the doctrine of a Trinity is found both in the East and in the West; so is the ceremony of washing; so is the rite of sacrifice. The doctrine of the Divine Word is Platonic; the doctrine of the Incarnation is Indian; of a divine kingdom is Judaic; of Angels and demons is Magian; the connection of sin with the body is Gnostic; celibacy is known to Bonze and Talapoin; a sacerdotal order is Egyptian; the idea of a new birth is Chinese and Eleusinian; belief in sacramental virtue is Pythagorean; and honours to the dead are a polytheism. Such is the general nature of the fact before us; Mr. Milman argues from it,—'These things are in heathenism, therefore they are not Christian:' we, on the contrary, prefer to say, 'these things are in Christianity, therefore they are not heathen.' That is, we prefer to say, and we think that Scripture bears us out in saying, that from the beginning the Moral Governor of the world has scattered the seeds of truth far and wide over its extent; that these have variously taken root, and grown up as in the wilderness, wild plants indeed but living; and hence that, as the inferior animals have tokens of an immaterial principle in them, yet have not souls, so the philosophies and religions of men have their life in certain true ideas, though they are not directly divine. What man is amid the brute creation, such is the Church among the schools of the world; and as Adam gave names to the animals about him, so has the Church from the first looked round upon the earth, noting and visiting the doctrines she found there.

This is the mighty and branching tree called mythology which ramifies round the whole world whose remote branches under separate skies bear like colored birds the costly idols of Asia and the half-baked fetishes of Africa and the fairy kings and princesses of the folk-tales of the forest and buried amid vines and olives the Lares of the Latins, and carried on the clouds of Olympus the buoyant supremacy of the gods of Greece. These are the myths and he who has no sympathy with myths has no sympathy with men. But he who has most Sympathy with myths will most fully realize that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion. They satisfy some of the needs satisfied by a religion; and notably the need for doing certain things at certain dates; the need of the twin ideas of festivity and formality. But though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say 'I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune,' etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty' and the rest of the Apostles' Creed.... Polytheism fades away at its fringes into fairy-tales or barbaric memories; it is not a thing like monotheism as held by serious monotheists. Again it does satisfy the need to cry out on some uplifted name, or some noble memory in moments that are themselves noble and uplifted; such as the birth of a child or the saving of a city. But the name was so used by many to whom it was only a name. Finally it did satisfy, or rather it partially satisfied, a thing very deep in humanity indeed; the idea of surrendering something as the portion of the unknown powers; of pouring out wine upon the ground, of throwing a ring into the sea; in a word, of sacrifice....A child pretending there is a goblin in a hollow tree will do a crude and material thing like leaving a piece of cake for him. A poet might do a more dignified and elegant thing, like bringing to the god fruits as well as flowers. But the degree of seriousness in both acts may be the same or it may vary in almost any degree. The crude fancy is no more a creed than the ideal fancy is a creed. Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped. The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone; in its own field reason does not restrain it at all..... There is nothing in Paganism whereby one may check his own exaggerations.... The only objection to Natural Religion is that somehow it always becomes unnatural. A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull’s blood, as did Julian the Apostate.

But which one is right? The real gods? The truth?' I asked. Balthazar smiled gently, as if speaking to a very slow child. 'That is not for us to judge. Each of us believes what seems true enough to him, and allows others the same luxury. Who can know what happened in the dim dawn of the world? We can barely decide what to have for breakfast without a theological debate - the Nurian law is polite disagreement. We do our best with how the world appears to our own eyes.

Indeed, the moral aspirations and the moral failings of polytheism and monotheism—the longing to lead a decent life in the face of the thoroughly human tendency

Because of the open nature of polytheism, there was virtually no such thing as “conversion.” Anyone who chose to begin worshiping a new god was welcome to do so and was not required or expected to leave behind any previous practices of worship or make an exclusive commitment to this one deity.

the greatest impact of the rise of great gods was not on sheep or demons, but upon the status of Homo sapiens. Animists thought that humans were just one of many creatures inhabiting the world. Polytheists, on the other hand, increasingly saw the world as a reflection of the relationship between gods and humans. Our prayers, our sacrifices, our sins and our good deeds determined the fate of the entire ecosystem. A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted not only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind. Less fortunate members of the old animist system lost their stature and became either extras or silent decor in the great drama of man’s relationship with the gods.

Thus the community is within its rights to set and enforce a minimum level of acceptable behavior, but it strays outside its rights if it goes beyond that and imposes ethical demands on its members beyond that. The minimum is business of law, while the effort to go further is the business of ethics-and thus of individual choice. The laws of a community, the measures of acceptable behavior, take shape by the same processes of dissensus as moral choice, but the goal is different. The lawmaking process does not seek the highest possible moral good; it seeks a workable comprimise between individual freedom and the needs of the community. Laws are thus best when they are few, clear, generally accepted, and strictly enforced

Syncretism may have been a fundamental unifying aspect of the Greco-Roman world, but when Christians arrived on the scene they did not want to join in. When Christians looked at the religious activity going on around them, at the veneration of ancestors, the deification of nature, the blending of deities, and a pick-and-mix approach to religion, what they saw was paganism. During the first few centuries of the Church, Christian theologians focused on three practices in particular that they saw as defining this false universal religion: polytheism, sacrifice, and idol worship.

Genesis 1 sits in stark contrast to that dark mythological polytheism. The biblical account has as its chief purpose to glorify the one Creator God who is the sole God of all reality. The water at creation (1:2) is certainly no deity, and it is not God’s foe that needs to be vanquished. It is mere putty in the hands of the Creator. There is no war between Yahweh and the gods of chaos in order to bring about creation. Yahweh is sovereign, and all the elements of creation are at his beck and call. Again, Genesis 1–2 is ardently zealous for monotheism. Not only does this literature not allow the inclusion of other gods; it stridently argues against them with clear polemics.

Much of the polemical theology we have witnessed thus far has dealt with the relationship of the stories of the Bible and ancient Near Eastern myth. Accounts of creation and of floods throughout the Fertile Crescent occur within the realms of the gods and by their very nature are fictitious and folkloristic. At the very heart of these myths are concepts such as polytheism and theogony; and, as I have attempted to demonstrate, such theological thought and underpinnings are foreign and antagonistic to the worldview of the Hebrews. The biblical authors are solidly monotheistic and Yahwistic; and there is simply no room for alien, pagan thought in Hebrew religion. Therefore, they often taunt ancient Near Eastern myth in their writings; polemics is one way of belittling and disparaging pagan myth.

Human intellects make sense of things and, if anything, err on the side of coherence. Geniuses of my acquaintance, who almost seem clever enough to make sense of the world if they so wished, are more likely to accept it as a muddle than the common man who invests it with a transcendent character of its own or recognizes it as filled with divine purpose in which nothing is out of place. Pluralism and chaos are harder to grasp – harder, perhaps, to understand and certainly to accept – than monism and order. For a whole society to accept an agreed world-picture as senseless, random and intractable, people seem to need a lot of collective disillusionment, accumulated and transmitted over many generations (see here). Moral and cognitive ambiguities are luxuries we allow ourselves which most of our forebears eschewed. Whether from an historical angle of approach, along which reconstruction is attempted of the thought of the earliest sages we know about, or from an anthropological direction, lined with examples from primitive societies which survived long enough to be scrutinized, early world-pictures seem remarkably systematic, like the ‘dreamtime’ of Australian aboriginals, in which the inseparable tissue of all the universe was spun. The ambitions these images embody betray the inclusive and comprehensive minds which made them. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries ethnographers’ fieldwork seemed ever to be stumbling on confusedly atomized world-pictures, shared by people who reached for understanding with frenzied clutchings but no overall grasp. This was because anthropologists of the time had a progressive model of human development in mind: animism preceded polytheism, which preceded monotheism; magic preceded religion, which preceded science. Confusion came first and categories, schemes and systems came later. People of the forest saw trees before they inferred wood. Coherence, it was assumed, is constructed late in human history. It now seems that the opposite is true. Coherence-seeking is one of those innate characteristics that make human thought human. No people known to modern anthropology is without it. ‘One of the deepest human desires’, Isaiah Berlin has said, ‘is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience is symmetrically ordered.’ Two kinds of coherence seem to come easily to primitive cosmogonists: they can be called, for convenience, binarism and monism. (For binarism, ‘dualism’ is a traditional name, but this word is now used with so many mutually incompatible meanings that it is less confusing to coin a new term.) Binarism envisages a cosmos regulated by the flow or balance between two conflicting or complementary principles. Monism imagines an indivisibly cohesive universe; the first a twofold, the second an unfolded cosmos. Equilibrium and cohesion are the characteristics of the world in what we take to be its oldest descriptions: equilibrium is the nature of a binarist description, cohesion of a monist one. Truth, for societies which rely on these characterizations for their understanding of the world, is what contributes to equilibrium or participates in cohesion. They

To the Wittgensteinian fideist, religion is such a form of life – a mode of discourse with its own internal logic, which cannot be judged from any outside point of view.  It sets its own criteria for what is true, relevant and meaningful.

Even within monotheist religions themselves, conceptions of divinity vary wildly.  The quest for a single concept that will embrace these diverse conceptions quickly turns to a search for the lowest common denominator of godhood.

H.P. Owen’s book “Concepts of Deity” provides a good standard version: “Theism may be defined as belief in one God, the Creator, who is infinite, self-existent, incorporeal, eternal, immutable, impassible, simple, perfect, omniscient and omnipotent” (Owen 1971, p. 1).

We have seen a movement from many deities to two to one. Whether you take that movement to be fact, mythology, or theology, it is the story of how we got to where most (Western) religions are now. And, as I said, it even defines where atheism is at. Have you heard the old joke about the Jewish man who was left on a desert island for years? When a ship found him, they saw two large huts that he had built on a hill. They asked him what they were. He said, "That one's my synagogue." ... And they asked him what the other hut was. He said, "That's the synagogue I don't go to!" (You can change this to churches or any house of worship you like when you tell the joke.) So we hear people say, "Do you believe in God?" But we do not generally hear people say, "Do you believe in the gods?" The religion that atheists don't go to is monotheism--by default. Or, better: by history. ... I have read and heard it said many times that monotheism has done more harm than polytheism. The claim is that monotheism is exclusive--"If my belief is right, then everybody else's belief must be wrong"--so monotheists are more likely than polytheists or atheists to exclude, persecute, and purge others. We can admit there is some logic to that claim, but still the evidence of history goes both ways. Polytheists and atheist nations and empires have done their share of atrocities. I would not want to take a side in a depressing debate over which has done more horrible things. My task here has not been to argue that monotheism is higher or lower than other ideas. It has just been to track how it came about and to recognize that it succeeded. Monotheism won. One won.

The dynamics of the Roman Christian creed is an oscillating maneuver between covert and overt Polytheisms; between Modalism and Partialism.