Polytheism

• 1. Introduction

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  Polytheism, the worship of or belief in more than one deity, got its name from an argument. The Jewish writer Philo of Alexandria coined the word, joining the Greek roots for "many" and "god" to make a point against the Greeks. Centuries later, others reached for it again. Jean Bodin revived the term in 1850, and Samuel Purchas put it to use in 1614. So a single word, born in debate, now stretches across nearly all of recorded religious history. It reaches from prehistory and the earliest records of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian religion to the temples of classical Greece and Rome. Yet the word hides as much as it reveals. How do you count gods when worshippers themselves disagree whether they are separate beings or faces of one? Why do religions usually filed under monotheism keep showing polytheistic seams? And what happens when a label coined as an insult becomes a faith people freely claim? These are the questions that follow.

• 2. Counting The Uncountable

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  Oxford Reference admits the trouble plainly: "it is not easy to count gods, and so not always obvious whether an apparently polytheistic religion is really so." The apparent objects of worship might instead be manifestations of a single divinity. That ambiguity sits at the center of the whole subject. A pantheon of deities can each carry its own sects and rituals. The same deities might be representations of natural forces or ancestral principles. They can be seen as fully autonomous, or as emanations of a greater being or a transcendental absolute, in either case present immanently in nature. Polytheists rarely treat every deity as equal. One position recognizes many gods while focusing worship on a single deity or a chosen group, perhaps only at certain times or in certain settings. Scholars give this stance several names: monolatry, kathenotheism, or henotheism, though that last label is itself controversial. The line between belief and practice runs deep here. Deities shown in conflict in mythology were often worshipped side by side anyway. A culture could tell stories of gods at war while bowing to both on the same altar.

• 3. Soft Gods, Hard Gods

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  Odin, Zeus, and Indra: are they three gods or one? Soft polytheism answers that they are one essential god, interpreted through the lenses of Germanic, Greek, and Indic peoples. This view, called omnitheism, lets gods become interchangeable across cultures. It also treats them as psychological archetypes or as personifications of natural forces. The English occultist Dion Fortune was a major populariser of this idea. In her novel The Sea Priestess she wrote, "All gods are one god, and all goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator." Hard polytheism rejects that collapse entirely. To a hard polytheist, gods are distinct, separate, real divine beings, not archetypes and not stand-ins for natural forces. They refuse the claim that all gods are one essential god. Some go further and reject the existence of gods outside their own pantheon altogether. This division is described as a major split in modern polytheistic practice. It determines whether a worshipper sees a foreign god as a cousin or a stranger.

• 4. Personalities And Spirits

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  The gods of polytheism often behave like exaggerated people. They are portrayed as complex personages of greater or lesser status, with individual skills, needs, desires, and histories. In many ways they resemble humans in their personality traits, yet carry additional powers, abilities, knowledge, or perceptions. These figures rarely stand alone. Polytheism cannot be cleanly separated from the animist beliefs found in most folk religions. The gods are frequently the highest order in a continuum of supernatural beings, a continuum that can include ancestors, demons, wights, and others. Some spirits are sorted into celestial or chthonic classes, and believing all of them exist does not mean all of them are worshipped. The roster of divine roles runs long. Among the types of deities found in polytheism are the creator deity, the culture hero, the death deity, the life-death-rebirth deity, the love deity, and the mother goddess. There are political deities such as a king or emperor, sky and solar and lunar deities, the trickster, the water deity, and gods of music, arts, science, and farming. Each role marks a different corner of human experience that someone, somewhere, decided to make divine.

• 5. Myths As Allegory

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  Cronus swallowing his children was not, to one ancient reader, a horror story but a hidden lesson. The 4th century CE Neoplatonist Sallustius sorted mythology into five types. He called that swallowing tale theological, an allegory expressing the essence of divinity. The other categories spread the meaning outward. Physical myths express the activities of gods in the world. Psychological myths read as allegories of the soul's own activities and acts of thought. Material myths treat objects as gods, calling the earth Gaia, the ocean Okeanos, or heat Typhon. A fifth type is simply mixed. Scholars have pushed even deeper into the past. Jaan Puhvel, J. P. Mallory, and Douglas Q. Adams reconstructed aspects of the ancient Proto-Indo-European religion, the source from which the religions of various Indo-European peoples are thought to derive. They describe it as an essentially naturalist numenistic faith. One surviving notion from that shared past is the concept of *dyēws, attested across several Indo-European religious systems.

• 6. How Pantheons Grow

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  Empires made gods multiply. Deities first worshipped as patrons of single cities were gathered together as empires spread over larger territories. Conquest could fold one culture's pantheon beneath the invaders', a pattern visible in the Greek Titanomachia and possibly the Æsir-Vanir War of Norse myth. Well-known historical pantheons stretch across continents: the Sumerian gods, the Egyptian gods, the gods of Greek and Roman religion, the Norse Æsir and Vanir, the Yoruba Orisha, and the Aztec gods. Cultural exchange blurred the boundaries further. "The same" deity could be revered in two places under different names, as happened among the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. Whole gods could migrate, like the Egyptian deity Osiris, later worshipped in ancient Greece. Greek religion tempered Etruscan cult and belief to form much of later Roman religion. Not every thinker believed these gods even cared. The Greek philosopher Epicurus held that the gods were incorruptible but material, blissful beings who lived in the empty spaces between worlds. They did not trouble themselves with mortal affairs, though the mind could perceive them, especially during sleep.

• 7. The Olympian Twelve

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  Twelve names anchored the classical Greek imagination: Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Athena, Ares, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Hephaestus, Aphrodite, Hermes, and Hestia. This was the canonical Twelve of art and poetry, each god holding a power. The list was never fixed. There was great fluidity over who counted in antiquity. Hades was often excluded because he dwelt in the underworld. Hestia may have stepped down when Dionysus was invited to Mount Olympus, though this remains a matter of controversy. Robert Graves' The Greek Myths cites two sources that do not suggest Hestia surrendered her seat, even as Graves himself suggests she did. Worship reached far beyond the mainland. Hellenic polytheism extended to the islands and coasts of Ionia in Asia Minor, to Magna Graecia across Sicily and southern Italy, and to scattered colonies in the Western Mediterranean such as Massalia, the city now called Marseille. Different cities often worshipped the same deities under epithets that marked their local nature. During the Hellenistic Era, philosophical schools like Epicureanism developed distinct theologies of their own.

• 8. Living Faiths

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  Roog is the supreme creator deity of the Serer people of Africa, and Serer polytheism reaches back to the Neolithic Era or possibly earlier. Its ancient ancestors represented their Pangool on the Tassili n'Ajjer. Beneath Roog stand many deities and Pangool, the interceders with the divine, each serving as Roog's agent on Earth. Among the Cangin speakers, a Serer sub-group, Roog is known as Koox. Polytheism keeps appearing inside faiths that call themselves something else. Christianity is usually described as monotheistic, yet the doctrine of the Trinity holds that God exists in three distinct persons, leading some to call it a form of tritheism. The scholar and self-described polytheist Jordan Paper argues that even the Catholic Church shows polytheistic aspects in the veneration of saints. Saint Brigid, he might note, is in fact Brigit, the main goddess of Celtic Ireland. The boundary stays porous in modern faiths too. Notable polytheistic religions practiced today include Taoism, Chinese folk religion, Shinto, Santería, most Traditional African religions, and neopagan faiths such as Wicca and Hellenism. Gerald Gardner, the founder of Wicca, helped revive ancient polytheism, building a duotheistic mystery faith whose worshippers honor the Lord and Lady of the Isles, names kept oathbound to this day.