The Case for
Polytheism
Today Pagan thinkers need to create an intellectual structure which allows diverse Pagan cultures to communicate with and to lend strength to one another … Above all else the distinctness of Gods and of pantheons must be respected.
We have reached a point where the many threads developed in this volume can be woven together to defend, and advocate, viewing our spiritual world as polytheistic. Previous chapters have made the following points:
1. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 demonstrated that religions claiming to be monotheistic are based on political power, not spiritual experience, and as soon as a degree of religious liberty exists, and sometimes even in the face of its absence, monotheism decays into polytheism.
2. Chapter 3 argued the idea of monotheism is incoherent and has led to endless strife and slaughter by combining its incoherence with demands that some version of it dominate all other religious points of view. With religious freedom, monotheism fragments into many different deities with devotees of each claiming theirs is the only one.
3. Chapter 4 argued that despite early scientists’ all but universal desire to demonstrate Scripture’s truth through gaining more knowledge about the material world, science ultimately devastated all rational arguments for scriptural monotheism. Scientists abandoned all of their scripturally derived assumptions about the world except for distinguishing mind from matter. This dogma remains, even though evidence consciousness permeates the world is as strong or stronger than any alternative view.
4. Chapter 5 argued that, despite predictions by secularization theorists and the steady decline of organized religion, there has been no decrease in the considerable number of people reporting powerful spiritual experiences.
5. Chapter 6 argued that, beginning with quantum physics, many leading scientists argued that science is compatible with, and even actively supports, the view that consciousness is in some sense a basic quality of the world. The remaining assumption dividing consciousness from the material world no longer has persuasive power.
6. Chapter 7 demonstrates how modern biology shows that individuality is an emergent property of still simpler individuated entities. As soon as consciousness is localized in an entity, the potential for ever more complex individuality emerges. From basic cells to the most complex life-forms, what are individuals at one level contribute to more inclusive individuality at another. Biological and psychological individuality is contextual and relational. Neither describes a discrete thing able to be separated from its context.
7. Chapter 8 explains how the human world exists in at least biological and cultural ecologies. As an ideational ecology, the world of consciousness includes at least human beings, memes, and organizations. From an occult perspective, memes are thought forms, and organizations tend to develop egregores.
8. For those open to the possibility, there is powerful evidence that some individuals can access information unavailable from the perspective of secular views of reality. Work at Stanford Research Institute and by the US military are examples, as are some dowsers’ ability to find lost objects.
These observations provide the context for my argument that polytheism is in harmony with modern science, and with all forms of reported spiritual experience. But it is not a powerful argument for the existence of different deities. And it is the extraordinary abundance of an enormous range of spiritual experience within a broadly polytheistic context that I hope this chapter will demonstrate is a reasonable expansion of the argument to date.
Divine variety
I described a variety of my own experiences which in themselves illustrate a puzzling diversity of polytheistic and related phenomena. I did so to outline at least some of the challenges that making a case for polytheism must address. My experiences are hardly all-inclusive, but neither are most or all unique to me. What kind of world makes them possible? Let me recapitulate the challenge.
1. Some superhuman entities exhibit qualities of love and completeness that are close to reported mystical experiences of the Godhead, but within the context of an individual personality distinct from other personalities. I have experienced beings with these qualities as being somehow “more real” than I am. These qualities are clearly superhuman.
2. Some reports are of beings demonstrating superhuman power, apparently without any kind of individualized self as we normally use the term. I described such experiences in my own life, as with that on Mount Shasta and with Yemaya.
3. Some spiritual encounters are completely unexpected. On the other hand, entities sometimes respond when an effort is made to contact them. Wiccan ritual provides many examples of both, as do other experiential polytheistic traditions.
4. Sometimes entities can temporarily “take over” a person’s body, causing them to do or say things they normally would or could not. Some people remember what happened, and others do not, relying on observers for that information. This is particularly the case today with African diasporic traditions, but is found in many others as well.
5. Many polytheistic traditions are based on personal encounters with their deities rather than sacred Scriptures or others’ accounts. Practitioners rarely wonder whether the gods exist, a common concern in monotheism.
6. Sometimes healers in altered states of awareness can “see” into their client, and perceive foreign elements that are then removed or dissolved. On occasion these visions can be verified by the client.
7. In my experience as well as those of many others, as a general rule, deities and spirits associated with one tradition do not show up in very different traditions. Pagan deities normally appear wedded to particular contexts. We do not often (if ever) see the same deity independently manifesting in very different cultures, unless in the most general terms, such as Mother Earth.
8. Despite this, syncretism is often encountered in polytheistic traditions. When practitioners have prior experience of deities from different cultures, those deities can accompany them into a new context. For example, Voudon combines spirits of African origin with entities specific to Haiti’s Taino Indians. It also includes the Irish goddess Brigid, who apparently arrived in Haiti with Irish deportees (Beyer, “Vodou Spirits”).
9. Some deities or superhuman beings were reportedly once human, such as Chango among orishas and Hercules for the Greeks. But within the same traditions others were apparently never human, such as Yemaya among the orishas and Poseidon for the Greeks.
10. There is a wide variety of spirit entities from the clearly superhuman, to beings apparently more like ourselves, down to still “smaller” entities. Deities can be all embracing, even cosmic, and they can be very local. Some appear well disposed toward all or some human beings, other entities appear actively hostile.
Ideally, any attempt to defend polytheism should be able to incorporate this wide variety of polytheistic experience.
Of aspects and individuality
Some polytheists argue that their most important deities are the same as analogous deities with different names in different traditions. This view goes back at least as far as Apuleius’ claims about Isis in The Golden Ass (Apuleius, The Golden Ass, 228). But a great deal rests on what we mean by “the same.”
While sharing important similarities, deities within one culture differ from those within another. For example, in many ways the orishas of Cuban Santeria and Brazilian Candomblé resemble the Greek and Roman gods. In all these cases, myths abound of their sometimes not so harmonious relations with one another, along with other similarities. But when we look more closely, we find that, while the similarities are quite real, so are the dissimilarities. The myths often varied within a given culture, with differing stories about how the same deity originated. For example, Aphrodite was both a child of Zeus and the goddess Dione, and also arose from ocean foam when Cronos castrated Uranus and threw his genitalia into the sea.
The frequent equation of Roman with Greek deities turns out to be less straightforward than usually thought, even though common themes appear among different deities. Mars is a Roman god of war and Venus’ lover. Ares, the Greek god of war, is similarly linked to Aphrodite. In the very different Yoruba culture, Ogun is the orisha of war and the lover of Oshun, the orisha of feminine beauty. So far, they would seem to be the same deities or powers, under different names, as the English “tree” and the German “Baum” refer to the same thing.
However, Ogun combines war and metallurgy whereas Vulcan oversaw these skills for the Romans, and Hephaestus for the Greeks. Both these classical deities were crippled and ugly, which is not the case with Ogun. While a god of war, Mars could be merciful and was committed to protecting Rome. Ares was filled with bloodlust, and apparently could take any side in a conflict to increase its lethality. Unlike Ares or Ogun, Mars was also a god of agriculture, sharing a connection with vegetation with his wife, Venus.
Aphrodite is a goddess of beauty, sexual love, and romance. Venus shares many of her qualities, but she is also a goddess of gardens, pure love, fertility, and domestic bliss. Oshun is associated with fresh flowing water, Aphrodite is connected with the sea. Oshun is associated with witches, whereas it was Hekate and Diana who had this association in the Greco-Roman world.
Oshun is sexually associated with Ogun, and Aphrodite is married to Hephaestus and had affairs with Hermes and Dionysus as well as Ares, while Venus is married to Vulcan, as well as being Mars’ lover, sharing a common connection with metallurgy. There seems to be a connection between beauty and metallurgy, as well as with war and strife, but the depictions of these qualities as deities differs.
There are many suggestive connections here, but important exceptions continually appear as well.
Similarly, the functions over which a deity presided could change with time. Apparently, Hekate was originally not associated with the underworld. That came later. She also appears to have become increasingly associated with theurgy, magick, ensouling the cosmos, and facilitating certain communications between people and gods, in Hellenistic and Roman times (Johnston, Hekate Soteira; von Rudloff, Hekate in Ancient Greek Religion).
Aspecting?
Some Neopagans offer an alternative take on polytheism, arguing that individuated deities are aspects of an all-inclusive goddess or god, returning us to Apulieus’ problem regarding Isis. We can safely presume that many a classical devotee of Hekate would not consider her an aspect of a single universal goddess. This effort at categorization would also not impress present day practitioners of Santeria or Candomblé. Is Yemaya an “aspect” of the Great Mother? Alternatively, many Wiccans, myself among them, believe our goddess is the goddess of the Witches, and there are other deities connected to people in other ways. My encounter with the Celtic goddess Brigid shared little in common with my encounters with the Wiccan Goddess, wonderful as both were.
In addition, many polytheistic deities manifest in very different ways while being in some sense the same deity. Christopher Scott Thompson makes this point within a Hindu context. Kali can be a wrathful manifestation of Parvati, Shiva’s wife. She can also be a manifestation of Durga, who battles demons. In some myths she is Shiva’s loving and obedient wife; others treat Shiva as being powerless without her, and still others describe Kali as the supreme reality, with no need of Shiva. She can also vary in characteristics from village to village and even oppose the Kalis of different villages. “So, which of these versions is correct and authentic? They all are” (Thompson, “Polytheistic monism”). John Michael Greer makes a similar point regarding the Greek gods (Greer, World Full of Gods, 106–7). James Kugel writes that ancient Middle Eastern treaties listed deities as witnesses and enforcers. One such treaty includes Ishtar of Arbela, Ishtar of Nineveh, and the planet Venus, which was associated with Ishtar, in this regard. Kugel points out that treaties were not theological discussions, but about as down to earth as an agreement could be (Kugel, The Great Shift, 85). Thompson points out how Ellegba, an important deity in Santeria, can manifest in 101 different ways. In some cases, as female, and in others, male. But Ellegba’s capacity in this regard is not unique. Many classical deities were similarly of variable sex, depending on what they were doing (G. Clark, “Augustine’s Varro,” 186).
Infinite in number?
The pre-Socratic philosopher Thales famously wrote “all things are full of gods.” Hesiod wrote “upon the bounteous earth Zeus has thrice ten thousand spirits, watchers of mortal men, and these keep watch on judgments and deeds of wrong as they roam, clothed in mist, all over the earth” (Hesiod, Works and Days, 248–64). A classical Christian critic of pagans scoffed that the emperor Julian loved three hundred thousand deities (Kahlos, “Refuting and Reclaiming Monotheism,” 168).
The same holds for the very different cultures honoring the orishas in Africa and the New World. A small number, those who made it over to the Caribbean during slavery, dominate rituals in African Diasporic traditions such as Santeria and Candomblé. However, in African Yoruba culture the number can be “as many as you can think of, plus one more—an innumerable number” (Falola, Encyclopedia of the Yoruba, 84–85).
But, in some sense Isis does refer to more than the personal goddess to whom Apuleius was devoted. Like the Wiccan Goddess as I have experienced her, she also was considered the goddess of Nature. From Europe to China to the Americas there have been many ways across both millennia and cultures for acknowledging the power and reality of the earth as feminine. Amidst enormous variety there also seems to be points of connection.
Christopher Scott Thompson writes that some Hindus consider Shiva to be God; others consider Vishnu to be God and still others consider a goddess such as Kali, Durga, or Lalita to be God. But, most followers respect the validity of other Hindus considering “one of the other gods as the supreme god, even though the gods as separate deities remain distinct” (Thompson, “Polytheistic monism”). In classical Greece, whereas Zeus was most commonly referred to as the chief among Greek deities, Edward Butler notes “Empedocles decenters Zeus in favor of a demiurgic Aphrodite, and his system differs accordingly” (Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism,” 70). The same pattern, which Thompson describes as “divine fluidity,” appears in Egyptian religion (Hormung, Conceptions of God, 235–6).
Such a seemingly disordered variety of gods/spirits/daimones reinforces many secularists’ views that all deities are cultural constructs, without any reality beyond their followers’ imaginations. At first take, this secularist debunking seems well taken. But, and here is the rub, it only makes sense to people who have never experienced the actual presence of a deity.
Hierarchies or something else?
Such divine variety and complexity are enough to drive anyone who loves tidy categorizations to complete distraction. This is especially the case if they think of divinities in terms of a political hierarchy with God or a major deity as king. This hierarchical model was often employed in polytheistic contexts in classical times. Order was obvious to all, but how could it arise? Aristotle described God as like a general (Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy,” 46). Other writers treated God as the head of a divine monarchy (Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy,” 57), or, in a deeply patriarchal world, father (Gasparro, “One God and Divine Unity,” 42). Many writers compared the abundance of deities with the abundance of human administrators needed to govern empires (Athanassiadi and Frede, “Introduction,” 9; West, “Towards Monotheism,” 39; Gasparro, “One God,” 54). It seemed as if some higher power was needed to impose order on an otherwise disorderly material world, as kings and emperors claimed to impose it in the human realm (Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy”). This concept of a hierarchy of divine power seems to have been a way for solving a problem arising from earlier, less hierarchic, polytheisms. For example, in the Iliad and Odyssey, different deities took up different sides in human conflicts and even fought among themselves, as when Athena severely wounded Ares. Greek philosophers, and others, bothered by the apparent chaos, sought to discern some ultimate principle that gave order to the world. Over time, for many, Zeus grew in power relative to the other Olympian deities. This pattern of growing hierarchy apparently also existed in the Middle East (West, “Towards Monotheism,” 21–40).
Within polytheistic traditions, the specific claims associated with monotheism were largely absent (Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy,” 63). Most Platonists argued that God could not be regarded as an individual, even one standing at the apex of all that is (Frede, “Monotheism and Pagan Philosophy,” 50).
Use of hierarchy in these contexts seems connected to relations of power, both politically, and with regard to the rest of the world. Jordan Paper observes the Sámi people, who herd reindeer on Russia’s Kola peninsula, regard individual wild reindeer as numinous, whereas domesticated reindeer are the gift of the Mistress of the Reindeer Herds (Paper, The Deities Are Many, 91). Wild reindeer are independent of the Sámi whereas domesticated reindeer are under their control. The second relationship is more hierarchical than the first.
My own experience supports this interpretation. When I come across edible wild mushrooms, I give thanks, whereas I did not feel the same degree of gratitude to my individual plants, when I cultivated a vegetable garden, but gave thanks to the spirits of the land and weather. Hierarchy and power relations seem intimately connected, reaching a pathological form in monotheism. The image of monarchy or other hierarchy cannot come close to comprehending the reality of polytheism in practice.
But what can?
Returning to emergence
Ancient times were limited in their understanding of complex orders because so many agricultural societies were extremely hierarchical. Apparently earlier hunting societies were far less hierarchical in their outlook, perhaps because social hierarchies were largely absent, and so that frame for making sense of order was lacking. That is certainly the case today (Brody, The Other Side of Eden). Only with the rise of cities and the hierarchies they created did this image begin to make sense for people. It was easy to think order came from the top down, and the elites encouraged such thinking.
We are better off today when trying to understand this divine multiplicity because we have a richer understanding of how order can arise in our world.
Both evolution and the ecosystems within which it takes place are ordered patterns that emerged without anyone being in charge. Of course, some monotheists say their deity “guides” evolution, but if so, it is a poor sort of guide, leading to many dead ends and poorly thought out ways of solving design problems (as anyone with a bad back will recognize). Human “anatomy isn’t what you’d design from scratch,” said anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva. “Evolution works with duct tape and paper clips” (Gibbons, “Human Evolution”).
Another alternative to explaining biological order by divine incompetence is more promising, and returns us to two concepts I introduced earlier: self-organization and emergence. Only now we will view them from a larger context, one embracing the sacred.
As previously described, Scottish philosophers sought to understand how social order could arise if God did not impose it and human geniuses did not create it. Their solution was to describe circumstances where no one was in charge and everyone reacted to the local changes around them, insights that led later scientists to discover biological evolution, and from it, ecology. I described in Chapter 4 how modern science itself is also such a phenomenon.
“Polycentricity” is a technical term for these systems, and refers to their not being hierarchies, but rather having many independent centers of action, each making its own decisions (Polanyi, The Logic of Liberty, 170–84). “Polycentric” means “many centers.” The patterns they manifest emerge out of multiple relationships where no one is in charge.
To unite this term with two others many readers might not have known before reading this book, self-organizing processes are characterized by order emerging from polycentric networks. It is the opposite of patterns being created by controlling hierarchies, human or divine.
Hierarchies can exist within polycentric systems, as organizations exist within a market or research teams exist within science. But no one controls the system as a whole. Every internal hierarchy is subordinate to a system no one controls, and the collective patterns arising from within all actors in a system are examples of emergence.
My discussions of individuality in biology described biological emergence, where individuals emerging from relationships with simpler individuals could, in a more complex set of relations, generate different individuals of a more complex kind. Two kinds of the simplest cells generated the first cell with a nucleus. Some of them together perhaps with viruses made the existence of multicellular individuals possible. Some multicellular and single celled individuals made more complex multicellular individuals possible, as when bacteria common in dirt made mice more intelligent, and some multicellular individuals made even more complex multicellular individuals possible, as when toxoplasmosis was discovered to encourage different kinds of thinking in human beings. Each level in this and other examples possessed characteristics not reducible to the sum of its parts. As explored in Chapter 7, unified individuals arise from relationships existing between different subordinate but also unified individuals.
Chapter 8 took this argument a step further into the cultural realm, where we, as individuals, are also the results of our collective cultural as well as biological relations, relations of which we are usually not aware. Memes as thought forms and egregores are the most important here.
Selves with and without bodies
If consciousness is universal, once awareness has become self-conscious in some sense, it does not necessarily disappear when the material form that originally enabled it to emerge disappears. Awareness as an individual arises from being able to integrate conscious relationships over time—past, present, and potentially future.
Consider our own selves. Our bodies shape the consciousness that arises from their involvement with the cultural and biological worlds we inhabit. But once we are sufficiently self-aware, we can direct our consciousness not only in ways that heal our own bodies, as with the placebo phenomenon, we can also heal others, as with energy healing. Self-awareness emerges from our embodied experiences, but once it does, we can to some degree act separately from the body. The conscious self is an emergent outcome of its constituent relationships.
Anyone who has encountered a disembodied spirit or deity, or astral-projected, should have little difficulty granting this possibility. The being I first saw on the Berkeley campus, after I made that challenge to Don, was not material, at least as we think of the term. The same insight holds for anyone who has astral-projected, or experienced awareness of places closed to normal perception, such as inside a person being healed energetically, or from remote viewing or dowsing, where no physical connection exists in any sense recognized by materialism. Perhaps material existence in our sense is a necessary precondition to the development of individuated consciousness such as ours, but once developed, is not necessary for it to persist.
These considerations may shed light on a view common in many polytheistic cultures, that souls are multiple. For example, in shamanistic cultures shamans leave their bodies to retrieve souls that have become separated from their own bodies (Paper, The Deities Are Many, 63). This commonly encountered view in traditional cultures makes more sense to us if we consider some element of soul remains behind, maintaining physical life, even as another leaves, but when together they are a unified self. Astral projection would be another example for some, even in the modern West. With death, all are disconnected from the material body.
It may also make sense of experiences of reincarnation. While many reports of past lives have proven accurate in their details, often those reporting them can do so only under hypnosis, or at a very young age after which they forget what they reported. Where are our past lives when we have no recollection? Are we really the same being as what appears to be another living in a different time and place? If individuals in our usual sense are in turn elements in a still more complex entity, this somewhat strange feature of our not being able to remember past lives except in rare or unusual circumstances makes sense. A prosaic biological example is a lichen, which is a collection of an algae and a fungus that makes something possible present in neither alone. The same could be true in the psychic realm, and if so, boundaries will sometimes be more fluid than at other times.
Even our usual sense of individual distinctiveness is fluid, depending on how aware we are of the varied relationships we weave together into a self. Selves in the modern sense of conscious individuality are not things, they—we—are active nodes of conscious relationship that can include more or less of our network of connections. Some linkages are very strong, others are much weaker but can matter in the right context. Sometimes our “self” is quite narrowly focused, as when I hit my thumb with a hammer. Other times it grows far beyond my physical body, as when I empathize with the pain or joy of a loved one, or of strangers.
Each of us is a hub where our experiences come together to create a world of individuated awareness. To some degree we can choose our present and future relationships even as we are constituted from out of them. We have some say in just how far we will seek to acknowledge and shape the relationships out of which we emerge. Each of us is a node where experiences come together to create a conscious individual awareness, linked at the same time with other nodes.
If the One or the Godhead is pure unconditional love, as I and many others have experienced it, the more we expand our hearts, the more links with other nodes enter into our sense of self. As many wise spiritual teachers of virtually all traditions have said, if your path does not have heart in it, it is not for you. This assumption, which I believe is true, leads to a coherent model of the deities able to explain why they are so varied, and why the ways of connecting with them so varied as well.
The gods
If all of reality is considered in some sense a unified One, all conscious nodes emerge from the ultimate source of connections of greater or lesser complexity. Deities can be thought of as “super hubs in this network.” The confirmation problem described by William James and David Chalmers is solved at the more-than-human level as it was solved at the biological, psychological, and cultural levels (James, Principles of Psychology, chapter 6).
This perspective sheds light on two largely universal dimensions of polytheistic religions. First, they are experiential. Polytheists encounter their deities in relationship, and so faith in their existence is analogous to the faith I have in a currently unseen friend’s existence. This has no similarity to faith as described applying to a monotheistic deity.
Polytheistic religions decenter spiritual reality, rather like spirituality de-
centers the self and modern biology has decentered the individual. There are many deities and no point short of the One at which they all converge. All share a common root, but manifest in their own ways. Polytheism focuses on relationship, and so, in general, the ideal connection with the sacred is harmony, of respecting “all our relations,” rather than salvation or enlightenment. There is no mountaintop toward which all paths climb. Instead there is an eternally opening flower of constantly renewed petals, each a manifestation of the One as well as unique in itself. (This flower metaphor seems implicit in careful thinking about polytheism. Greer uses it in a complementary way. A World Full of Gods, 139–40.)
Of webs, nets, and drops
The modern metaphor of a web echoes the Hindu one of Indra’s net where every jewel mirrors all the others. Often this image is used to point to the nondual character of ultimate reality, for everything is mirrored in everything else. Without in any sense denying this dimension of the metaphor, each jewel reflects all others from a different place within the net. Each jewel is also an individual expression of the net as a whole. All are represented, but in each case from a different perspective, explaining the diversity of spirit entities, for the nodes are innumerable.
This perspective enables me to understand how at least some deities can be “more real” than I am. Modern human beings often report feeling disconnected from life; life has no meaning. Even in earlier times, when the world was more commonly regarded as deeply meaningful, many myths explored how we came to feel so separate from our origin. There was a time when animals and people could talk, and even change places, but today this sense of connectedness is often thin or absent.
Even so, the more positive connections we experience with others, the richer and deeper our lives become. In other words, the richness of life arises out of connections and the quality of those connections. This may be true “all the way down” for, as de Quincey explains, “The hierarchical depth of internal relations experienced by any particular entity … is the relative value of that entity within its hierarchical network … a cell is more valuable than a molecule or an atom, and a dog or fish more valuable than a single cell, because it literally incorporates more reality, more complex nestings of levels of internal relations” (de Quincey, Radical Nature, 169). Major deities are “super hubs.” They are larger, more inclusive foci of relationships within the divine network. In this sense they are more real and more important than less inclusive hubs, be they other spirits or beings like us. Might we ourselves grow in wisdom to become more like these deities? I think a poem by the Sufi, Rumi, gives us a clue:
Let the drop of water that is in you
become a hundred mighty seas.
But do not think that the drop alone
Becomes the Ocean—
the Ocean, too, becomes the drop!
(Rumi, A Garden Beyond Paradise, 149)
The more drops of which we are aware, the more we are the entire ocean viewed from our unique place within it, and so manifest the unconditional love at the center of everything. (I have quite a way to go in this regard, BTW.)
Divine individuality
Divine and human individuality alike are self-aware focal points integrating multiple relationships into larger wholes. The richer the integration, the richer the individuality. I am the same person but manifest different dimensions of who I am when I am enjoying music with friends, hiking in nature, lecturing in a class, or creating a work of art. In each context, my friends might not be the same as in another. But a complete description of who I am has room for all of this.
Human beings exist in intimate relationship with their culture, including the memes and egregores comprising the ideational ecology within which they exist. And we manifest differently depending on the contexts we encounter. So do our religions. Consequently, in any religion, the identifying features of a god may reflect the worshipers as well as the god (Greer, A World Full of Gods, 107).
Like ourselves, deities can have many of the same qualities and not be reducible to one another. Oshun and Venus and Aphrodite share important elements within this web. All are, among other things, goddesses of beauty, and so are profoundly connected. But they also each partake of other different elements, and so are individual. As do people who have lived a rich and multifaceted life, they will also manifest different dimensions in different contexts (Thompson, “Polytheistic monism,” part two).
Existing between the One and the world of humans, to the degree they are closer to the One, they will also be better able to manifest unconditional love.
As with larger deities, lesser deities, daimones, and spirits can be self-aware entities that are no longer embodied or perhaps never were. What maintains them is access to energy. Apparently it can come from two directions: more directly from the One, or from individuals in ways we have already discussed with regard to egregores and thought forms. John Michael Greer observes: “Any symbolic pattern that has served as a focus for human emotion and energy will build up an egregore of its own over time … The gods and goddesses of every religion, past and present, are the centers of vast egregores charged with specific types of power” (Greer, Inside a Magical Lodge, 106–7).
Greer’s observation leads to these questions: Are the gods human creations? Is the Wiccan Goddess an egregore?
If all that is in the world makes up a field of interwoven networks, the more linked a “hub” is, the more real it becomes. From this follows the experience I and others have had of encountering entities more real than ourselves. We are not the apex of awareness or individuality, and to the degree an egregore is in harmony with more fundamental dimensions of reality, it is not simply the result of human consciousness. The gods are not our creations.
But neither need they be divorced from us. How I manifest as a person is not solely determined by me. It is also shaped by those around me and their expectations. Perhaps the same holds for deities. Did the entity I now experience as the Wiccan Goddess exist during the Jurassic? I have no way of knowing. But I am quite sure that, if she did, she did not appear to whoever perceived her in a (super) human form, such as she did to me. Greer seems to be getting at the same thing, writing the most powerful egregores are “built up on the basis of the living patterns of the realm of meaning, outside space and time. These patterns are what some religions call gods, and what others call aspects of god. They … use the egregores the way people use clothing” (Greer, Magical Lodge, 109–10). There is no contradiction between arguing an unimaginably huge number of individual deities can exist, and honoring the existence of an ultimate Source from which everything emerges, including the gods. Nor is there any contradiction with honoring one of these multiple deities in particular, while recognizing in others an equal right to honor different deities. We do this in the purely human realm every day. When we love another person, we do not look askance at others who love different people. Nor do we think the person we love is the only lovable person, or that others’ love for other people is somehow inferior to our own. Each case of love is irreducibly individual, and a manifestation of the unconditional love that ultimately pervades reality.
Some could misread me as reducing the Gods to very powerful egregores or thought forms. Egregores exist due to their connection with human consciousness. So do thought forms such as Philip. If humans did not exist, these entities would not exist. However, the world and the energies that enliven it existed long before we did. For example, beauty is intimately associated with the sacred. Today we usually consider beauty as rooted in our subjectivity. But beauty long pre-existed human beings. It influences the evolution of many creatures and is also, for many of us, intrinsic to our experience of the world (Prum, Evolution of Beauty). And beauty is rooted in consciousness. From this perspective, the core qualities of the sacred and the major Gods pre-existed us. Perhaps it is in relationship with us that they took on dimensions more accessible to minds such as our own.
Neoplatonist polycentrism
As it happens, Neoplatonism pioneered an understanding of polytheism at least broadly compatible with the view I am developing. Mine is rooted in evolutionary biology and ecology, theirs in philosophy and in ancient, and perhaps unbroken, spiritual traditions extending back to the dawn of humanity. That both paths lead to similar insights adds to the credibility of their general conclusions.
Edward Butler, one of Neoplatonism’s most important contemporary figures, emphasizes the importance of polycentrism for understanding polytheism (Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism”). Butler writes: “The importance of the philosophical formulation of polycentric polytheism by the Neoplatonists lies in having disaggregated individuality from the logic of part and whole (Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism,” 35; “Bhakti and Henadology”). Individuality can partake of a whole, but be individualized because some dimensions are more dominant than are others. Butler is explicating an ancient form of thought that, at the same time, is remarkably modern, as Butler appears to recognize (Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism,” 74).
It seems to me Neoplatonism describes the same pattern I have described as existing in the spiritual world. Butler provides a clarifying passage by Olympiodorus (quoted in Butler, “Theological Interpretation of Myth,” 34–5): “If the virtues reciprocally imply each other, nevertheless they differ individually … all [of the virtues] are in courage simultaneously courageously, in another [temperance] temperately; and so to all the Gods are in Zeus zeustically. In another [Hera] herically; for no God is imperfect. And as Anaxagorus said all things are in all things, but one is superabundant [in each], in this way also we speak of things divine” (Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism,” 34–5). This insight brings us back to a weakness of any monotheistic view of God as a personality. There is no single perfect personality. Personality implies relationship. In polytheism, each of the gods can serve as a center to which all else is linked. But, as Butler emphasizes, “there can be no unique center” (Butler, “Polycentric Polytheism,” 6).
As Rumi observed, the ocean becomes the drop and, as implied by the image of Indra’s net, each jewel reflects all the others from its own place. If these examples still fail to give you a sense of this insight, let me risk a mundane example: Each of my readers can read English, but each brings his or her own way of interpreting my words to this manuscript. If “English grammar” is the One (which it clearly is not), then hopefully the point above is clarified: we all share it, but employ it differently.
Monism and abundance
People having the most complete mystical experience describe a total but temporary annihilation of their self, entering into a state of awareness without differentiation, a divine “Nothingness.” One account of such a classic mystical experience is Alfred Lord Tennyson’s (1809–1892) description of one that he experienced: “[I]ndividuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state but the clearest, the surest of surest, utterly beyond words—where death was an almost laughable impossibility” (quoted in Paper, The Mystic Experience, 94).
I think this experience is not the “ultimate spiritual realization.” I think there is no ultimate spiritual realization other than, perhaps, the gradual expansion of the links to which one is connected to include all of them, as Rumi suggested. And as he observed, individuality does not disappear, it is transformed. If this latter is the case, it is not a situation we can reasonably expect to attain this time around.
Many mystics experience what is often called the Godhead, and not pure nonduality. They report that love and compassion are among the most basic elements of the divine. This was my experience when it happened to me. And my own and others’ experience of gods emanating unconditional love as being more real than anything else supports this argument. There is both unity and diversity within the very structure of existence as human beings experience it.
Only through a rich and varied individuality can the maximum opportunities for realizing love and compassion be attained. If love is the recognition and cherishing of inner beauty manifesting through someone or something, there is no love in nonduality because there is nothing separate to love. If, as the Wiccan Goddess once told me, “All beings are worthy of my love,” then the greater the number of such beings, the greater the opportunity for love to manifest. Love cherishes particularity. Divine love cherishes all particularity.
In a way, we could say transcendence exists only in and through immanence. We always encounter it from within a particular context. Particular descriptions of this experience often differ in their details shaped by who we are and when and where we have the experience. Significantly, all who experience it say it cannot be described. But we try. The problem is not the experience, it is the always inadequate effort to communicate it, because words, even poetic ones like Rumi’s, cannot quite get us there, though he gets closer than arguments like mine. An argument by its nature distances us so we can evaluate it whereas great poetry draws us in.
Transcendence versus immanence is a false dichotomy. Duality versus nonduality is false as well. This world is always monist, always dualist, and always individuated (Paper, The Deities Are Many, 129; The Mystic Experience, 75–135).
Do I believe I have found the truth?
I do not argue my explanation for the near universal experience of a living and polytheistic world is the truth. I am a human discussing the more-than-human, using concepts developed largely in Western thought, and especially contemporary science. I have sought to clear away the errors of monotheism, leaving us free to rethink the nature of the divine. Combining what I have learned in the sciences with my own experiences, I hope I have presented a good road map to important dimensions of the more-than-human that lack the debilitating weaknesses of monotheism, and honor the rich spiritual history of diverse cultures and peoples. To do so I have employed insights rooted in modern science, but as I argued earlier, this approach has been used at least since the invention of the clock.
My argument relies on apparent similarities between very different phenomena, enabling them to shed light on one another. I believe it captures a part of the truth better than any other model I have encountered, and relies on concepts proving themselves increasingly important in the sciences. As in science, the test is not truth, for we do not know the full truth, but reliability compared to alternatives. Better ones can always emerge.
I am suggesting a way of understanding that honors the experiences of people in the midst of their different spiritual practices, recognizes the reality of the sacred, of the diversity of forms in which it manifests, and that we live within a universe that is most appropriately conceived of as a Thou rather than It.
But the superhuman is beyond human power to grasp. No words can fully describe even individual experience. Try describing an orgasm. That is why the best poetry is so important. It takes us as far as words can go, and then opens the door to where they cannot. How much more true must this be for the more-than-human?
I am offering one more finger pointing at the moon, hopefully a more reliable one than many.