The moon is full above California’s soaring redwoods as the coven meets beneath them to honor the goddess and do magick. The circle has been cast, the directions called, and the High Priest approaches the High Priestess to invoke the goddess, calling out “I call upon Thee o mighty mother of us all …” At the invocation’s conclusion, she enters into the woman, to teach and bless those gathered in her name. One of the coven members has a request for the group to help her find an affordable place to live. Aided by her presence, a chant is created and, at its height, the High Priestess sends the energy raised off to help achieve the member’s request.
At a signal from the Mae de Santo, the batá drummers begin pounding out a complex rhythm. Within the temple, men and women dressed in white begin singing and clapping to honor and call upon an orisha, an African deity, one of many. Soon one of the participants, a woman, shudders and begins to shake, and then dance, and whirl, as Ochossi arrives to join the celebration. As she better integrates with the divine arrival, her movements shift into the stylized dance associated with that particular orisha. As the ritual progresses, other orishas may arrive as well, each choosing a member with whom to join, dance, and heal.
Within a tent from which all light has been blocked, the Medicine person has been bound tightly. As he lies on the ground, the rest of the space tightly packed with guests and the main person to be healed, drums begin beating a steady rhythm, like the beating of a heart. Soon tiny lights begin to flash overhead in the otherwise total darkness, and people feel feather fans brushing against their heads as they receive healings along with the person for which the Yu Wipi Ceremony has been called. In time the drums cease, the lights and fans vanish, and when the space is illuminated again, the Medicine person is sitting quietly, his bindings neatly placed at his feet.
These examples come from very different cultures: Western Europe, East Africa, and North America. These particular ceremonies occurred in Northern California, but they could have occurred anywhere. What they share is a common experience of participants directly encountering the world of Spirit. Those participating are a varied lot, from construction workers to scientists; from doctors to students; and indeed, just about any other way of life. They usually leave feeling much better than when they arrived, and often personally enriched with new insights for living their lives.
This is polytheism in action as a part of people’s reality, American style.
But American culture is usually described as a combination of Christianity and secularism, a society deeply divided by the spiritual and scientific tensions between them. If polytheism is considered at all, it is treated as a way station most have long since passed in humanity’s journey toward worshiping one god, or alternatively, none at all.
I will argue here that both perspectives are mistaken, and that what we loosely call polytheism is the natural experience human beings have always had of the world of Spirit, and that it is a much more accurate understanding of the world within which we live than the secularism usually considered the alternative to monotheism.
To make my case I will demonstrate that, in practice, monotheism is polytheism, although a very confused one; that modern science’s criticisms of monotheism target its incoherence and lack of evidence, but do not touch polytheism; and that polytheism itself is a natural outgrowth of exploring the primordial human insight that our world is alive “all the way down.” Thus, the enormous variety of polytheistic experiences is as natural as the enormous variety of life forms that enrich this world. This variety enriches the spiritual world as much as nature’s diversity enriches our physical one.
Polytheism resolves the internal problems of monotheistic arguments, is compatible with modern science, and is continually reflected in people’s spiritual experiences, even today. In Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, the modern world killed God, but in doing so we wiped away the fog of theology that obscured a deeper spiritual reality. Hence the last part of this book’s main title: “Long Live the Gods.”
The problem with monotheism
Monotheists claim that all existence was created by a single deity. This creation was to further his divine plans, and these plans include demands people must obey, on pain of divine punishment. This deity claims it is omnipotent, omniscient, and good, and demands precedence over all other entities.
Any such image of a divine singularity suffers from many fatal flaws, and I will explore them in the first chapters of this volume. Basically, as soon as these broad generalities are applied to illuminate specific issues, a seemingly coherent concept breaks down. It is this incoherence that prevents any particular deity from winning support among all monotheists.
Given the reality of religious experiences and the incoherence in all attempts to make sense of them in monotheistic terms, it is important to dispose of monotheism’s monopolistic claims while recognizing the sacred also existing within the various Abrahamic traditions. A polytheistic perspective preserves what is best in the different monotheisms, explains what is worst in them, and harmonizes what is best with other religious traditions.
Modern science is an unexpected ally in this needed transformation.
Science illuminates these issues
Science began its intellectual journey with solid Protestant assumptions rooted in scriptural monotheism. But what sets science off from other ways of seeking knowledge is that it emphasizes not what truth is, but how errors can be discovered and abandoned. As science advanced by eliminating error after error, it abandoned nearly all claims rooted in its initial assumptions.
This book argues one major assumption remains, but only because of intellectual inertia, not evidence. When we set it aside as unjustified, and look at reality without its filters, a living world opens up to us, ranging from the smallest entity to the most divine.
That assumption is that a deep divide separates objective reality from subjective experience. Many scientists describe understanding consciousness as the “hard problem,” because there seems no way to derive it from nonconscious matter. Scientists’ initial assumption was that the world was a construct into which God inserted souls, as in the Adam and Eve story. As that view failed to fit what scientists were discovering, alternative views developed, but still separated subjectivity from objectivity. Either consciousness somehow emerged from nonconscious physical processes, or it was in some sense an illusion or “epiphenomenon,” giving the impression it mattered in a world that, in fact, could be entirely explained in nonconscious deterministic terms.
These attitudes support the common secular belief that early peoples were animists who gradually developed enough understanding to limit awareness to the gods, and ultimately to one god, who was the fundamental cause for the world around them. Modern secularists agreed with this development, but took the progressive squeezing of life from the world a step further. They eliminated any reference to consciousness as part of an ultimate cause, arguing it was in fact a deterministic law of nature. Thus, so this story goes, scientists are pursuing the holy grail of a unified “theory of everything” that, ironically, is devoid of life.
Reductionist secular views were never universal among scientists, and many of the greatest of them suspected that consciousness in some sense penetrated all of reality. Post-Newtonian physics powerfully strengthened the case that more mystical and meditative religious traditions were compatible with modern science. Quantum physics provides powerful evidence that some kind of consciousness is needed for reality to exist, but in practice, the rest of science generally argues these discoveries are irrelevant for their own work. Quantum mechanics’ implications are only for the very small, compared to which an atom is huge.
This book argues this avoidance is unjustified.
Even so, another dimension arises regarding the question of consciousness. If it is a fundamental property of the world, how does individuality and the sense of separateness arise? Physics alone can support the reality of experiencing mystical Oneness, but it cannot explain the seemingly discrete individuality of people when they are not having such experiences. It is here that discoveries in biology are shedding a provocative light.
Individuality is quite real, but not in the way we traditionally think of it, a way ultimately rooted in scriptural assumptions. Biological individuality first arose in eukaryotic cells—that is, cells with a nucleus, mitochondria, and (in plants) chloroplasts. These cells made even more complex individuals possible. Recent research demonstrates that this arising of individuality from fusions of simpler individuals seems to continue all the way up to ourselves. Today we are often referred to as ecosystems or superorganisms by biologists, but our sense of psychological individuality is very real.
At the same time, if consciousness is a fundamental property of reality, then as biological complexity increases, the same might well hold true for psychological complexity. From this perspective, taken-for-granted terms such as culture, organization, and society take on a new depth of meaning. This outlook is also in harmony with much of the world’s shamanic and occult traditions. In particular, the secular idea of a meme is remarkably close to the occult concept of a thought form. Exploring this connection opens us to an outlook that makes sense of the extraordinary variety of divine and other spirit beings reported in the world’s societies, as well as in the experience of many of us.
In particular, the same process by which biological individuality emerges from simpler form of individuality seems to apply within the world of consciousness as well. Exploring these connections helps make the case for individuated more-than-human consciousnesses that many of us have encountered. In other words, polytheism is in harmony with what modern biologists are discovering about biological individuality.
Polytheism not only is compatible with scientific modernity, but it also solves the worst problems plaguing monotheistic practice and theology. It is the only way in which people have engaged with the sacred, other than in traditions emphasizing nonduality or other forms of mystical encounter. However, these latter traditions are themselves compatible with polytheism.
In making these arguments I am benefitting from an increasing number of excellent books on polytheism emerging from within the broader Pagan community.
Viewing from the shoulders of others
Back when I first encountered the Wiccan Goddess, pioneering Neopagan authors did plenty of heavy intellectual lifting, exploring the implications of a Pagan world view and shedding light on our common heritage in classical pagan thought. I am indebted to a great many of them, particularly Margot Adler, Stewart and Janet Farrar, Gerald Gardner, and Starhawk. Their deeply insightful passages on the nature of polytheism got me started on my own intellectual journey to try and make sense of the divine world I was now experiencing.
Since that exciting time, many scholars within the broad Pagan tradition have built upon their work, and they have built well. They have made powerful contributions exploring the realities underlying our experiences with the more-than-human, and I have learned much from them. While this list of talented and insightful Pagan writers is not exhaustive, I unreservedly recommend the following people as having contributed greatly to my own understanding of the issues discussed in this volume. Although whether or not they agree with how I use their insights is their call, I am grateful to Edward Butler, John Michael Greer, Emma Restall Orr, Jordan Paper, and Christopher Scott Thompson. Not all of these have written from an explicitly Neopagan perspective. Jordan Paper’s analysis of polytheism is rooted in his experiences with Native American and Chinese traditions. That Paper came to his conclusions while involved with a different set of traditions supports the universal connectedness within what is loosely called Pagan or polytheistic spirituality.
In addition, the contemporary Western Pagan tradition is developing an important philosophical case for polytheism rooted in classical thought. Edward Butler, in particular, but others as well, are reviving a case for polytheism rooted in classical Neoplatonism, freeing it of the distortions imposed by later Christian writers. The full richness of this, perhaps the most sophisticated pagan philosophy of all time, is coming into ever clearer view.
So why another book? It is not as if any of us has time to read every current book and blog on Pagan religion and practice. Why then, another one?
There are three reasons. First, in a world characterized by divine immanence, in principle any starting point, rightly pursued, will lead us to a fuller appreciation of that sacredness. The more paths we can take to a similar insight on the nature of spirituality and the sacred, the better. The more different arguments converge on a common conclusion, the greater the case for accepting that conclusion. That writers like Butler and those using more contemporary approaches, such as Paper, come to what seem to me broadly compatible conclusions supports their case for their basic validity. Rooting the case for polytheism in modern science, especially biology, adds another brick supporting this important task.
Second, the most developed philosophical case for polytheism today, inherited from classical civilization, is also a difficult one to master. Even in classical times there was no firm consensus about many important issues, for it was a world of extraordinary richness in thought and subtlety in debate. Today, Neoplatonism’s specialized vocabulary makes it a daunting endeavor for modern readers, particularly as the same or similar terms have changed their meanings over thousands of years.
Finally, over and above a common acceptance of polytheism, the ancients’ view of the world, and of our place in it, was in some ways very different from ours. Without in any sense denigrating classical insights, our understanding of the greater reality they sought to illuminate will be enriched, and I think modified, by insights from our own dominant ways of obtaining knowledge. One such way is science.
In its own sphere, science is unequaled as a means for eliminating error, and thus advancing knowledge we can depend on. Science does not tell us what is true, but science is wonderful in exposing what we believe to be true, but is not. This point even holds for its own basic assumptions about the world, which is why science proved such an unreliable handmaiden to the church.
I encountered the Wiccan Goddess for the first time a few months after receiving my PhD in political science. In the years and decades that followed, I explored the implications of a Pagan and polytheistic world while continuing to do research in my academic field. I always hoped that at some point I might be able to link the two in a way that did justice to both the reality of Pagan experience and the insights of modern science, political or otherwise. With this volume I think I have succeeded.
Summing up
I am not claiming to have solved the mystery of who and what the gods are. We experience them as super-human because they are super-human.
What I do claim to present is a view, in keeping with modern science, in which the gods as more-than-human individuals play an important role. Our experiences of such divine encounters are not illusory and our attempts to enter into relationship with them are not a waste of time. Far from being a holdover from a more primitive understanding of the world, polytheism remains as relevant and as true today as when it graced the practices of our ancestors. To say “the gods exist” is no more primitive than to say that people exist.
Today, at a time when this country is riven by a cultural schism between a backward-looking, and increasingly brutal, monotheism, and a secular scientific outlook denying any deep meaning to spiritual experience, a revival of a polytheistic spiritual sensibility and all that it touches may contribute to the healing our society needs.
And that is the ultimate purpose of this book.