Tag Archives: polytheism

Downsizing Polytheism

A 2003 panel from Partially Clips—A Webcomic for Grownups. Click to embiggen if necessary.

Polytheism and the Empowered Individual

An interesting article from a Hindu writer on polytheism, monotheism, and contemporary politics in India: “The March to Monotheism.”

This paragraph caught my eye:

If the upside of monotheism is universalism and egalitarianism, the downside is that it admits of no rival. There can be no middle ground, no compromise. Reality is binary. It’s either one or zero. It’s my god or your devil. The aversion to idolatry and icons emerges from the same logic: an icon or idol is a personal god; it empowers individuals. It is democratic. It allows any individual to fashion his own god.Which is why iconoclast kings and priests have gone out of their way to destroy idols: the idea is to destroy the spirit of the empowered individual.

Yes, Hypatia, There is a Santa Claus

This fellow — Santa Claus, Father Christmas — has joined the lineup of graven images on our polytheistic/animistic mantel. That’s Hermes’ foot at the far left, followed by an ossuary jar of sharp-shinned hawk bones, and Hekate on the right.

We all know that Santa’s name derives from the Dutch form of St. Nicholas, but what need have we Pagans of a saint whose titles include “Defender of Orthodoxy” (versus the Arian Christians) and whose biographers proudly proclaim that he destroyed Pagan temples. So forget that part.

The connection with Odin is fascinating but fragile. Others go off on different tangents.

As the scripture states, “He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus.”

On the other hand, I really have no problem with calling this time of year “Christmas” in casual conversation. When I was in my twenties, I rigorously drew a line and would only say “Yule.” Now I am more casual.

Review: Written in Wine

Dionysos, writes Sannion of the Library of Neos Alexandria, “is a maddeningly complex god to figure out.” And so he gets an anthology: poetry, fiction, hymns, essays, ritual from a group of Hellenic revivalist Pagans: Written in Wine: A Devotional Anthology for Dionysos

I like that approach for several reasons.

For one, contemporary Pagans must remember that our model of clergy is different from those of the monotheists. We start with service to deity, which is not the same as “pastoring” (herding sheep).

For another, we are drawn (or chosen) by different deities at different times. Sometimes, as Wiccan writer Judy Harrow says of herself, we are “serial henotheists.”

Harrow herself produced an excellent book in 2003, Devoted To You: Honoring Deity in Wiccan Practice — the title is a slight misnomer, since two of four contributors, Alexei Kondratiev and Maureen Reddington-Wilde, are reconstructionist Pagans.

I once said that we needed poets, not theologians, and much of the poetry in Written in Wine is good stuff. Theokleia’s “Come Dionysus” needs to be chanted by drunken, torch-lit devotees, while the collection also includes new translations of some ancient hymns to Dionysos as well.

The book includes stories and essays as well: I was impressed by Sarah Kate Istra Winter’s “What It Means to be a Maenad” and, somewhat parallel to it, Tim Ward’s “Dionysos on Skyros” with its questions of how a man moving toward middle age might still manifest the god.

Yesterday I mentioned Ginette Paris, known for three excellent works of polytheistic psychology: Wisdom of the Psyche: Depth Psychology after Neuroscience, Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia, and Pagan Grace: Dionysus, Hermes, and Goddess Memory in Daily Life.

Those books can help you see how divine energies penetrate the psyche and also manifest unexpectedly in everyday life, but Written in Wine is for the times when you want to call them forth—now!

Polytheism and Punctuation

Have you seen the new ads for Gillette’s Venus-brand razors?

Do you think some copywriter once read some classic of pop-psychological polytheism, such as Goddesses in Everywoman: Powerful Archetypes in Women’s Lives?

Or perhaps more amazingly, what if someone read Pagan Meditations: The Worlds of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Hestia?

Gods below! Polytheistic myth as psychology — in the marketplace!

Note the correct use of the apostrophe-in-direct-address in the Gillette page’s title bar. A lot of sloppy writers forget that punctuation can have a semantic purpose. There is quite a bit of difference between “Let’s eat, Susan” and “Let’s eat Susan.”

Gods Below

“Gods below!” was a favorite oath of the characters in Rome, my favorite HBO series ever.

I have been giving them a lot of thought lately, starting with Cloacina (scroll down to Poster 6).

The line to the septic tank at the guest cabin was clogged beyond my ability to clear it with a hand-cranked snake, so I had to call Cory the plumber.

And since the tank itself had not been pumped for a decade, I called the septic service to pump it. When the pump truck showed up, we discovered the baffle on the outlet pipe had fallen off. I got new parts from the hardware store (a four-inch 90-degree PVC elbow and a neoprene coupling to attach it to four-inch clay pipe, if you’re wondering) to replace it.

It’s a small tank, so I was able to attach the baffle by just hanging over the opening and reaching down. Didn’t drop the screwdriver–hurray. The tank was empty, but still pungent.

I figure that M. could have fit through the opening and climbed down on a ladder, but for some reason she was not interested in helping.

So all honor to Cloacina, a goddess below.

Process Theology and Feminist Wicca

In her new book, Hidden Circles in the Web: Feminist Wicca, Occult Knowledge, and Process Thought, Denver priestess and theologian Constance Wise argues that process theology is uniquely appropriate for Paganism.

When we speak of the “Web of Being,” she writes, “the interconnectivity of events posited by process though is so expansive across both time and space that it can scarcely be grasped by human thought. On the other hand, process cosmology provides a clear way to talk about the Web (114).”

Process thinkers’ understanding of deity leans towards the abstract. It is not “hard polytheism.” But process thought does offer a useful and challenging way to think about inter-connectedness and the Goddess.

It is the fourth book in AltaMira’s Pagan Studies series.

The Theoi Project

The Theoi Project is a site for “exploring Greek mythology and the gods in classical literature and art. The aim of the project is to provide a comprehensive, free reference guide to the gods (theoi), spirits (daimones), fabulous creatures (theres) and heroes of ancient Greek mythology and religion.”

Want a family tree of the gods? It’s here. And here is the cultus page for Hekate.

The God with Many Eyes

The new issue of The Entheogen Review carries a piece by David Luke on cross-cultural encounters with a godlike being covered with a multitude of eyes. (Yes, Ezekiel’s cherubim are one of the references.)

His article, “Disembodied Eyes Revisited: An Investigation into the Ontology of Entheogenic Entity Encounters,” describes such encounters and descriptions from Jewish, Muslim, Tibetan, and non-traditional entheogenic experiences:

Then the multitudinous eyes of the being before me suddenly and quite deliberately blocked my curious consciousness’s further explorations by mesmerizing me with its squirming, rhythmic eyeball hypnosis.

In Tibetan tradition, a multi-eyed being called Za functions as a “protector of the law,” being a guardian deity on the borders of our world and the Other Side. Luke hints at a connection with Python the guardian of Delphi, mythologically slain by Apollo.

Searching trip reports at Erowid, he finds more similar reports, leading him to wander, “But is there anything that can be found in this wayward meandering through myth and visions that offers a case for the genuine reification of ‘the other’ encountered in psychedelic spaces on the far side of the psyche?”

Yes, it is the interpretatio graeca, saying that all these experiences are of the same deity / psychic structure / whatever. And why not? In applied polytheism, you start with your own experience.

Seizing Symbols of Love

The Valentine’s Day card that I bought for M. would be illegal to Saudi Arabia’s Wahabi Muslims.

It would be an acknowledgment that women are more than a necessary evil, household appliances in veils. Maybe it’s an incitement to polytheism too. Who knows?

In fact “red items” are a problem.

So if I had Saudi students and marked their papers in red ink, I would be inciting lust or something?

Aphrodite will not be denied.