#Henotheism Explained

[monotheistreal]

Dive into the world of Henotheism with our latest video exploration. Henotheism, a unique belief system, focuses on devotion to a single deity while acknowledging others. Join us as we unravel the origins and intricacies of Henotheism, offering a clear understanding of its place in the tapestry of religious ideologies. Subscribe for straightforward insights into Henotheism, and stay tuned for more content simplifying the complexities of faith. At Monotheist, we're dedicated to making the exploration of religious perspectives clear and engaging. #Henotheism #ReligiousBeliefs #DeityWorship #MonotheisticViews #TheologyExplained #FaithJourney #ReligiousDiversity #BeliefSystems #SpiritualInsights #UnderstandingHenotheism #OriginOfBeliefs #ExploringFaith #ReligiousIdeologies #MonotheismVsPolytheism #CulturalBeliefs #GodsAndDeities #PhilosophyOfFaith #SingularDevotion #HenotheismExploration #MonotheistChannel

[sovaghoul]

Theism

The main Wiccan view of Deity is that of the Union of the Horned God with the Great Mother Goddess. Yes, this view engages with the traditional cisgender binary, and also heteronormativity. I’ll comment on those issues in another post.

🕯🌒🌕🌘🕯

This Union is related to the Sabbat (holiday) celebrations throughout the year; the God is born at Yule, grows in strength till Midsummer, declines during the Fall months, and is reborn again. He lives and dies for the sake of the people and the land, growing with the seedlings and dying with the harvest. The Goddess is either Mother or Wife to Him, depending on the moment in the cycle. This is not, however, an incestuous relationship, but part of the Mystery of the Divine Union. The Goddess is specifically honored during Moon rituals, called Esbats, with the Full Moon seen as the height of Her power.

The names of the Gods honored in Gardner’s original rituals are Oathbound, so when word of this path began spreading, the names were replaced with titles such as, “the God and Goddess” or, “the Lord and Lady.” The use of these titles, however, was misinterpreted as meaning Wiccans believed their Gods were THE Gods, Deities Most High the way the God of Abrahamlic faiths is thought of. However, the actual intention was the same as saying, “I’m going to the doctor today,” a linguistic place holder for a proper name.

🕯🌒🌕🌘🕯

☀️🪦 The Wiccan God is the Lord of Nature, the Sun King, and the Horned One of Death. He embodies both passion and solemnity, the brilliance of all life under the Sun, and the stillness of the darkest depths of the Underworld. He inspires heady revelry, and leads the Wild Hunt. We see Him in animals, forests, and the blaze of the Sun. He dances in the flames of candles and bonfires alike, and we hear His voice on the wind.

🌙🌎 The Goddess of Wicca is the Mother of all life and the deep, abiding love that gives us to rebirth. She is Queen of the Heavens and of the Faerie Realms. She is Wisdom and Mystery, Wife and Virgin, Queen and Witch. She is reflected in the light of the Moon and the waves of the oceans. She is the warmth of the Earth and the glittering of the stars.

🕯🌒🌕🌘🕯

Many words can apply to my personal view of the nature of Deity, that may or may not be shared by others;

Monism: I believe that, ultimately, all Divinity and existence stem from a single source of “God stuff,” that both encompasses and transcends name and form (this differs from monotheism, in that I do not claim there is one God, but instead that all is One, and that All is God/Divine). This Source defies and transcends all Its divisions, having both no and all genders, both darkness and light, and all the shades between.

Duotheism: I believe in the Divine Union of Masculine and Feminine energies, and that all life and Divinity spring from this Union (the Union itself being a dualistic manifestation of monism, as was explained above. It is a more simplified explanation and understanding of that Oneness).

Polytheism: I believe there is more than one God and more than one Goddess, that the names and faces recognized by other cultures and paths are further expressions of the unified Divine. However, this does not mean I view all those manifestations as wholly interchangeable. Zeus is a very different God-King from Odin, for example.

Pantheism: I believe the physical universe itself is Divine, and thus infuses all forms of existence with Divinity, with that “God stuff.”

Panentheism: I believe there is more to the Divine than the physical universe, that Divinity is comprised of, encompasses, and transcends this physical plane simultaneously.

Animism: I believe all entities have their own spark of Divinity that is uniquely theirs, yet all made up of that same “God stuff.”

Henotheism: I believe all views of the Divine are valid, even if they differ from my own; I contend that all God-forms exist and that They are real and valid, even if my specific practice does not focus on Them.

But perhaps the most important term is Nondualism: I believe all these views are not only valid, but accurate, and not at all in conflict with each other. I don’t see the nature of the Divine as either/or, but rather both/and.

For clarification’s sake, think about the concept of Divinity as being like the ocean. In the ocean, there are innumerable drops of water, and those drops can be broken down further into molecules and atoms even. Each atom, each molecule, each drop is indeed an individual entity unto itself. However, they are all still simultaneously part of the ocean, are made up of the same “ingredients” as the rest of the ocean, and can also take on different forms (it can evaporate into vapor, or freeze into ice). It’s all still water, but can be viewed and appreciated in its other forms as well.

🕯🌒🌕🌘🕯

There are those who practice what has come to be called “hard polytheism,” believing that every Deity is separate and individual unto Themselves, without a monistic, pan- or panentheistic idea of a higher source. My view, in contrast, can be described as “soft polytheism,” since I do see the Gods as separate, yet still pieces of something greater, and in that way united.

To me, it’s all a matter of scale. When we talk in terms of humans, do we mean each individual person, or humankind as a greater whole, unique upon the Earth? Each person is independently alive, but so is each cell that makes up a person. So, are the gods as individual as “humanity,” or as a single person, or as a single cell? And how “individual” is that, when looked at on a grander scale? These are rhetorical questions, the answers to which depend on your view, your gnosis, your experience, and the situation at hand. But it’s something to think about.

In most practices though, it doesn’t matter if all involved agree on the “true” nature of the Divine’s existence, as long as they can agree on the specific God forms being honored. If all participants in a ritual can agree that the God and Goddess they are calling on are, say, Isis and Osiris, and it’s understood what these Gods represent, it doesn’t matter if one person views Them as wholly individual and another believes They are part of something greater.

🕯🌒🌕🌘🕯

In closing, here is a quote from the novel “Lord of Light” by Roger Zelazny, that struck a chord with me the moment I read it. It struck me as truth, and one of the most concise and beautiful descriptions of the condition of Godhood I‘ve yet encountered:

“Godhood is more than a name. It is a condition of being. One does not achieve it merely by being immortal […] Being a god is the quality of being able to be yourself to such an extent that your passions correspond with the forces of the universe, so that those who look upon you know this without hearing your name spoken. […] Being a god is being able to recognize within one’s self these things that are important, and then strike the single note that brings them into alignment with everything else that exists. Then, beyond morals or logic or esthetics, one is wind or fire, the sea, the mountains, the rain, the sun or the stars, the flight of an arrow, the end of a day, the clasp of love. One rules through one’s ruling passions. Those who look upon gods then say, without even knowing their names, ‘He is Fire. She is Dance. He is Destruction. She is Love.’ […] they do not call themselves gods. Everyone else does, though, everyone who beholds them.”

Next post: Magick

[mask131]

Green spring: The Wiccan deities

THE WICCAN DEITIES

Category: Wicca

Wicca is without a doubt the first name that pops up when people speak of things such as “neo-paganism”, “new religion of the 20th century” or “modern witchcraft”. Wicca however is actually a very broad and large term that covers as much a religious movement as a school of esoteric and occultism, mixing a lot of different influences both ancient and modern, and just like any religion it covers a wide set of different branches, sects, interpretations and sub-types of “Wicca practice”. There are many different forms of “Wicca”, but they all at least agree on one point: there is a duo of deities that is at the central of the Wicca worship.

I) The divine couple

Wicca started out as a duotheistic religion, centered around two deities: the Goddess and the God, also known as the Lady and the Lord. I say “started out” because, as said previously, Wicca is a true religion with many different conflicting branches and traditions. Almost all of them however have this duotheistic focus on the Lord and the Lady – however it can range from a theist point of view worshipping the divine couple as literal gods, existing powers in the world ; to more atheist interpretations that rather interpret the God and the Goddess as symbols and archetypes, not as actual beings.

However a certain branch of Wicca (which with time seems to have grown in size, presence and influence) rejects a pure duotheism to rather embrace a form of henotheism – a refusal to deny or refute the existence of other deities. This form of Wicca decides to “include” or at least make “contact” with other mythologies and religions by considering that all the goddesses are actually just facets, aspects or incarnations of the Wiccan Goddess, the same way that all gods are just alternate names and identities of the Wiccan God. As a result you will have numerous Wiccans who consider that Kali from Hinduism, Eostre from Germanic mythology and the Catholic Virgin Mary are just different faces of their Goddess ; and others who will explain to you how and why Dionysos of the Greek myths, Cernunnos of the Celtic religion and the Judeo-christian Yahweh are all one and same God. Gardner himself (see below) compared the two to the duo of Isis and Osiris in Egyptian mythology. This is notably why the Wiccans adopted the denomination “Great God” and “Great Goddess”, to differentiate their deities from the “smaller” or “lesser “deities, which are just fragments of the “great” ones – others prefer the term “Universal Goddess” and “Universal God”.

There is also an actual current of polytheism among the Wicca branches, a small category of Wiccans deciding that yes, the other “lesser” gods do actually exist, even though they are all just “under” the main two deities – or all born/manifested out of the divine couple. This can even range into a fully animistic views, but that’s another topic.

The God and the Goddess embody a fundamental dualism: he is the masculinity, the force and the sun, where she is the femininity, the form and the moon. Their interactions are what made the world, nature is born out of the balance between them, and to understand the universe one must understand their union. The deities are manifested in the Wiccan religion by a High Priest and a High Priestess.

A last important part of the Wicca belief is the idea of the “manifestation” of the deities. Wiccans believe that the God and the Goddess, be them actual deities or psychological archetypes, can actually “manifest” to people in various ways – and while some believe in actual physical manifestations, others rather believe more in manifestations through dreams, or through the possession of Wiccan priesthood.

II) The Great Goddess

When it comes to the Wiccan deities, the most common name/appearance/characterization of the Wiccan goddess is “The Triple Goddess”. However it wasn’t how she started out…

You see, Wicca was formed and influenced in its early days by many early 20th century/late 19th century researches about prehistorical religion, and the “truth” behind the “witch-cults” of Europe. And the thoughts of people such as Margaret Murray or Gerald Gardner was that in the Stone Age, people worshipped a primordial duo of deities known as the Horned God and the Mother Goddess – a simple worship that was replaced by the most complex ones of Antiquity, but that still survived in Europe under rural cults that were considered to be “witches” by the Christian church and persecuted as such. It was these “primordial deities”, considered to be the “tribal deities of the British Isles”, that Wicca tried to re-include, rehabilitate and restore in their religion, and so the Goddess original form was the one of the Mother Goddess, a deity of life and fertility with a particular focus on springtime, an “ideal of feminity” who was the goddess of the “gatherers” of the hunter-gathered duo of the Stone Age, and the feminine power worshipped by “witches”. Gerald Gardner, who was the man that established the Wiccan core tradition and made the movement public in the 50s, claimed that the true names of the deities had to be kept secret – before an “leak” revealed that the rites of the Gardnerian tradition worshipped the goddess under the name “Aradia”. This promptly led the name of the deities to be changed, in order to keep the secret. According to Gardnerian Wicca, the Mother Goddess, also called the Great Mother, is the one who offers love to the living, and regeneration/rebirth to the dead – she is simultaneously the Eternal Virgin and the Primordial Enchantress, and she is connected to the moon, the stars and the sea. In other mythologies and religions she is known as Brigit, Hecate, Diana or Gaea, and she is said to “conceive and contain” all life within her – which is why Wiccans held life itself to be sacred, and consider all living beings to be divine. As a Moon goddess, she is also considered to be the goddess of menstruation.

However, this original characterization of the “Mother Goddess” promptly got fused/replaced by another “identity” that is the most famous one today: the identity of the Triple Goddess. A goddess that manifests as a trinity identified as Maiden, the Mother and the Crone, representing respectively virginity, fertility and wisdom (though the Gardnerian influence still kept the “Mother” facet the most important and prominent of the three). On top of representing the three “ages” of the “female life”, the three “faces” of this Goddess also represents the three aspects of the Moon: the Maiden is the waxing moon, the Mother is the full moon and the Crone is the waning moon.  This triple nature also allows the Goddess to rule over the three realms of the world: heavens, earth and the underworld. Through the three processes of sexuality, pregnancy and breastfeeding the women “embody” the Goddess or make their own bodies sacred to her. The Triple Goddess is a force of change and a symbol of self-transformation. The Maiden embodies birth and youth, enchantment and beginnings, inception and expansion ; the Mother is sexuality and stability, power and life, ripeness and fulfilment; as for the Crone, she is repose, death and endings.

The concept of the Triple Goddess doesn’t actually originates from Wicca, but from other writings of the early 20th century. Most notorious and influential of them being Robert Graves’ works, his two books “The White Goddess” and “The Greek Myths”, which proposed a personal and “poetic” re-reading and re-interpretation of the Greek myths, in the light/in comparison with Celtic myths, leading notably to the creation of a reconstructed divine figure, the “Triple Goddess”. This poetic and literary theory was taken back by other figures of myth studies and comparative mythology, such as Jane Ellen Harrison, Marija Gimbutas or Karl Kerenyi, defending the concept of a Triple Moon Goddess worshipped by early European cultures and that manifested the most clearly in Greek mythology. Indeed most of the “manifestations” and “proofs” of the Triple Goddess come from Greek mythology: the Charites (Graces), the Horae (Seasons), the Moirai (Fates), the goddess Hecate (a triple-deity), the trinity of Demeter/Persephone/Hecate, but also a local cult of Hera as “Girl, Adult woman and Widow”… Though the construction of the Triple Goddess also included non-Greek elements, such as the Hindu Tridevi. Of course this was a very controversial take and idea, that based itself primarily on poetic systems and literary evidence while being contested by more cultural/historical/archeological elements, but it was nonetheless a concept popular and influential enough to reach both Carl Jung (who made it one of his famous “Jungian archetypes”) and the Wiccans.

III) The Great God

As said above, according to the theory of the “Stone Age duo”, the Wiccan Lord was (and is still) most widely and commonly interpreted as the Horned God, worshipped by the hunters of the hunter-gatherer duo, and who was the so called “dark goat/devil” worshipped by the cults persecuted during the witch trials. And unlike the Mother Goddess, who got replaced by the Triple Goddess, the Horned God stuck around and didn’t change much.

He is the perfect complement of the Mother Goddess: he is the god of nature and death, an “ideal of masculinity” with a particular focus on animals. He is the Garnerian god of hunting and magic, connected to the sun and the forests, who rules over the paradise known as the “Summerlands”. He is a force of sexuality, wilderness and life cycles who is usually depicted as a man with horns or antlers, embodying the “union of the animal and the divine” and carrying the souls of the dead away from the world of the living.

The Horned God’s correspondence in other pantheons include Cernunnos (Gaul), Lugh (Irish), Herne the Hunter (English), Pan (Greek), Faunus (Roman), Brân (Welsh), Wayland the Smith (Germanic), Tubal-cain (Biblical) and Pashupati (Indian). In fact, Cernunnos was the initial “secret name” of the Lord, just like “Aradia” was for the Lady, before its public revelation led to the keepers of the Gardnerian tradition to change his secret appellation. Other used and known name for the God are mostly deformations of “Cernunnos”: Kernunno, Janicot, Karnayna, Atho… The Horned God is also recognized by Wiccans as being the Leader of the Wild Hunt (often said to take place at Imbolc, 1st of February), which he leads as the “Lord of Death and Resurrection”.

The most common consideration among Wiccans is that where the Goddess is triple, the God is double: he has a “dark” and a “bright” faces representing the duality of nature – night and day, summer and winter. Alongside the three faces of the Goddess, the two faces of the God makes the Wiccan Pentagram, and Wiccans associate it with the folkloric figures known as The Holly King and the Oak King, male seasonal embodiments said to each rule over a different part of the year (the hot and sunny part of the Oak King, the cold and dark part for the Holly King). A lesser tradition rather considers that the God should be equal to the Goddess and thus have also three faces representing the “ages” of a man’s life – these Wiccans worship the God as the Youth (or the Warrior), the Father and the Sage.

The Lord is at the same time the lover and the child of the Goddess, the “spark of life and inspiration” within her (which is why alternate titles and identities to “The Horned God” are “The Son God”, “The Lover God” or the “Divine Child”, associated with the worship of the Christ Child). It is said that the Lord follows a seasonal life centered around the Goddess, according to the series of festivals and holidays known by the Wiccans as “The Wheel of the Year”. The Lord is born in winter out of the Goddess, grows in spring, becomes the lover of the Goddess in summer, and after impregnating her dies in autumn, before being reborn the next winter. That being said, the exact dates of each of the God’s life-events are up to debate: for example Wiccans debate whether the God dies on Lammas (August 1st), on Mabon (the autumn equinox) or in Samhain (October 31st).

A last debate about the God is about the… let’s say “alternate identities”. You see, the idea of the God/the Lord being identified as the Horned God isn’t favored by all. Some Wiccans will drop other names. The Divine Child or the Sacrificial God have been talked about before, but two identities notably stood out from the others: The Vegetation God, tied to the Oak King/Holly King duality and representing a Wiccan appropriation of the Green Man figure; and the Sun God, considered to the at the center of the Wiccan holiday of Lughnasadh/Lammas. And while some people consider these identities to be just alternate names/faces of the Horned God (who is associated with the sun and the forests), others argue that these might be distinct deities… And this range from people talking of them as separate male gods existing alongside the Horned God, to either the Green Man or the Sun God being actually the “true” Lord/Great God, not the Horned God. But usually, it results in the three figures being mixed together (it isn’t uncommon to see Wiccan imagery have a Green Man with antlers or a Horned God crowned with sunrays).

- - - - - -

While I said the Wiccan religion became more and more polytheistic as time went on, another side of the Wiccan religion also became more and more monotheistic as time went on. This is notably due to one of Gardner’s original stance, which made the Wiccan religion slightly agnostic: he was certain that beyond the two Wiccan deities existed a Supreme Deity, or Prime Mover, which was too complex for humans to understand. Gardner claimed it was a divinity in a purely deistic form, and that had created the “Under-Gods”, such as the Lady and the Lord, but who hadn’t done anything to the world (isn’t ruling it, didn’t create it, just created the “Under-Gods”).

This interpretation was also popularized among Wiccans under a more pantheistic perception, some claiming that the God and the Goddess were actually the two faces of one same being, the same way all the “lesser gods” were just aspects of the Lord and the Lady, making it so that all the gods and goddesses are one deity ; other rather invoking “The One” as being more of a great impersonal force from which the Lord and the Lady manifested.

Now, Gardner deeply hated and criticized monotheism (he notably invoked the “problem of evil” as one of the biggest ways to break down monotheistic religions), and yet in the 60s and 70s a strong monotheistic current formed itself among Wiccans. A monotheism focused over the Goddess, and rejecting the existence of the Lord or any “supreme entity” beyond the Lady. To talk about a precise example, the most commonly accused is the “Dianic Wicca” branch, a group of Wiccans who formed in the 70s as an all-female cult, centered entirely around feminine experience and female power, and who only considers one Goddess and no other deity (this branch is heavily influenced by the book “Aradia, or the Gospel of Witches” and keeps its traditions that the “witches” of Europe were part of an all-female cult and secret matriarchal society worshipping a goddess who was at the same time Aradia, Diana, Aphrodite and Herodias). Dianic Wiccans are very different from “traditional” Wiccans, and in fact many of the “traditional” Wiccans actively criticized and rejected the Dianic Wiccans by accusing them of merely being “Christianity reversed”, replacing all the “Him” and “His” by “Her” and “Hers”.

But the Dianic Wicca itself is actually part of a much wider movement of neo-paganism of the second half of the 20th century commonly referred today as the “Goddess movement”, a huge wave of different Neopaganism cults, beliefs and philosophies that rejected dominant masculinity and the patriarchal mindset.

As a departing thought: while the idea of the Triple Goddess as “Maiden/Mother/Crone” as adopted and popularized by Wiccans is the iconic iteration of this trinity, in the books that started it all, Robert Graves’ books, the identities of the Triple Goddess as much less clear cut… As I said before, these books proposed a “poetic” reinterpretation and reading of the Greco-Celtic myths, Graves himself being a poet. He firmly opposed the “scholarly” readings and analysis of the myths, claiming them to be too much “prose”, and rather wanted to return to the “poetry” of the Greek texts… But poetry being poetry, Graves never had anything set in stone. He laid out three different “trinities” that could represent the Triple Goddess. One is the iconic Maiden/Mother/Crone, but another focused on the woman’s sexuality towards the man is “Maiden/Nymph/Hag”, and a third one centered around the role of a woman in a man’s life is “Mother/Bride/Layer-out”. He also evoked the moon goddess as manifesting through the Maiden (New Moon), Nymph (Full Moon) and Mother (Old Moon)… He even complexified the system as a “three-in-three” deity at some points, claiming that the Goddess manifested as the goddess of the underworld, the goddess of the earth and the goddess of the heavens, each with its own three sub-faces: the goddess of the heavens is the New, Full and Waning moon ; the goddess of the earth is Spring, Summer and Winter ; the goddess of the underworld is Birth, Procreation and Death. I mention that because many non-Wiccan neo-pagans grew dissatisfied with the idea of the Triple Goddess, thinking the Maiden/Mother/Crone concept to be stereotypical, reductive or even offensive, and returning to Graves’ books and writings to find more suitable “aspects” or “faces” of the Goddess.

[shatar-aethelwynn]

 You are right, my memory failed me. Homosexuality is for Paul the "uncleanness" and the "vile passion" to which God gave up the Gentiles as punishment because of their idolatry. As the text of the Epistle to the Romans presents idolatry and its consequences: "Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 1:23 and changed the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, and of birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things. 1:24 Wherefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts unto uncleanness, that their bodies should be dishonored among themselves: 1:25 for that they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 1:26 For this cause God gave them up unto vile passions: for their women changed the natural use into that which is against nature: 1:27 and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another, men with men working unseemliness, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was due. 1:28 And even as they refused to have God in their knowledge, God gave them up unto a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not fitting; 1:29 being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 1:30 backbiters, hateful to God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 1:31 without understanding, covenant-breakers, without natural affection, unmerciful: 1:32 who, knowing the ordinance of God, that they that practise such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but also consent with them that practise them." Personally I find Paul's mentality and positions as expressed in passages like this one problematic for several reasons, but this is not the place to become more specific about my objections to his views and legacy. Anyway, I think that you underestimate somehow the homophobia in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Moreover, our disagreement about henotheism remains, but it is essentially just a disagreement about terminology, that's why there is no reason to discuss it further.

Oh no, I don’t underestimate the presence of homophobia at all. It is absolutely there, believe me I am personally aware. Especially in the denominations and groups that make it into the news the most often. But there are also many devout believers who are actively pushing back against that hate.

I’m merely stating that since the original topic was the sin of Sodom, a) the theology of Paul is too late to be a factor in determining the nature of Sodom’s sin from a historical perspective (as a general rule I do not use New Testament texts to explain the meaning of the Hebrew Bible texts); b) homosexuality in the ancient world is not socially the same as it is today and that is an important factor. With a bit of “scholars aren’t 100% sure what definition of homosexuality Paul is working with so both translation and application of interpretation can get complicated.” My personal interest tends to be on archaeological and historical scholarship rather than on current theology most of the time. As I said, this is a controversial issue and there is no one answer. Mine is just that I think people make it into more of an issue than the Biblical authors intended it to be and that often they do so from faulty premises because they ignore historical context. An argument being common doesn't necessarily make it correct.

I also find Paul problematic in many instances and think his writings have been badly abused over the centuries. Also the pseudopigraphic writings in his name which are worse. In Romans he is writing to a church he has never visited and is trying to prove his theology so they will accept him. So he comes right out swinging. But is it really any different than how Christians have been explaining things ever since? The narrative always starts with humans rejecting god followed by a list of all the things that go wrong and all the sins that it causes, because it there's a salvation then the first step is to establish what people need to be saved from. I've read a few salvation tracts in my life and there's always a List right after the introduction of sin. That's pretty much what he's doing - setting the stage for him to explain his theology and why it's right. That doesn't mean anyone is obligated to agree with him though.

[apilgrimpassingby]

"that's retarded."

"you're obviously just trying to slip and slide around, obscuring the original intent of your initial reply."

Plus I've now explained, multiple times, how my view is different from henotheism.

There's not point engaging with someone with this little intellectual charity.

Catholics: We don't worship Mary!

Catholic Mystics:

[cramulus]

Forms of Discordian Belief

Discordianism can be hard to understand. Let’s clear up the confusion surrounding the various types of Discordia:

Discordian Monotheism: I believe in Eris, in the sense that she is a cosmic entity outside of me that I sometimes hang with. There is no Goddess but Eris and she is my Goddess. Discordian Polytheism: Eris is just one of several Gods I roll with. Discordian Atheism: I don't believe in Cosmic Superbeings. Eris is a metaphor who I think is cool. Discordian Agnosticism: I identify with the concept of Eris, but I don't think we can know whether Eris/Gods are real or not.

Discordian Situationism: Whether or not I behave in a manner consistent with a genuine belief in either the existence or metaphorical meaning of Eris depends on my current circumstances.

Discordian Gnostic Agnostic:  Eris?  WHO NEEDS HER?

Discordian Pantheism:  Eris is the Universe (we're all fucked.  Especially you).

Discordian Maltheism:  Eris is a real goddess, and boy, she really doesn't like you. Discordian Henotheism: Eris exists.  So do other gods.  But those other gods suck, I'm sticking with Eris. Discordian Apatheism:  I don't care if Eris exists or not. Discordian Deism:  Eris created the Universe, in order to confuse physicists, but has since retired and/or is involved in the creation of other Universes. Discordian Transtheism: Eris is something to surpass. 

Discordian Schizoism: Any of the above but ask me again after lunch if that answer isn't good enough. Discordian Nihilism: Eris exists, but only during the fertile months and exclusively on the banks of the river Nile.    

Discordian Implication: If there is a god, it's Eris

Discordian Ignosticism: Define God, please. If I'm happy with that definition, then I'll believe in Eris. If I'm not, then the whole question is meaningless.

Discordian Pantyism:  Only into Discordianism for the chicks and getting in their panties. Discordian Maltism: Finding Eris exists at the bottom of really good beers. Discordian Apothecarism: PILLS HERE

Discordian New Agism: Ya, ya... fairy wood spirits... whatever... Can I get laid now?

Discordian SubGeniusism: Eris is the only being that "Bob" acknowledges above and beyond himself, except when he doesn't. Which is probably more often than is strictly healthy. Discordian Discordianism: If anyone actually succeeded in practicing this, we'd probably be able to tell by the spontaneous formation of a quantum singularity inside their skull.

Discordian Scientology: Tell people how they have been living their lives wrong, win fabulous prizes.

Discordian Scientology II: Xenu brought billions of his people to earth in a spaceship shaped like a DC-8, piloted by Eris.

Quantum Discordianism: Fucks with yuor shit when you're not observing it.

Nondenominational Discordianism: Box next to the word "Other" Discospagism: Only in it for the asshatery.

Pentecostal Discordianism: You can handle deadly serpents and drink poison.  However, you will more than likely die from doing so and Eris will laugh at you. Calvinist Discordianism: You have slack because Eris elected you to have slack.  Greyfaces and cabbages are the unelect.  It's no coincidence that Calvinism has 5 points.

Methodist Discordian: We have all these rules but you don't really have to follow them. 

Really Real Discordianism: The details of this obnoxious faith are unknown to outsiders, but it is clear that for every Discordian there is at least one of these to tell them they're wrong.   

Raelli Rael Discordianism: This elite group of scientists know the truth about all of life's origins: extraterrestrials. Raelli Rael Discordians want you to know that not only do they look down on you for being against human cloning but so do the Elohim, from their shiny, silent spaceships.

Rlyeh real discordians: Not only are life's origins extraterrestrial but extradimensional and terrifying. One day the sleeping old ones will rise and the world of man shall come to an end, devoured in the fires of great cthulhu, MAY THE RATS EAT YOUR EYES, DAMN YOU BELIEVE ME, WE ARE INVADED .... Bzt..... (unintelligible).... 

Baptist Discordianism - Long, boring sermons followed by potluck supper.

Discordian absolutism:  Everything is Discordia, even those things that are not; all mortals must die with "Hail Eris" on their lips Discordian agapism:  Everyone loves Discordia, all love children are named Eris Discordian authotheism:  The belief that Discordia makes people Godlike or Eris incarnate Discordian capitalism:  you can privately own enough chaos to make an economy work; aka The Koch Brothers Doctrine Discordian bullionism:  belief that golden apples are the way solve all economic evils Discordian experientialism:  believing that the experiencing Discord brings you the knowledge you are well and truly fucked Discordian hedonism:  belief that pleasure in chaos is the highest good; i.e. The Joker Doctrine Discordiain ignorantism:  doctrine that ignorance of Discord is not only no excuse but also highly likely Discordian naturalism:  belief that the world can be explained through chaotic forces; i.e. Daddy tell me a bedtime story about Eris

Discordian Eroticism: Eris exists, and I want to do her.

Discordian Epicurianism: A philosophy that considers Slack to be the highest good and that advocates the pursuit of pleasures through chaos.

Pragmatic Discordianism: No matter how exclusive you make the invites, Lady Discord will always show up to your party in one form or another.  The pragmatic Discordian looks for ways to make the best of it (as opposed to pretending she doesn't exist or erecting "No Drama Permitted" signs.) Pessimistic Discordian: Everything is false, meaningless, or inconsistent in some sense. Optimistic Discordianism: Everything is false, meaningless, or inconsistent in some sense, especially Pessimistic Discordianism.

Discordian Gödelism: the belief that Discordian Gödelism is false.

Eris' Witnesses: Eris is throwing a giant party, the guest list is full. Her followers are required to go from door to door with this important message.

credit: Cramulus, Cainad, Doktor Howl, Cain, Faust, el Sjaako, Lenin McCarthy, Triple Zero, Thurnez Isa, Freeky, Precious Moments Zalgo, Iason Ouabache, Epimetheus, AFK, Jenne, Kingyak, Anna Mae Bollocks, Golden Applesauce, rong

[planetofsillyhats]

(CW: General mid-antiquity misogyny)

Today is Transgender Day of Visibility, so I'm re-upping one of my short essays about one particular trans-woman particularly worthy of visibility: Ancient Rome's loopy god-queen, Elagabalus.

Elagabalus was the 25th Emperor of Rome--and also its first Empress. Born Sextus Varius Avitus Bassianus, she was by modern standards very obviously transgender, and would probably have been delighted to be addressed as Sexta Marcellina, her proper feminine name by Roman conventions.

She was raised in Syria, and was already the head of a major state religion: the worship of the solar deity El-Gabal, whose pedigree is entwined both with Christianity and with Islam. She ascended to the throne at the age of fourteen, succeeding the man who killed her cousin Caracalla and tried to rule in his place--because this was the tail end of the Severan Dynasty, and things were starting to go downhill for Rome. She did this by personally leading the final charge at the Battle of Antioch in 218 AD, actually helping to rout the usurper’s army and claiming Imperial honors for herself that very day. Picture that for a minute: a charging Roman legion led by a fourteen-year-old girl, then the same legion hoisting her on their shields and proclaiming her Imperator. The fact that everyone thought she was a little boy doesn’t really make it any less badass.

Unfortunately, this would be both the high point of her career, and the last time she’d ever have much real power. Once Marcellina settled down, she was little more than a puppet for her grandmother, Julia Maesa, who had tremendous ambition and, as a cisgender woman, no legitimate way of fulfilling it. This gave the Empress a whole lot of spare time to explore her identity--and while her strict henotheism ruffled feathers, and she may not have made many friends in high places for possibly inventing the whoopee cushion, what really made her unpopular was her sexuality.

Romans were a fairly enlightened bunch for the ancient world; they really didn’t care about race or religion one bit. If your faith didn’t involve infringing on the rights of others, they left you be---and the only religions they ever persecuted outright were the ones that involved human sacrifice (like the druids), theft (like certain Dionysian cults who supposedly ran around the countryside naked and slaughtered other people’s cattle), or sedition (like the Christians, who didn’t just refuse to pray to the deified Emperors, but wouldn’t even pray TO their own god FOR the living ones). Their only real social vices were their class issues--which were somewhat lessened by the fact that even the Senatorial elite were little more than a rubber stamp for the Emperor--and their staggering, galloping, ludicrous misogyny.

And when I call the Romans misogynistic, I don’t mean they were “just” sexist the way most modern Americans are, with our sometimes invisible biases and quietly nasty patriarchal worldview. I mean they really, flat-out, openly despised women and anything feminine. To illustrate the difference, Americans are homophobic partly because we have often unthinkingly sexist biases that make us see sex with a man as feminine and femininity in a man as bad. The Romans had the same attitude toward homosexuality, but they were so massively misogynistic that they went and romanticized certain types of gay relationships anyway, because keeping little boys as sex slaves at least proved you weren’t mooning away over--gag--a girl. And lesbianism was considered a form of frigidity; you weren’t really attracted to women, you were just being irrational and man-hating, which could be cured by sufficiently vigorous rape.

This was not a good environment for a teenaged transgirl with unlimited executive power, is what I’m getting at.

One of the things that I think people don't think about enough with regards to the ancient world and its cast of Great Men is how incredibly young a lot of these legendary characters are. Alexander the Great, for example, was... well, first off, he was basically Genghis Khan, but we root for him because he was a rich white guy. But more importantly, he was younger than me when he conquered Persia--which explains a lot about him, like the time he got really, really drunk in 330 BC and burned down Persepolis, probably resulting in a morning-after scene that looked like Cecil B. DeMille's The Hangover. All the the legendarily loony Roman Emperors were also twentysomethings at best--Caligula was the old man of the Bad Princeps Club at twenty-five, and his reign was less about real tyranny than sexual experimentation and snarky performance art. Nero was sixteen, and reading actual accounts of his reign, it very much shows--he was dramatic, emo and bratty, and desperate for attention and approval.

Marcellina was fourteen years old, trapped in a male body, and ruling a city-state where just wearing what would be considered normal men's wear back in Syria--colorful silks, some tasteful jewelry, and a practical bit of eyeliner to keep out the sun--got her ridiculed as a foppish, Oriental despot. But undeterred by legendary Roman normative biases, she took advantage of her Imperial prerogative to do what, to my knowledge, no other person in Western history had up to that point: live openly as a transwoman. She wore women's clothing, took male lovers, and famously offered huge sums of money to any doctor or wizard who could transition her. Of course, this was the Iron Age, so nobody took her up on it, and she still had protocols and traditions to follow--so she got married, tried to produce heirs, did all the usual Pater Familias stuff. But at some point, after the first year of her reign, she seems to have just given up and, like Caligula, entered a rather mean-spirited "just fucking with everyone" phase. She executed people, gave out cabinet positions to lovers, and didn't seem to care about actually ruling anymore.

Now, Romans were really, really nasty to people who didn't fit within their sexual norms--but they also used sexual deviancy as a form of slander in itself, so it's very hard to say just how much of the legend of Elagabalus the Crazy Syrian Drag Queen(tm) is really true. It's doubtful, for example, that she actually held a banquet at which several tons of flower petals were dumped from the rafters, smothering many guests. It's a safe bet, though, to say that she didn't take her marriage vows seriously at all, and seemed to enjoy taking the mickey out of Roman sexual mores. On one occasion, she married a virgin priestess of Vesta, left her for the wife of a man she'd had executed, and then dumped her to go back to the vestal virgin--who she may have married just for the sake of a joke about siring divine children. She went through five wives over the four years she reigned--but the whole time, her true love and only real companion seems to have been her chauffeur, Hierocles, who in my mind's eye is always portrayed by Darren Criss. She wasn't allowed to marry him--there are some things even an Emperor can't do--nor was she allowed to make him her co-ruler. But she did stick with him, and it looks to me to have been genuine teenage puppy love--just about the only thing in her life that was just right.

Now, isn't this just a little bit first-world-problemy? What can really go wrong if you're the ruler of all Western civilization? Well, if you recall, I said that Sexta reigned for only four years--in 222 CE, she and her mother were murdered by their own elite bodyguards, her kid brother Alexander was installed as the new Emperor, and the Romans set about trying their darnedest to erase her from history, or at least paint her as the worst thing since the RIAA. Does her reputation as the worst ruler Rome ever saw hold water? Not really. Could she have been better? Maybe--but so could Rome.

[automatismoateo]

Whenever I've brought up my problems with God, many Christians say "it's just because you haven't read the Bible". So I'm doing exactly that and analyzing it. via /r/atheism

Whenever I've brought up my problems with God, many Christians say "it's just because you haven't read the Bible". So I'm doing exactly that and analyzing it.

I was initially thinking on just doing this for subreddits like r/exchristian, but I'd be willing to post my journey here if people would be interested. This has been something I've wanted to do for years anyway, even when I still considered myself devoutly goes-to-church-every-Sunday-and-prays-every-night Catholic.

It's no secret that I have a lot of problems with the God of the Bible. Or rather gods of the Bible, since historically-speaking there were multiple i the transition from polytheism to henotheism to monotheism. But even the monotheistic stuff gives me problems.

But when I point these out, a lot of Christians seem to say "you only think that because you haven't read the Bible completely and seen the full picture of his word". So I'm going to do exactly that.

In truth, I think the vast majority of Christians haven't read the full Bible, and only are familiar with the watered-down passages read to them at church. But most don't want to admit that, so whenever anyone questions God, they say "read the Bible!" even though they haven't done that very thing despite claiming to stake their existence on it.

Regardless, I've wanted to read the Bible cover to cover for a while now, both for my own knowledge and to properly say "Actually, yes I have read the full Bible so I know what I'm talking about".

I do not intend to shy away from any historical context. Many times Christians say "the New explains the Old", applying New Testament meanings to Old Testament writings when the NT concepts did not exist in the OT. The Bible was not "revealed" over centuries, it was invented, and a group of men chose what was canon and what wasn't. I will not apply some meaning to a passage in the Old Testament with a commonly-tossed New Testament interpretation when such a thing did not exist. The Bible is not a single book, it's an anthology, and I will treat it as such.

Also, my writing comments will be snarky. If someone in the Bible acts like an immoral egotistical jerk, I will call them out for being an immoral egotistical jerk. No matter who they are.

That being said, there are plenty of Bible translations online, and it would be much easier to copy and paste everything I have a comment on rather than typing out everything I have a comment on myself (as my comments get long enough as it is). I cannot read Hebrew or Greek though part of me wishes I could, as a lot of points are lost in the English translations (such as replacing mentions of other gods with "the Lord"). If I can find a proper translation that makes something clearer than the common English translations, I will find it.

I'm not sure at this point whether I'll do my analysis posts chapter-by-chapter, or book-by-book. I feel like the former might be too numerous/spammy, but the latter might have the posts be too long, especially for the longer books. If anyone has any input in that regard I'm willing to hear it since I don't want to be too spammy. Aiming toward books in that regard because chapter-by-chapter would take up way too many posts.

Submitted January 10, 2022 at 09:13PM by CatOfTheInfinite (From Reddit https://ift.tt/33mp66p)

[potorgaret--inactive]

Day 1 / Jan 1

Introduction ; Day 2

Gen. 1-3

Genesis opens with God(s)[1] creating the world. The order is as follows:

Light; Separation of Day and Night

A firmament between the water (the Sky)

The dry land, Earth, and the Seas; Grasses, herbs and other plants

The luminaries (the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars)

Aquatic animals and birds

Land animals, livestock, and drumroll please Humanity[2]! He gave plants as food to every animal, including humans

On the seventh day He rested

That's the version that Gen. 1 tells, but literally in the next chapter, we're presented with a plantless, humanless world. In this version, a mist from the ground makes all the plants grow and God personally creates Adam out of clay. God then plants a garden in Eden, with two very special trees. He also outright violates the laws of geography and makes 4 rivers come out of Eden. These being the Pishon in Havilah, where there's gold, bdellium, and onyx stone; the Gihon in Cush; the Hiddekel (Tigris) in Assyria; and the Euphrates. God tells Adam that he can eat any fruit he wants execpt for the one[3]. He also lets Adam give a name to every animal, and clearly Adam was on something when he called a frog, a "Mountain Chicken". God decides that being the only human in existence must be pretty lonely, and so he knocks Adam out, takes out one of his ribs, and makes Eve.

Enter Chapter 3, which opens with a snake[4], not Satan himself, decieving Eve into eating the one thing she wasn't supposed to. Eve makes Adam eat with her, and they both get a wicked knowledge hangover. They realize they're naked so they make clothes and hide themselves. God eventually finds out and he curses everyone involved. He cursed Adam with manual labor, Eve with a painfull childbirth, and the snake with limb loss. He also speaks the Protoevangelion (Gen. 3:15), Greek for "First Good News", which is a promise that humanity will one day redeem themselves. After all of this, he exiles[5] them out of Eden and places some Cherubim on guard duty.

Now we have talk about what name the authors use for God, because it points to what was happening when Genesis was getting compiled. From Gen. 1:1-2:3, the author uses "El"/"Elohim", but then when the narrative switches, the name also switches to יהוה. This points to there being atleast 2 authors who wrote parts of Genesis, which were then combined into one[6]. Because remember, this was written and told over hundreds of years with different traditions and tellings emerging in different parts of the Yahwistic/Jewish lands. This also explains the discrepencies between Gen. 1:1-2:3 and everything after.

Let's actually dig into these names. First up, El/Elohim. This word literally means "deity", cognate with Arabic "Allah". This was used as the name of the Canaanite chief deity, El, who was the father of all the other gods and had a wife, Asherah. When the Israelites grew distinct from their Canaanite origins[7], this name got attached to the god of Israel. This name was also sometimes given to the storm god Ba'al, who then influenced or got absorbed into the god of Israel. This would make some sense since God is absolutely a storm god[8].

One note about El is that his name turns up much more frequently in Theophory. For example, after Jacob fought with God, he was renamed to Isra-el, not Isra-jah. It seems that while El was quickly getting syncretized with Yahweh, the little things in Israel's culture still hadn't changed too much from Canaanite ways

Next up, Yahweh (יהוה). Not a lot is known about the origins of both the name and the entity. Some say the explanation in Exodus is correct, with YHWH being the 3SM conjugation of the copula. Others say that it's from a shortening of the phrase ˀel ḏū yahwī ṣabaˀôt which means "El who creates the hosts", which brings us back to El. Still others say it comes from a place name. Another theory says that Yahweh isn't even native to the Palestine/Canaan area, but instead being from somewhere in the south. Honestly just go read the Wikipedia article.

There are still two things left that I want to dump on you. First is the similarity between the Bible and the texts of neighboring lands, like the Ba'al Cycle, Gilgamesh and the Enuma Elish. I'll leave links, you can go read them for yourself[9]. As for the second, the utter lack of Leviathan[10] in the Geneis creation narrative. In other books, like Job, God is described as fighting the sea monster in order to bring about order. Think about that.

That's it for today, but there's weirdness in store for tomorrow as well, when we discuss the Nephilim and the Flood.

Sources

Videos

1: Trey the Explainer: The Sons of God

4: 43alley: Evolution of Satan

5: OSP: Judaism

8: Sigalius Myricantur: Pagan Origins of Judaism

10: Trey the Explainer: Leviathan

Wikipedia

1: Henotheism; Canaanite Religion

2: Lilith

6: Documentary Hypothesis

7: Historicity of the Bible

9: Ba'al Cycle

Articles

2: Was Adam a Hermaphrodite?

3: 'Paradise Lost': How the Apple became the Forbidden Fruit

6: Who Wrote the Bible? (Part 1): The Old Testament

How did we get the Bible? A quick summary of biblical composition throughout history

Bible Readings: Gen. 1-2 and Gen. 3-4

Unfortunately, the Ba'al Cycle text is really hard to find online for free, so I just linked the Wikipedia article

"Behold, I will do a new thing. It springs out now. Don’t you know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert."

Isaiah 43:19 WEB

[hyacinth-halcyon-blog]

Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion

This post is a breakdown of the essay “Polycentric Polytheism and the Philosophy of Religion” by Edward P. Butler. Butler’s writing is notoriously dense and therefore pretty inaccessible for most. However, I think his ideas are thought-provoking and therefore should be made into an accessible post for people to read and engage with. This post by necessity is a bit lengthy but I made sure to include short breakdown summaries for people. That way the ideas contained in this paper should be accessible to many people.

(It’s worth noting now that Butler comes at this with a very particular view of divintity that not all will agree with. So go into this aware of that perspective. However, I hope this will give people something to think about regardless of their beliefs surrounding divinity is.)

In the abstract to his paper, Butler states that he sets out to do the following: Using Neoplatonist* theory, he seeks to establish:

that focusing on one deity at a time is not indicative of monotheistic tendencies

give guidelines for non-reductive cross cultural comparisons

a foundation for a polytheistic philosophy of religion

In addition, while not stated in his abstract, Butler also discusses how syncretic practices preserve the uniqueness of gods, how gods can have overlapping functions, how contradicting myths do not create falsehoods, and lays out the beginning of an historical defense for creating one’s own ‘pantheon’ set up.

* - Neoplatonism is a school of thought from 3rd century Greece. It is hard to give a summary of beliefs but the center of it revolves around the derivation of the many from the One. The One is beyond being and is what makes reality. As such for Butler, the One is equivalent with the divine. From the One and the divine come reality and existence. Other relevant Neoplatonist terms will be discussed through the body of the paper as they arrive.

We begin with this quote by the philosopher Olympiodorus as it introduces the core that polycentric polytheism revolves around:

If the virtues reciprocally imply each other [antakolouthousin allêlais], nevertheless they differ individually [têi idiotêti  diapherousin]. For they are not one, but all [of the  virtues] are in courage courageously [en men têi andreia eisin andreiôs], in another [temperance, sôphrosunê] temperately [sôphronikôs]; and so too all the Gods are in Zeus zeusically  [en men tôi Dii eisi diiôs],  in another [Hera] heraically [hêraiôs]; for no God is imperfect [atelês]. And as Anaxagoras said all things are in all things but one is superabundant [in each], in this way also we speak regarding things divine.

In short what is being discussed here is the concept of the gods being perfect. Here, perfect doesn’t mean morally impeccable or the like. It is meant in the mathematical sense of a set containing all things. According to Neoplatonist thought, the gods contained all qualities and virtues in some amount. In addition, the gods express these virtues differently. For instance, the virtue of courage would be expressed very differently between Athena and between Hermes. Athena would likely express it through battle or a bold idea whereas Hermes would express it through a daring feat of thievery. So virtues are expressed in Athena “athenaically” and in Hera “heraically” and in Zeus “zeusically” and so on. 

According to Butler, this concept of “all in each” is often misinterpreted as “all in one”. This has led to people interpreting monotheistic tendencies within polytheism. Aka, that even a polytheistic belief must turn to monotheism in time. Butler explains that this is not true in the slightest. Neoplatonist thought does not classify the gods as “modes” or “names” of One elite Being. Because all of the gods are ‘perfect’ each god can be placed at the ‘center’ of a system. This placing of one god at a time in the center allows us to know each of the other gods through their relationships thus allowing us to worship many at once. Because each god is perfect we have relationships between gods in the virtues and ways these virtues are expressed. This creates unities between gods and allows for syncretization. Furthermore, this perfection prevents the gods from being altered by contradictory myths. None of this is exactly clear here so I will explain these ideas more below.

“All in each” vs “All in one” - “All in one” implies that all the gods are merely facets or aspects of one greater being. “All in each” indicates that all these virtues are in each divine being. The amounts and expressions differ and give individuality to the gods. This belief is fundamentally pluralist in nature meaning it is fundamentally tied to a concept of multiple divinities. As such, it cannot be monotheistic in nature despite misinterpretations of this saying.  (Pluralist simply means believing in multiple modes of being in regards to something as opposed to monism or believing in one way of being regarding something.) As the philosopher Proclus said “each of the gods is the universe each in a different way.” Furthermore, he states that each god, despite having the same traits, because they differ in individual expression, the gods are still distinct individuals and are named for this individuality. 

Butler explains this clearly by relating it to the tale of Indra’s Net in his short article “Polycentric Polytheism”:

A similar concept is embodied in the metaphor of Indra’s Net, which appears first in Buddhist literature (circa 3rd-4th c. CE), but which probably originated in Hindu thought. The God Indra, so the story goes, possesses a net which is studded with jewels, each one of which reflects all the others, as well as the reflections themselves. This jewel-studded net is understood to be a symbol for all things. 

Both panta-en-pasin  (all in each appropriately) and the metaphor of Indra’s net express the concept that individuality implies relation, but in a surprising way. Relations are not something external added onto individuals; instead, relations are in individuals in some fashion — relations with other things are the presence of things themselves in one another. 

This doesn’t mean that things aren’t unique. The jewels in Indra’s Net are individuals, above and beyond whatever they share. What they share above all else is reflectivity; but we can imagine this property infinitely varying, as each jewel reflects the others according to its unique shape, color, and other traits. Moreover, if we are really to appreciate the metaphor, then we must assume that there is no point of view on the whole net other than the reflections in each jewel. The jewels are not merely perspectives on the totality — rather, the universe itself is nothing other than these myriad perspectives. We may take any jewel, at any time, as the center of the net, and plot the whole system of relations starting from it and ending with it. 

This leads into the concept of each god being ‘perfect’ and how that allows for them to be the center of a system as well as how perfection allows for simultaneous individuality and unity. Butler speaks of “henads” meaning “unities” of gods. These henads can be formed because of the shared traits due to each god being perfect. As such, these henads are particularly strong and complete unities that allow gods to squish into each other and share their powers and influences so cleanly. (Aka they’re unities that normal beings cannot form because we are not perfect in this sense.) But again, the gods are by nature unique individuals due to the expression of their virtues. In any case, this property of unity the gods share is what allows for us to shift the ‘center’ of our worship around as well as worship the many through the one at a time. What does this mean?

Essentially, this: Henads are unities of things, here, we’re talking gods. Gods are united through the qualities they share with each other. However these qualities are not measurable because gods are vast. This means there are immeasurable ways to reconfigure the gods' arrangement in relationship to each other. We tend to focus on one god at a time giving the appearance of a henotheistic* approach but by approaching one god we approach others at the same time as all are connected in a henad, a unity. Thus, when we approach one god and get to know one, we approach and get to know more through them. So for instance, if one were to worship the Egyptian god Set, one would also get to know the gods related to him. Take Heru. Heru is his family as well as his mythic rival. So by reading about the Contendings, even if one is reading to focus on Set, by the nature of their relationship you will still get to know bits of Heru as reflected through Set. And when you worship Set, you are still worshiping parts of Heru as reflected and shared between them. 

* - Henotheism is the belief in multiple gods but a worship of one at the exclusion of the rest. It has polytheistic beliefs but not plural worship of gods.

Polytheism by nature has times where gods are singled out. A footnote explains when ti comes to hymns ‘Versnel  has  remarked  that  hymns, insofar as they “by definition ... concentrate on one particular deity and magnify his greatness ... are ‘henotheistic’ moments in an otherwise polytheistic context”. These moments do not define the practice as a whole or indicate monotheistic tendencies. In fact, Butler argues it’s important to limit our experiences to smaller number of gods in order to better connect with the vastness of their divinity. By trying to connect to multiple gods at once we don’t connect to their individuality so it is important to have singular encounters even within a polytheistic belief system.

Going back to the perfect nature of gods, Butler explains how this allows for the overlapping functions of gods as well as the way they remain unaffected by contradictory myths. Essentially, by being vast and containing all of these virtues and unities, the gods by nature overlap. Butler explains how the philosopher Proclus believed that certain properties of gods were caused by the reflections of the other gods within them, using an example of Hestia having powers to impel as being sourced from Hera. However, the way the impelling is executed is still purely Hestian in flavor thus preserving her integrity even if the power is sourced in a reflection from Hera. This property of gods is what allows for syncretism of gods. Syncretism, for those unfamiliar, is where gods are in essence squished together into one. However, when this happens, the gods are not lost in each other. That’s why we get syncretizations like Amun-Re. While one, they’re still also their unique, individual parts and able to re-manifest in other combinations. The vast nature of their perfection also allows for them to encompass contradictory natures and mythological stories. They contain multitudes so it’s not beyond them to also contain contradictions. Multiple deities can swap out mythic roles with each other because of their unity. This perfection also allows for shared traits in gods across cultural boundaries. However, we should not reduce them to mere facets of the same god because gods, again, are individuals and unique in their perfection.

So to sum up this discussion on the unity and individuality of gods: 

gods are perfect (meaning containing all things in a set)

this perfection allows for overlap in function

however gods express their virtues differently which allows for their uniqueness

perfection allows for unified sets of gods (unities are called henads)

perfection allows for syncretization

perfection allows for shared roles between gods even across cultures

gods are still unique even when syncretized and compared and should not be reduced to mere facets of other gods

unity of gods allows for us to worship multiple gods through one god

So that with that discussion concluded, we can move onto the topic of how polytheistic worship is organized. We’ve covered that worshiping one god at a time, sometimes above others, is not exactly an indicator of henotheism or “latent monotheism.” However we haven’t discussed how this deity at the center can both change and what its purpose is. 

The “polycentric” in polycentric polytheism comes from the idea that the center of our worship can change in polytheism. For instance, although Zeus is commonly regarded as the king of the gods in Hellenic practices and thus things are centered around him, the center can shift onto other gods instead pushing him to the sidelines in favor of others. Of course, this doesn’t eliminate the worship of Zeus due to the unity I mentioned above. Zeus is merely no longer the center. But how can we make this arbitrary shift in focus? According to Butler, it is because again, each gods is perfect. There is nothing missing from them, even if the virtues are expressed differently, so any god has the qualities necessary to assume the center of worship. And of course, through the worship of one we worship the many so we’re not cutting off worship by changing who is at the center. 

The deity at the center of the henad we worship functions as what the Neoplatonists call a “demiurge”. The demiurge is what the One of Neoplatonism throws out and all existence is sent out and organized by the demiurge. Essentially, the center of our practice functions as a demiurge organizing our practice around it and through it. For many in today’s neopagan religious communities this will be their patron deity or a divine parent or loved one. It is historically attested, however, for people to form their own henads to worship. As Butler explains:

Within the Hellenic religious field, it is clear that, for example, the onto-theology of Empedocles decenters Zeus in favor of a demiurgic  Aphrodite, and his system differs accordingly. This phenomenon finds formal expression in Egyptian religion. As Hornung remarks, “It is characteristic of the Egyptian   conception of God that the epithet ‘greatest  god’ can be given to the most varied deities, often in a single text. [...] By the end of the Old Kingdom at the latest, the Egyptians had developed their conception of a supreme being who is “king” and “lord” of all that is created, and is  also  the  creator  and sustainer of “everything that exists.” In Egypt, however, the qualities of this supreme being do not attach to a particular deity, but may be attributed to any deity, even to relatively unimportant local gods.

In short, this practice of changing and unique combinations of gods and having focus on gods not typically the ‘ruler’ of their pantheon is historically attested in both Hellenic and Kemetic practices. The center of our worship can shift and this is an essential part of practical polytheism. Who is at the center and the periphery naturally will create differences in practice and organization of our individual paths. While I don’t think Butler necessarily intended to provide a defense for this particular aspect of paganism today, he has indeed in my opinion created one with solid footing.

So the perfection and unity of gods allows for the following as well:

all gods are perfect so any god can take the center of a henad

unique henads of gods can be made

the center of a henad acts as a demiurge or organizing principle

the unique nature of the henad we work with allows for unique paths to be created

This almost wraps up the discussion of Butler’s paper but I wanted to finish with on last quote that was relevant to me but that didn’t fit neatly into the above discussions:

... in Proclus we see the return of the concept of individuality over and above functional equivalence. Nor does this come about as a regression to a more primitive structure, but through the sublation of the paradigm of translation. Functional equivalence, now occurring within its own register, need no longer imply identity.

Basically, Butler is stating that identity of gods should not be tied to their purposes/functions alone. Identifying a god thusly is to reduce them to mere actions when gods are greater than this. This also leads to reductionist equivalencies that say things like “Hermes and Thoth are just facets of the same god.” (This gets even more troublesome for deities of close cultures.) This ignores the unique identifies of each god. Similar functions do not make gods identical and ignores all of their history and cultural backgrounds. 

And I believe with that we wrap up the bulk of Butler’s argument. (I admittedly cut out some of the discussion on demiurges because it was less relevant to the core discussion in my opinion and this post was getting long enough.) I tried to keep this opinion-free and as true to the meat of his discussion as possible so that people could engage with the material more easily. Hopefully you all find it as thought-provoking as I did. :>

[craftaesthetic]

Polytheism VS Monotheism,

In Jan Assmann’s essay “Monotheism and Polytheism,” he defined monotheism as confessing to or worship one god (17). Later he states that monotheism asserts its identity by opposing polytheism, “defining what god is not and how god should not be worshiped” (28). While Assamnn has a straightforward definition for monotheism, there is “no such self-description exists for polytheistic religions” (17) because polytheism is older and monotheism is newer and thus must assert itself as different from polytheism by opposing it. This can lead to a thinking that Judaism and Christianity “represent the rather unique end of the line, [and] consequently, the more morally and ethically advanced of the two systems” which is simply untrue (Ogden 35). Modern scholars often think that polytheism is barbaric, when referring to sacrifices, or unintelligent, because they are worshiping gods that, in the mind of a scholar, do not exist. However, belief in these deities does not discount the mathematical and philosophical advancements made by the Arabs and Greeks for example, but go hand in hand with their superstitions. One must remember that belief in  supernatural figures was part of the average day in those times, even if someone was not actively worshiping them.

The “most cogent theory of polytheism” is Varro’s Tripartite theology which refers general structure applicable to many polytheistic religions. The three spheres of divine presence and religious experience are as follows:

Cosmic theology: cosmic dimension of divine manifestation

Political Theory: cultic dimension

Mythical/narrative theology: stories about the gods (names/epithets/genealogies)

With monotheism, the cosmos comes to be seen as a creation of God. The geographical and cultic dimension is reduced, and Jerusalem does not reflect the pluralistic identity of various religious centers. Stories told about gods to talk about their characteristics is changed to talk about God and his chosen people. Concern with human affairs becomes YHWH’s dominant trait.

In polytheistic religions, “translating gods” became popular. Though the deities are different and personalized by nameand function, the “highly differentiated members of poly pantheons lend themselves easily to cross-cultural translation” (24). Translation works were a reference to the god’s specific character. Thus, these traits make two different gods seem comparable. These translations were important because treaties had to be sealed by solemn oaths, and the gods invoked in these oaths had to be recognized by both parties. The list of gods closes the treaty by having the gods be equivalent in function and rank.

The growing political and commercial interconnectedness of the ancient world and the practice of cross-cultural translation gradually led to the concept of a common religion. The names, rites differ but the gods are the same. This way of translating everything led to the late hellenistic mentality: the names of the gods didn’t matter in the view of overwhelming natural evidence for their existence in the world. This led further to a thinking by some that “all gods are one” (26). For example, there are hierarchies in Mesopotamia and thus in their society there are ideas of deep structural identity. The main god, Marduk, takes all the names of the lesser gods because they are a part of him now,  becoming his subordinates.

This belief in a Supreme Being led to the idea that all gods are actually part of the same god leading to the “One-God” idea. Even Oracles would proclaim gods to be the same as other gods (27). The name by which you call god (the supreme god) doesn’t matter because they are all the same. One idea by the Stoics was “that there is only one god, whose names merely differ according to actions and offices” (27-28). This argument could be applied to how Mikalson says Zeus had many different names which each indicated a different function in his book Ancient Greek Religion (48). Mikalson seems to be implying that because the tacked on ‘epithets’ or function is different, that Zeus Herkeios and Zeus Ktesios are worshiped differently because they were seen by their worshipers as different gods, and thus they are given different sacrifices and different specific worship days. However, if the reader takes into account what Assmann is saying in his essay on monotheism and polytheism, then it is unlikely that the worshipers saw these Zeus’ as completely different gods. More likely it is that the worshipers simply wished to invoke and worship certain aspects of Zeus’ functions on the appropriate days and appeasing different aspects of him.

Some argue that polytheism grows into monotheism when someone is particularly devoted to a certain god or goddess. An example of this is from the book “The Golden Ass” by Apuleius for at the end of the novel one reads of the narrator’s love and devotion to Isis, where he joins her priesthood and goes to Rome to worship her under Isis’ local name of Campensis. Though this is written later in history, this is not an uncommon thought. In Mikalson’s book, he describes how Isis could fulfil virtually all the religious needs of Greek citizens because her devotees would credit her with “power over and protection of virtually all aspects of human life and even with the initial structuring of the cosmos and all elements in it” (189) shown with Isidorus’ First Hymn to Isis. Therefore, “Isis alone [opened] the way to concepts of monotheism for her worshipers,” though some may call that henotheism or monolatry instead, as belief in Isis didn’t necessarily mean the rejection or nonbelief of other gods. However, the main idea is the supremeness of one god.

This elevation did not just happen with Isis, but other gods as well. A major example of a shift from polytheism to monotheism is when the prophet Zarathustra  elevated Ahura Mazda to a position of supremacy that approaches monotheism (201). The mythos has a savior figure, the Saoshyant, who would redeem the world in the future. This eventually became Zarathustrianism, or Zoroastrianism, which can be seen as either monotheistic or dualistic as there is a sharp contrast between the battles of good and evil, Ahura Mazda, and Aura Mainyu, respectively.. Though this religion is not as monotheistic as say, Judaism, the world was still made up of only two supernatural forces: one good, one evil and the people would have rituals to help the good side and also to help lead them into a good afterlife.

Zoroastrianism scholars as well as others, point to “some affinity between YHWH and Aten in the Bible” (Iran 203, Israel 182). However, Akhenaten’s monotheism was said to based on the physical discovery that sun generates light, warmth, and time. The sun provided helped the crops to grow, while light and time explained the existence of the universe to them, thus the traditional pantheon was superfluous. Abolition was the consequence of a new cosmology. Biblical monotheism is based on non-scientific revelations: Revelation to Moses on Mount Sinai of the Commandments, Enoch and Daniel who received revelations of the end of history for example and judgement of the dead (Israel 181, 187).

Drawing especially and directly from the posted texts of Homer, Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, and “Aesop,” discuss what literature tells us about early Greek religion.  Then, explain how Jon Mikalson (in Ancient Greek Religion) draws on other sources—especially art and archaeology—to round out or understanding of Greek religion during the classical (i.e. pre-Hellenistic) age.

In Greek myths, an underlying theme is that the earth is eternal while gods have a beginning and end. This can be seen with the transition from the Titans to Zeus and his pantheon. Different cities that celebrated different gods had different religious calendars with different festivals. Cults were usually not practiced in the same way by all Greeks. In Greek civilization, polytheistic religions are about actions: what a person does, and the rituals they engage in. Today, American Christianity is about belief in the heart and mind, and the person practicing that religion doesn’t have an obvious outward component all the time. However, in early Greek religion, it wasn’t about belief because their deities couldn’t read minds. Elements of Greek religion reach back into the Mycenaean period. For example, Zeus is Indo-European and linked with Roman Jupiter, and Mycenaean Linear B tablets contain familiar names of Zeus, Athena, Poseidon, Hera, Hermes, and Dionysus with other, unknown, deities.

In the Iliad, the translation is prose where it was originally poem and the role of the gods in this work portrays them as petty, just like humans. The notion by many modern historians is that though Greeks had religion, they were rational and guided by reason. However, this is not necessarily true. It is often preached by people who do not like religion or do not understand it because the gods are everywhere in these stories. For example, in the Iliad, a Priest of Apollo Shootafar named Chryses calls upon Apollo to make “the Danaans pay for [his] tears” in a good example of Do Ut Des which means ‘I give so that you might give’ (Homer 12). Ancient people thought there was a divine element, and they believed someone who was sick was being punished. They also believed that if one person was wicked, it could bring the wrath upon a whole village or people. This is why Achilles is angry with the King, because by not giving back the daughter of Chryses, the King was tempting the wrath of the gods to fall upon the military camp. This did indeed occur for Apollo shot “deadly shafts… all over [the] camp [and] the people died in heaps” (Homer 18). The relationship between human and divine was that the Greeks wanted fertility of crops, animals, and selves in return for the rituals and sacrifices they gave to the gods. The idea was a mutual exchange of favors and gifts to be the center of human/divine relationships with gifts reflecting honor, not love or fear. Humans like deities because of the power they have and gifts they give and the gods rejoice in honoring those gifts. When relationships are fractured, via impieties by humans or unjust divine behavior, the chaos can ensue and punishment will rain down. Greeks normally had a good relationship with the gods but if there was pollution or religious oversights they could be corrected via rituals and additional gifts. Thus the idea that the gods will punish those they are displeased with through pestilence and illness is strengthened and perpetuated.

Hesiod and Homer created a divine genealogy for Greek by distributing their named via their offices, skills, and outward appearances. They would do this by picking out the gods that they wanted to focus on, making the greek pantheon as it is known today. Many rituals, mythology, etc were oral and local though, and not necessarily contained to what was written about the gods. However, as Jon Mikalson discusses in his essay about Greece religious cults were not limited to worshiping the gods, Heroes also received public cults after death, and became a second class of deification. In Hesiod’s Story of the Ages of Man, there is a golden, silver and bronze age. The theme here is gradual deterioration, for ancient people didn’t believe in progress like modern Americans do. They thought if someone was born a poor man then they would be that poor man for the entirety of their life, and didn’t expect progress or improvement. In fact, the default assumption was that things get worse. For example, in The Story of the Ages of Man first people were gold and then they deteriorate though Hesiod does throw in race of heroes that momentary breaks the trend. The real development of these cults may have actually influenced by the increasing spread and popularity of the Homeric epics. Many cults were not devoted to Homeric heroes and some were even nameless. Hero cults were often very localized, and closely bound to the presumed tomb of the hero.

Humans relationships with the gods is severed by death. Individuals were not rewarded or punished in the afterlife for religious behavior unless really good or really bad. Usually rewards and punishments fell on descendants. The Greek didn’t praise death, for example, Odysseus would “rather be plowman to a yeoman farmer on a small holding than lord Paramount in the kingdom of the dead (Odyssey 134). Life is of utmost importance to the Greeks and is thus humanistic in this way. Odysseus has talked to Circe who says he must perform a ritual a certain way in order to speak Teiresias. In Book 11 Odysseus slits animal's throats so he would be able to understand the dead. A reason for this could be because blood is life in liquid form and thus gives the dead back a sense of life.  Odysseus also makes the dead come to him one at a time, and they don’t like the point of his sword that he has. This may be because Odysseus is afraid the dead may overwhelm him, and take his blood or life.  When the first person to come is Elpenor, a man who had just died and had not buried, it shows how doing the right burial rites in Greek society and religion was important. Additionally, Elpenor didn’t take the blood, this is likely because he had recently died and didn’t need it whereas older shades needed the blood to be able to communicate with the living. These scenes show the restlessness of the dead when their body has not buried properly.

[warsofasoiaf]

I've been thinking about this for a while, so I decided to find out your thoughts on the matter. How would you go about creating a good fantasy religion?

When it comes to building a religion, the key things to remember is that religion is tied very much to ethics, the nature of reality, the meaning of life (and anything that comes after), and other deep philosophical underpinnings of what it means to be alive, to be good or evil, what responsibilities do we have in life. Religion offered to the people of the past (and continues to offer to the people in the present) profound comfort, meaning, and purpose for the entire life. So, you have your work cut out for you. But this is not beyond the ability of the aspiring worldbuilder and fantasy writer. I’m going to caveat this: I’ve studied religions, but a lot of my studies were focused on western religions. Someone who has studied more Eastern, African, or Pacific religions feel free to add anything. I acknowledge my limitations and have done what I could be as inclusive as possible, but I am certain there was stuff I missed.

Who Are You, Who Worships Me?

It’s tempting to start building a religion by building a deity or pantheon and moving from there, but I find it altogether more productive to look at the society that practices the religion and build up, rather than craft the divine and build down. Unless the piece you’re writing focuses on the perspective of the gods, or has them act as characters, they won’t be the focus of your story, but the society that your characters will be interacting with will have a profound effect on the story you’re writing.

So, when it comes to your society, the cardinal virtues that your society wishes to express will become central tenets of your religion. A society that prizes military strength, for example, will emphasize bravery, duty, loyalty, obedience to orders, hierarchy, and all of the things that enhance military cohesion. Deities will often be emphasized in martial roles, whether against enemies, other deities, or against evil itself. Antiquity often had gods pitted against each other, with the winner in warfare being the “stronger” deity, because clearly, those worshippers were the ones that won, right? The positive virtues and negative virtues of your society will be emphasized in all aspects of life, to include religion, and how it evolves over time.

Did You Ever Wonder Why We’re Here?

The meaning of life almost seems too cliche, but having a reason for existing is tremendously comforting. Religion have, throughout history, offered answers to very difficult and very terrifying questions. Why are we born? What happens do us when we die? Is this the only existence there is? Are all the bad things that happen to me just random, or is there a greater purpose to it all? Your fantasy religion is almost certainly going to have to attempt to address some of these questions in order to seem like a credible religion.

Always make sure to take into account the context of your world to think up of confusing questions that the world has to answer. Does magical talent happen seemingly randomly? Religion might attribute a divine origin to such a thing. Can the dead come back to life? That’s certainly going to factor in to your answers about what happens when humans die.

Religion offers other answers as well. Early religions attempted to make sense of the world and phenomena, because, as I’ve mentioned before, knowing why something is the way it is offers tremendous comfort. The fear of the unknown is one of the oldest fears in existence, and it’s one of the most pervasive fears even into our modern day, because the unknown calls into question a human’s mastery over his or her environment and ability to control and handle situations as they occur. Not knowing means losing one of our most powerful attributes: our ability to think rationally and plan accordingly, and this feeling of disempowerment is wholly terrifying. Good horror makes uses of feelings of weakness to amp up the fear effectively, and the use of the unknown, the paranoid cloying that something is out there but we have no idea what it is, where it is, or how to stop it, is amazing. It’s comforting to think of the sun as a flaming chariot powered by a god who wishes to keep us warm. After all, chariots are something familiar, even if the scale is beyond us, and a powerful being that looks out for our survival helps guard against the fear that at any minute, the sun could go away or expand into a giant and burn us to a cinder.

Now, a big part of religion is the concept of the sacred mystery. In the more ‘public’ sense, this would be supernatural phenomena that cannot be explained by rational means, and this forms a crucial understanding in the relationship between the mundane world and divinity. How the divine interacts with the world, if at all, is critical to understanding the relationship between any divine figure and the mortal practitioner. In the more esoteric sense, a sacred mystery is knowledge that is not commonly available to the public, accessible only by initiation and elevation to the proper rank. This was done in Greco-Roman mystery cults, as an example. In a fantasy story, for example, this is excellent for bringing in elements of the supernatural while keeping it rare and out of public hands.

Don’t fear that any point is too esoteric or minute to be important. The meaning of the divine have launched wars. Just to take an example, look at all the early theological disputes as to the exact nature of Jesus in Christianity. Arianism, Monophysitism, Monotheliteism, there was a tremendous amount of discussion and excommunications over aspects that seem almost trivial to a layperson, but this was a matter of the soul and of life everlasting to the people who lived in those times. Just because it seems unimportant to you, it can still have great significance to those who believe it. The same is true in fantasy as in reality.

The Path to Power

Now, religion is, like any other institution, controlled by humans, and humans are many things, but one thing that they are good at is building power structures. Religion has often been used as a vehicle to power. In some cases, this means an out-and-out theocracy, where political power is exercised through the clergy, but it hardly needs to be official. When a religion can control something as powerful and meaningful as an immortal soul, even without any official political power, the clergy will exert a great deal of influence.

Of course, when it comes to designing a religion, one of the big questions that will determine how much hard and soft influence said religion will have on the society at large. An informal, deeply personalized religion based on direct relationships with divine entities will not be very organized, but will still form a significant part of the daily lives of practitioners; in ASOIAF, it’s considered proper to perform important moments in front of a heart tree so that the Old Gods may bear witness, yet there does not appear to be an organized clerical hierarchy. A more organized religion will have a much more formalized organizational structure, with sacred texts and formalized rituals. Religions like Christianity and Islam are very organized, and as the number of worshipers grew, so did the size of their organizations.

The size of the organization is critical, because that determines the amount of resources it has. The Catholic Church was the largest organization in medieval Europe, and as such, had a truly gigantic amount of resources in both money and land, and that translated into a lot of power. The most powerful Popes could cow the mightiest kings of Europe, send ambassadors to distant lands, call Crusades and sanction invasions that forever changed the face of Europe. The most powerful Caliphs left their stamp on Islamic philosophy and jurisprudence that affected the way the religion is practiced today.

Now, as you might imagine, the bigger the organization and the wealthier it is, the more attractive it is to gather money, power, and influence, just like any secular organization. Corruption is present in all organizations, even the tiniest and weakest ones, and the largest and most powerful ones will definitely have corrupt officials, and those in power will use their organization to protect their power for reasons both benign (if I lose this power, I can’t help my flock) and malicious (if I lose this power, then I can’t help myself), and everywhere in between. As might be expected, corruption in any religion would be abhorrent to honest practitioners no matter their rank, corruption and hypocrisy rankle any outsider, and so anti-corruption movements would result. There were plenty of anti-corruption initiatives in Catholicism, and this ranged from peasant revolts who railed against inequality and classism to reformist Popes who cracked down on simony and usury. These anti-corruption initiatives can form critical moments in the history of your religion…or are a perfect way to have a conflict over the course of your novel.

What is a God, Anyway?

Now, of course, if you have a religion, you’ll need some sort of divine figure or idea. There has to be an origin for these sacred mysteries after all. Whether you have a monotheistic religion, a dualistic religion, a polytheistic religion, or even an atheistic one built around a philosophy, the big thing to capture is a sense of something much larger than humanity.

In a one-god religion, it’s important to settle exactly how powerful the god is. Monotheism typically asserts that the one god is all powerful, and has no peer, but that is far from the only way that works. Henotheism asserts a single divine essence which takes the form of many valid gods, and monolatrism, where many gods exist but only one is worshiped. In this latter two cases, defining the relationship between the gods is critical to the nature of the divine. Can a mortal worship the underlying divine essence of henotheism (or even comprehend it)?

In a ditheistic religion, the relationship between the gods becomes even more important, because usually whatever the one god is not, the other is. This dichotomy is often central to the formation of the world, and the religion offers a lens of contrasts and binary choices. Zoroastrianism is one of the most influential ditheistic religions I’m aware of, and it stresses the constant choices that mankind makes, to do good or to do evil, and this impetus of behavior affects many aspects of Zoroastrian societies.

In a polytheistic religion, the gods typically resolve around certain spheres of influence, and so it might be possible and necessary to pray to certain deities who have access over this sphere. Polytheistic deities typically emphasize human characteristics, and not all of them benevolent. The Greek Gods might bestow favor that ended up with horrible things happening to them. Susano-o got into a fight with his sister and flayed her favorite pony and threw the skin at her. Tezcatlipoca and Quetzlcouatl constantly unmake creation to show each other up. Odin repeatedly tried to renege on deals. Eshu walked around with a hat that looked different depending on how you looked at it just so people would fight over it. Taken as a strictly secular observer with modern values, you could probably say that these gods were, well, dicks (apologies to anyone if I called your god a dick), but they seem so strikingly and extremely human: concepts and personas taken to their immortal conclusion. Death is also a real thing for these gods. Many of the Tuatha died, including Nuada and Lugh, and they eventually lost Ireland. The Norse Gods were all fated to die on Ragnarok (save for a select few). The Aztec gods were built around death and sacrifice providing power. These concepts were all special, magical, and relatable.

I’d recommend researching ancient religions and seeing how they explored these concepts (and others) to make your religion feel genuine.

Bringing it Together

Just like anything else, you will be building a lot of things from single ideas that will invariably change. Do not fear change, and this is especially true for religions. After all, the changes you make, you can incorporate into the fictional history of your religion, as it grows and shifts over time, just like everything else (hopefully) in your setting.

For example, the religion in my fantasy setting started with a single idea. I wanted to build a society where doing good was a real concern, so I based it off Zoroastrianism. The religion was a dualistic one, with one good and one evil deity. Doing good actions strengthened the good deity of creation, doing evil strengthened the bad one. At the judgment day at the end of time, the two deities would fight, and the winner would be the one strengthened by the active thoughts and deeds of worshipers. If the good deity won, it was a remaking of the world into a land of endless paradise and plenty. If the evil deity won, the world became an endless suffering pit. This resolved the issue of free will, because mankind and free will is the active shaping force of the end of the world. It assigns significance to actions because everything that everyone does matters in judgment day, even if ever so little. The ethical framework of this society, then, becomes rather judgmental, as each evil deed is not only a crime against man, but against existence itself, and villains became interesting as they justified their crimes to render them good, or even went so far as to do other things to stave it off, and in one particularly horrible case, believed that the patient suffering of his victims offset the damage he was doing.

Then, to make matters more interesting, I made a religious schism that was based off the Great Schism of 1054, naming them after their implement of religious purity. One side, the ones who follow the sacred fire, believe that action is the principal driver of good, and so their doctrines resolve around actively doing good. The other side, who follow the sacred waters, believe that contemplation and thought are the most important, that one must actively think good and the action will follow. To the fire side, thought without action is impotent, empowering nothing and permitting evil to triumph, strengthening the evil god. To the water side, wanting to do good because of benefit (even just to strengthen the good god for the hope of the eternal paradise) is selfish and strengthens the evil god. Now, there’s actually a lot more theological discussions and some of it concerns secular concerns of power. The spectrum of belief has heretic hardliners who believe in violent action to eliminate the other sect before they do more wicked things, to more mellow followers who believe that the other side is misguided by not actively evil, to active Unificationists who attempt to use theological argument to reconcile the two sides with a variety of compromises. There’s even a sect in the hills that are fundamentalist Rejectionists who say that the schism is a sign of corruption and that there needs to be a return to a simpler, purer form of the religion, and that all came from one idea of a man constantly quoting scripture as if every single line he said was pregnant with meaning. I have (horrible) sketches of two grand temples devoted to sacred waters and sacred fires with beautiful architecture and ideas for how this schism will play out to create conflict for the protagonists, and how their ideas on it shape their actions. Follow the path where it takes you, write your notes, and don’t be afraid to come back and make revisions.

Thanks for the question, Overlord.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[cookinguptales]

Can you explain how Shinto came to be?

NO, AND NEITHER CAN ANYONE ELSE. lol. Don’t be fooled.

Frankly speaking, it’s a religion/philosophy that scholars and even practitioners will argue over until they’re blue in the face. I went to a symposium last year that had Shinto scholars from around the world and I actually asked them why people in Shinto studies are so obsessed with finding “true” or “original” Shinto (as opposed to the way that people who study other religions go about things) and they all kind of looked at me like I was from another planet. Like. You just do that in Shinto studies. You argue. The foremost experts can’t even agree on what Shinto is. They can’t even agree on whether Shinto is!! Like there are literally foremost experts who say that Shinto (as we conceptualize it) is a myth.

Like you’ll get arguments on both sides of a very polarizing spectrum. There are scholars who say that Shinto is a concept that only makes sense in retrospect; in other words, “Shinto” didn’t really exist until nationalists had to create a religion to define in opposition to both Buddhism and Christianity, and that to some degree is just an offshoot of Buddhism. Other people will talk about how Shinto is an indigenous religion that goes back to Japan’s prehistory that has been displaced throughout history by foreign religions, which are evil and anti-Japanese. Frankly speaking, I don’t think either extreme is correct. Looking at both literary and archaeological evidence, I think you can see indigenous (also a somewhat problematic term, for assorted reasons) rituals that came to be incorporated into what we nowadays call “Shinto” – and I’m serious, there’s extensive research on where you can even trace that term to, and even that’s disputed.

(And always keep in mind that it’s notoriously difficult to interpret non-literary archaeological evidence and archaeologists have a strong tendency to shrug anything off as “religious ritual” when they don’t know what it actually was. And most of the textual evidence we have is extremely late. The earliest written accounts of what was going on in Japan are actually Chinese (and extremely brief) and the earliest historical accounts we have by Japanese authors are literally from the eighth century. C.E.!!! That’s incredibly late, and basically guarantees that everything being written was written centuries after it actually happened, and likely with a strong political slant. No one writes something down for no reason, and never forget that simple fact.)

Honestly speaking, I think it’s important to keep in mind that no religion burst into being fully formed. Christianity, for instance, took hundreds of years to get to a form that we’d find recognizable as modern Christianity; there wasn’t a solid religious text (i.e. the Bible) for a long time, and a lot of contesting and conflicting rituals, texts, and doctrinal beliefs made up what we’d eventually come to consider Christianity. I think it’s something similar with Shinto. Japan wasn’t even technically Japan for a very long time, but was instead various clans and ethnic groups that lived throughout the region that we now label “Japan” on a map. (And hell, even some of the geography is contested still.) There were different language traditions and cultural traditions and religious traditions. Like many ancient religions, there were a lot of animistic tendencies to these traditions, and a lot were based on the natural world. (This isn’t actually unusual; the strong emphasis placed on “green” Shinto is relatively recent and strongly tied to conservation efforts as well as nostalgia for a world that potentially never existed.) But a lot of these were also super local traditions! As people traveled more, ideas traveled as well and things evened out a little more and became a little more holistic – but let’s be real, even nowadays Shinto can have extremely regional rituals/beliefs. (Which gets especially interesting once you get out of Japan; Shinto is very place/object-based and is often considered to be innately tied to Japanese land, so Shinto gets interesting in places like Hawaii.)

To compare to another religion you might be familiar with, think Greek mythology. Greece was separated into much smaller city-states which were disconnected from one another due to the geography. So you’d get very similar ideas sometimes, but even the same deity would often have very specific regional forms, and stories that travel from one place to the next would change dramatically. It’s why you have so much variation to this day in Greek mythology. Shinto is an even more extreme version of this.

Shinto, frankly speaking, has always been whatever people need it to be throughout history. It’s been localized beliefs. It’s been a concept that can be neatly tied to Buddhism (and even Catholicism – see: my discussions on Christian henotheism and adoption of local deities (in this case, kami) as saint-like figures) when people need it to be. Like for a lot of Japan’s history, including now, Shinto is a belief system that is often used in tandem with other religions. It’s also been an environmentally-tied belief system, especially in more modern times when the environment is less taken as a given and more as something we need to pay specific attention to. It’s been used to deify human heroes (some more heroic than others) and to imbue spirituality into our physical environments (natural and man-made both). And yeah, like many religions, it’s been used as a tool of extreme nationalism. (And let’s not take things out of context; nationalists were going to folk/environmental traditions in order to create national identity in the 18th/19th centuries in Japan… and in Germany (Grimm), and Russia (Propp), and Finland (Lönnrot), etc. It was definitely a global movement.) Sometimes it’s strongly connected to the ruling class of Japan, and sometimes it’s not. (And sometimes it is retroactively applied to rulers to legitimate their rule.) Shinto is a set of at times loosely-connected beliefs, and sometimes that can be used to lead a movement, and sometimes that just inhabits a sort of cultural background noise that informs religion, politics, and philosophy.

From everything I can see, Shinto is an extremely malleable belief system. Because there’s so much variation within it and it’s such an adaptable set of traditions, it can be extremely difficult to say where Shinto ends and begins. As a result, it’s also difficult to say when it began. There are definitely aspects of things that retroactively were identified as Shinto, and there were definitely religious rituals in practice long before Buddhism made it to Japan. But there weren’t people who really tried to define the edges of what Shinto was until relatively late in Japan’s history, and it was for a long time just defined as what people were doing before other traditions came along, and those things were kami-related. But like I’ve said, there were very disparate people and very disparate traditions, not just one ~true Japanese belief system~ that existed before Buddhism showed up. And like with other religions, sometimes the old traditions were consciously stamped out by new ones, and sometimes they merged to create something new and interesting.

Truth be told, I don’t know that one cohesive Shinto exists, and I don’t know that one needs to exist. It certainly doesn’t with other world religions. That vagueness is good for a religion, imo. (And I use the term “religion” very loosely here – this is also something people argue over, because many people who engage in Shinto ritual don’t consider themselves to be practicing a “religion” but rather are just engaging in family/local tradition.) For many Japanese people, Shinto is just something useful that one uses when they need extra luck during an exam or a propitious beginning to a building endeavor. Other people in Japan have dedicated their lives to Shinto traditions, particularly the more esoteric aspects of them. Other people still use it as a way to connect to nature and/or their locality. There are also various ways that it’s used by people in the Neopagan community, people who are Japanese, Japanese-descended (but who identify otherwise), and non-Japanese. It’s always been a syncretic sort of set of traditions, and I think it likely always will be. And all of those traditions came to be in a different way in a different time for different reasons by way of different people. So Shinto came into being gradually, or perhaps hundreds of times, as people navigated their way through the sometimes sacred world in which they lived.

tl;dr… no.

[paganusgnosis-blog]

Some Arguments for Polytheism

This is a subject that has been playing through my mind for most of the evening. Not for the first time- it has occurred to me that one can actually make a strong case for polytheism.

Now I understand that not all pagans are polytheistic. I figured I'd better get that out of the way first.

However, it wouldn't be inaccurate to say that polytheism is the root of most pagan religions. Theology and concepts can indeed evolve, so not all modern pagans will find polytheism to their taste.

This post is only my attempt to bring some considerations for the reader to ponder. Then everyone will have to make up their own mind.

Now all things considered- polytheism is one of the oldest theological positions humans entertain. It could even be argued that polytheism is THE oldest, although that's certainly contestable...

In examining polytheism's merits we start at the same place any theological position does- the reality we observe.

Here we already find good evidence for building the case. We find a world that seems to have order. However, it isn't a uniform order.

Now when I say evidence, I mean of the philosophical kind that any theist deduces through argumentation and reason. Some would argue that it isn’t empirical that the world has an underlying order to it.

To avoid pursuing that argument, I need only say- it can be suggested. It is not outside the realm of possibility...

Accepting as a believer that the seeming order isn't merely speculation- I would like to carry the case a bit further.

Now the belief that the world has an order is usually divided into two main theological categories: polytheism and monotheism.

Naturally, there are several sub-categories of these like henotheism and pantheism- but most theistic stances fall under one or the other in the strictest sense.

Monotheism looks at the order through the lens of there being a single deity with a correct, preferred order. In monotheism, anything that goes against the deity's order is typically labeled 'evil'.

This idea of evil isn't without justification- for even monotheists must attempt to explain why reality does not appear uniform. Monotheists find themselves in the position of having to explain why a reality ordered by one deity can be complex enough to seem contradicting.

Now a polytheist would not necessarily deny evil can have something to do with reality's paradoxes, but it isn't the first conclusion we would go running toward.

I submit to the reader that monotheism finds itself in a rather interesting predicament with only a single deity. In that framework, everything in reality is subjected to one deity's preferences about correct and incorrect.

As such, monotheistic theology finds itself faced with some rather large philosophical dilemmas and contradictions. The most notable dilemma is the fact that in any given situation- more than one course of action can be good to the reasonable mind. There is not necessarily just one 'right way' to go about a thing.

Now for the sake of the argument, let us assume we all agree with the monotheists that 'real good' cannot be mixed with any bad. For a reference point- compare this to Epicurus's idea of real pleasure being unmixed (without suffering).

Going on this definition- we could find situations in which monotheists would be forced to call good actions evil. Imagine that we find ourselves confronted with a problem and there is more than one good way of resolving the issue. Because monotheists submit to us that there is only a single, personal god with a fixed law- only one of the actions can be the actually good one in resolving the problem.

We find that monotheism introduces a new kind of evil action through it's theology. Because even entirely good actions can be bad if the one deity doesn't approve.

I submit to the reader that this is a rather odd notion- is it not? Let us consider the case of marriage and divorce.

Indeed, if the one god thinks marriage is good, it follows that the other action is bad for the sake of being objective.

I hold that divorce can in fact be good, such as- one spouse finding themselves in an abusive or overbearingly miserable situation.

Now rather I am right or not, I can at least consider the position and not be inconsistent.

A monotheist cannot consistently say that two opposites are both good. To do so, they must deviate from actual monotheistic ideology and be subjective.

Remember that objectivity within a uniform reality is the entire premise of monotheism. When a monotheist brings subjectivity into it, their worldview is compromised. They are beginning to saw off the very limb upon which they stand.

To say that subjectivity has a place in monotheism is to undermine the very premise of it.

These are problems polytheists do not find ourselves faced with. We do not have to conclude that only one course of action is truly good in situations, while the others are bad on the basis of divine command.

It is also not necessarily subjective that polytheists choose different courses of action and call them good- since we don't build objectivity on a monotheistic foundation.

One divinity can find a thing preferable, while another deity can think a thing undesirable. This can in fact be the case. It isn't subjective if this is indeed the case.

Very well then- monotheism tries to account for the fluid nature of reality in a way some would find questionable. This is me trying to be kind...

The monotheistic worldview might at least be more convincing if it wasn't forced to cast good actions as bad. That there can be more than one 'right way' suggests from the get go that one deity cannot be behind it all.

One deity will have his or her idea of good, but another might have a different one. This appears in reality exactly as we would expect it to if many gods were behind the order. We find that there are many good courses of action in most cases.

But at the danger of making this blog post a mile long- I will only touch briefly on another point. I'll save any other points for another post. My other point touches on what we can deduce is possible through observation of reality- and what is impossible.

If there are gods, it is reasonable reality would reflect their reaching down to touch the world. We find that reality does not reflect anything remotely suggestive of monotheistic theology.

Monotheism holds ideas that are reasonably and logically impossible. It is one thing to believe in the supernatural, but another to entertain what cannot be. God's omnipotence, which is a core precept of all three Abrahamic religions is simply not possible. Why? Because of what power is...

Power is not boundless. The word power has a very clear definition. It only goes to power's utmost potential. I mean the maximum voltage possible with electricity or something like that.

To speak of a being with 'all-power' is possible. However, power without limits is incoherent. Power is something measurable by it's very nature.

I fear this blog post will run on forever, so I leave the reader with just that one point. The monotheistic idea of omnipotence is impossible. There are many other aspects of their theology that upon examination- is impossible.

Gods must not defy what is possible by all reasonable accounts. Indeed, they cannot, or we have truly entered the territory of the unreal.

I hope this post provides some good things to consider, at very least. Bright blessings!