Polytheism Quotes

“You've a right to believe that we're governed by Nature and the hidden Force within her. You can think that the gods, including my Melitele, are merely a personification of this power invented for simpletons so they can understand it better, accept its existence. According to you, that power is blind. But for me, Geralt, faith allows you to expect what my goddess personifies from nature: order, law, goodness. And hope.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, The Last Wish

“To Judaism Christians ascribe the glory of having been the first religion to teach a pure monotheism. But monotheism existed long before the Jews attained to it. Zoroaster and his earliest followers were monotheists, dualism being a later development of the Persian theology. The adoption of monotheism by the Jews, which occurred only at a very late period in their history, was not, however, the result of a divine revelation, or even of an intellectual superiority, for the Jews were immeasurably inferior intellectually to the Greeks and Romans, to the Hindus and Egyptians, and to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who are supposed to have retained a belief in polytheism. This monotheism of the Jews has chiefly the result of a religious intolerance never before equaled and never since surpassed, except in the history of Christianity and Mohammedanism, the daughters of Judaism. Jehovistic priests and kings tolerated no rivals of their god and made death the penalty for disloyalty to him. The Jewish nation became monotheistic for the same reason that Spain, in the clutches of the Inquisition, became entirely Christian.”
― John E. Remsburg, The Christ

“As polytheism is in religious belief reflected in the recognition of moral complexity, so henotheism in religious practice is reflected in the recognition of moral diversity. To worship different gods is to align oneself with different ideals, and to embrace different moral standards. The example of the mother and the judge shows one way in which this works out in practice. The mother places parental love above impartial justice, while the judge does the opposite. In the language of Greek Paganism, the mother bows to Hera, the judge to Zeus Dikaios, and both are right to do so.”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“What monotheism undoubtedly did was to make many people far more intolerant than before, thereby contributing to the spread of religious persecutions and holy wars. Polytheists found it perfectly acceptable that different people will worship different gods and perform diverse rites and rituals. (…) Monotheists, in contrast, believed that their God was the only god, and that He demanded universal obedience. Consequently, as Christianity and Islam spread around the world, so did the incidence of crusades, jihads, inquisitions and religious discrimination.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

“I have yet to understand the ritual of sacrifice in monotheism; to a supposed Creator who has supposedly given us what we will be eventually sacrificing.
If I take a small mirror and reflect sunlight back to the sun, am I sacrificing to the sun?”
― Haroutioun Bochnakian, The Human Consensus and The Ultimate Project Of Humanity

“One of the distinctions that religious scholars make about various religions is the monotheistic and polytheistic world views. It seems to me that if one were to describe to a Hindu the myriad of divine beings in Christianity (and by relationship Judaism and Islam), such as angels, archangels, cherubim, seraphim, putti, Satan and his crew, Mother Mary, Jesus the son of God – who threw out demons; not to mention the saints and martyrs, who can be contacted and prayed to as divine guides, etc., I dare say this Hindu would consider the Christians polytheistic like himself. If we then include holy relics, the cunning snake and the talking fiery bush, then we are moving towards animism. Monotheism in this light is actually referring to One ruling (and jealous) god over many lesser “gods,” deities, angels and souls, which is describing a polytheistic hierarchy and not monotheism.
My conclusion: there is no monotheism.
It may be heretical to say, but perhaps the Western religions have more in common with Hinduism and with the Roman or Scandinavian pantheons than they care to admit.”
― Stephen Poplin, Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook

“If, these people worshiped one God alone, and no other, they would probably have some valid argument against the worship of others. But they pay excessive reverence to one who has but lately appeared among men, and they think it no offence against God if they worship also His servant.”
― Celsus

“My gods are not tame. They do not always come when they are called.
This is not a failure of ritual or a weakness of belief. It is the nature of my gods. I would no more expect a god to “show up” in my ritual space than I would expect to be able to call a mountain into my living room. That is simply not the nature of mountains. If I want to meet a mountain, I am the one who must move." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Gods Like Mountains, Gods Like Mist”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“Personally, I thought it chancy to rely on only one god. It struck me as akin to placing all your drachars on one chariot at the races...It didn't seem logical that one god could ensure the proper working of the world.”
― Tammie Painter, Domna, Part One: The Sun God's Daughter

“It is the distinction between transpersonal and interpersonal relationships with deities which sets naturalistic polytheism apart from neopolytheism. Interpersonal relationships are between two or more persons and are focused upon individual perspectives. A transpersonal relationship extends beyond the individual perspective, transcending the distinctions of ego and personality. For example:
A neopolytheist has a close personal relationship with a modernized personification of Thor, to whom she prays to daily.
A naturalistic polytheist practices breathing as a sacrament which allows her to focus on life’s connection to the atmosphere, altering her perception of separateness, resulting in viewing the at-mosphere as a deity." - Glen Gordon, "Naturalism and the Gods”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“At least all Gods except one are man-made.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Some people have exercised their right to create their own God.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Whatever you touch will touch you back. The simplest way that I can try to explain it is that when you spend time touching the core of the earth, soaking in the stars, communing with the moon, aligning with the elements, working with the gods and spirits—it changes a person.”
― Mat Auryn, Psychic Witch: A Metaphysical Guide to Meditation, Magick & Manifestation

“Natural polytheism embraces the science of ecology as a basic metaphor for theological inquiry. In other words, natural polytheism seeks to understand our relationship with the gods as an aspect of interrelated systems of being, consciousness and meaning. Its focus is, first and foremost, on the wildernesses that defy our carefully mapped boundary lines, that penetrate even the most civilized cultural centers and underlie our most cherished notions of what it means to be human." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Natural Theology: Polytheism Beyond the Pale”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“My gods are not always like human beings. Sometimes my gods are like mountains, sometimes they are like mist. Sometimes I seek my gods in the forests, sometimes in ritual space or the beat of the drum. Some-times my gods are inscrutable or apophatic, and my relationship with them is one of longing and seeking rather than invocation and offering. And sometimes it is the mountains themselves who are gods, and the rivers and trees who speak." - Alison Leigh Lilly, "Gods Like Mountains, Gods Like Mist”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“Above all, we new pagans must learn to know and honor the Many as they manifest in our own time and place. While the ways of the ancestors—the Received Tradition—must always inform our thought and action, we are truest to our heritage when we think and act as natives of here and now. Our mandate is to be the pagans for our own time, our own place, our own post-modern, science-driven Western culture. This is the only kind of pagan that we can honestly be; anything else is pretense." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“While the ethnic paganisms have important things to teach us concerning the necessity of cultural authenticity, at their worst they become purist ghettos of nostalgia-driven re-enactors. We must never forget our Received Tradition or fail to learn from it; without it, we have no solid basis by which to evaluate our own experience. But ultimately the ways of our ancestors cannot teach us what we most need to know: how to be honestly pagan for our own time and place. That understand-ing can come only from our own encounter with the very sources that inspired these ethnic traditions in the first place. We must drink from the original wellspring itself." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“the resurgence of the elder gods breaks down the wall of separation between religion and science that has partitioned Western thought since the Enlightenment. The rise of science has taught us things about the Earth, Sun, and Storm that the ancients would have marveled to know. We are in the enviable, irresistible, position of being able to learn, through science, about the very gods themselves." - Steven Posch, "Lost Gods of the Witches: A User’s Guide to Post-Ragnarok Paganism”
― John Halstead, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans

“But which one is right? The real gods? The truth?' I asked.
Balthazar smiled gently, as if speaking to a very slow child. 'That is not for us to judge. Each of us believes what seems true enough to him, and allows others the same luxury. Who can know what happened in the dim dawn of the world? We can barely decide what to have for breakfast without a theological debate - the Nurian law is polite disagreement. We do our best with how the world appears to our own eyes.”
― Catherynne M. Valente, In the Night Garden

“Thus the community is within its rights to set and enforce a minimum level of acceptable behavior, but it strays outside its rights if it goes beyond that and imposes ethical demands on its members beyond that. The minimum is business of law, while the effort to go further is the business of ethics-and thus of individual choice. The laws of a community, the measures of acceptable behavior, take shape by the same processes of dissensus as moral choice, but the goal is different. The lawmaking process does not seek the highest possible moral good; it seeks a workable comprimise between individual freedom and the needs of the community. Laws are thus best when they are few, clear, generally accepted, and strictly enforced”
― John Michael Greer, A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism

“So which is more probable: That today's atheist apocalyptans are unique and right? Or that they are like their many predecessors—at the very least, in their motivations? If anything, the vehemence with which the believers in emergent complexity debunk all religion may betray their own creeping awareness of the religious underpinnings and precedents for their declarations.

In fact, the concept of Armageddon first emerged in response to the invention of monotheism by the ancient Persian priest Zoroaster, around the tenth or eleventh century BCE. Until that time, the dominant religions maintained a pantheon of gods reigning in a cyclical precession along with the heavens, so there was little need for absolutes. As religions began focusing on a single god, things got a bit trickier. For if there is only one god, and that god has absolute power, then why do bad things happen? Why does evil still exist?

If one's god is fighting for control of the universe against the gods of other people, then there's no problem. Just as in polytheism, the great achievements of one god can be undermined by the destructive acts of another. But what if a religion, such as Judaism of the First and Second Temple era, calls for one god and one god alone? How do its priests and followers explain the persistence of evil and suffering?

They do it the same way Zoroaster did: by introducing time into the equation. The imperfection of the universe is a product of its incompleteness. There's only one true god, but he's not done yet. In the monotheist version, the precession of the gods was no longer a continuous cycle of seasonal deities or metaphors. It was nor a linear story with a clear endpoint in the victory of the one true and literal god. Once this happens, time can end.

Creation is the Alpha, and the Return is the Omega. It's all good.

This worked well enough to assuage the anxieties of both the civilization of the calendar and that of the clock. But what about us? Without time, without a future, how to we contend with the lingering imperfections in our reality? As members of a monotheist culture—however reluctant—we can't help but seek to apply its foundational framework to our current dilemma. The less aware we are of this process—or the more we refuse to admit its legacy in our construction of new models—the more vulnerable we become to its excesses. Repression and extremism are two sides of the same coin.

In spite of their determination to avoid such constructs, even the most scientifically minded futurists apply the Alpha-Omega framework of messianic time to their upgraded apocalypse narratives. Emergence takes the place of the hand of God, mysteriously transforming a chaotic system into a self-organized one, with coherence and cooperation. Nobody seems able to explain how this actually happens.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Non-Christians were alternately baffled and repelled by such excess. Pliny himself describes Christianity as nothing more than a ‘degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths’. For a long time, Romans struggled to understand why Christians couldn’t simply add the worship of this new Christian god to the old ones. It was known that Christianity had sprung from Judaism and that even the Jews had offered prayer and sacrifice to Augustus and later emperors in their temple. If they had done so – and theirs was the more ancient religion – then why couldn’t the Christians? Monotheism in the rigid Christian sense was all but unthinkable to polytheists. ‘If you have recognized Christ,’ as one official put it, ‘then recognize our gods too.’ Not just unthinkable but, to many, unnecessary to the point of histrionic. As another prefect in another trial pithily put it: ‘What is so serious about offering some incense and going away?’ The emperor Marcus Aurelius disparaged martyrdom as mere ‘stage heroics’. Others saw it as simply deluded: Lucian scornfully described the Christians as those ‘poor wretches [who] have convinced themselves, first and foremost, that they are going to be immortal and live for all time, in consequence of which they despise death and even willingly give themselves into custody’.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“It is obvious that this violence was not only one’s Christian duty; it was also, for many, a thoroughly enjoyable way to spend an afternoon. Those carrying out the attacks sang as they smashed the ancient marble and roared with laughter as they destroyed statues. In Alexandria, ‘idolatrous’ images were taken from private houses and baths, then burned and mutilated in a jubilant public demonstration. Once the assault was complete, the Christians ‘all went off, praising God for the destruction of such error of demons and idolatry’. Broken statues themselves were another cause for hilarity, their fragmented remains an occasion for ‘laughter and scorn’. Chants appeared celebrating these attacks. Coptic pilgrims who visited the city of Hermopolis in Egypt could join with fellow faithful as they sang a local hymn to the destruction. The humorously apposite insult was much enjoyed by God’s warriors. In Carthage, there was an annual religious ceremony in which the beard of a statue of Hercules was ceremonially gilded; at the beginning of the fifth century some Christians mockingly ‘shaved’ the statue’s beard off. It was, for them, a moment of much hilarity. For the watching polytheists it was a desecration.”
― Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World

“To fade away at the end of a long life is a blessing from the gods; to die prematurely is a curse.”
― Claude Lecouteux, The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind

“The gods, I correct her. Monotheism sucks, like all despotisms. The species is naturally, democratically, polytheistic, apart from that evolutionary elite which has dispensed with the divine requirement entirely. You instinctively want the gods to be many because you are One.”
― Salman Rushdie, The Ground Beneath Her Feet

“That I may give a true representation of their faith, I will use their own words, as given in what is called A Heavenly Dialogue: 'If the Son is mightier than God, and the Son of man is Lord over Him, who else than the Son can be Lord over that God who is the ruler over all things? How comes it, that while so many go about the well, no one goes down into it? Why art thou afraid when thou hast gone so far on the way? Answer: Thou art mistaken, for I lack neither courage nor weapons. ' Is it not evident, then, that their views are precisely such as I have described them to be? They suppose that another God, who is above the heavens, is the Father of him whom with one accord they honor, that they may honor this Son of man alone, whom they exalt under the form and name of the great God, and whom they assert to be stronger than God, who rules the world, and that he rules over Him. And hence that maxim of theirs, 'It is impossible to serve two masters,' is maintained for the purpose of keeping up the party who are on the side of this Lord.”
― Celsus

“While polytheism, through the worship of many gods, affirms the life and mystery of the world in all its complexity, monotheism declares the world to be a mere artifact, the product of God’s making, and thus about as living and mysterious as a thumbtack. The transition from polytheism to monotheism is the “De-Godding” of the different aspects of the world. Monotheists therefore progressively cede the complexity of creation to the natural scientist. The entire material world becomes understandable by science on its own terms, and eventually the scientist steps in to take God’s place.”
― Collin Cleary, Summoning the Gods

“Polytheistic Greek mythology includes some stories that tell of intervention by Zeus in human affairs but others that tell of Zeus’s life among his fellow gods. In the Bible, God, being the only god, does not have that second kind of action through which to present himself. But the peculiarity of God’s character does not end there. God could conceivably engage in some kind of demonstrative action that would serve his own self-presentation apart from any interaction with man: miraculous displays, cosmic disruptions, the creation of other worlds. But in fact he refrains from all such activity. Not only does he lack any social life among other gods but he also lacks what we might call a private life. His only way of pursuing an interest in himself is through mankind.”
― Jack Miles, God: A Biography

“A pure monotheistic God, unrelieved by polytheistic elements, tends to become lifeless and abstract. A purely monotheistic unity fails to represent the living unity of the Spirit and expresses merely the intellect’s love of the uniform and the general.
Similarly, purely polytheistic Gods without any principle of unity amongst them lose their inner coherence. They fall apart and serve no spiritual purpose.”
― Ram Swarup, The Word as Revelation: Names of Gods

“What the monothesists dismiss as polytheism and idol worship are natural to the normal human psyche. Moreover, honouring that which was honoured by one's ancestors keeps one rooted in one's history and culture. Cults which encourage one to denounce one's ancestors as barbarians or infidels, and one's past history as an age of ignorance, render one rootless and make one into a menace to one's neighbours. The Bible provides ample evidence of the normal people reverting to polytheism and idol-worship again and again, and the persistent and violent wars which the prophets had to wage for reimposing Jehovah on them. In any case, a religion stands in need of a philosophical defence only when it is already on a course of decline, and an inner dissatisfaction starts gnawing at the heart of its more perceptive adherents.”
― Sita Ram Goel, Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them