Polytheism is Shaping our Culture
Could such an ancient “primitive” religion find traction in the sophisticated 21st century? In 1974 in “Christian” America, we witnessed the publication of an oddly titled book – The New Polytheism: the Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses. The author was David Miller, a professor of religion at Syracuse, and an apparent atheist. He stated that with the collapse of the Christian faith (which he saw in the early 1970’s arguing that people were going through the motions without true understanding of why) we would see the rebirth of the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece and Rome. He boldly stated that with the collapse of the Theistic dominant norm, people would look for new dimensions hidden in the depths of reality’s history.
In 1995 Jean Houston, a self-identified Jungian who counseled Hillary Clinton (then in the White House) and helped to channel the spirit of Elanor Roosevelt, observed that our present society was in a state of both “breakdown and breakthrough – … what I call a whole system transition … requiring a new alignment that only myth can bring. These were the myths of polytheism. Houston published a book that year, The Passion of Isis and Osiris, proposing as the saving myth for the modern world the story of the Egyptian goddess Isis, goddess of magic and the underworld. “Now open your eyes,” she has said, “and look at all the gods in hiding” – in America!
Houston, the polytheist was the senior consultant for the United Nations Development Program, which was established in 2000 at the Millennium Summit, it is in at least 166 countries. UNDP sponsored Houston’s work in leadership training, which took her to all the underdeveloped countries to teach young leaders “social artistry,” reconnecting them with their old ancestral polytheistic myths. The mythologically wise community will be the basis of the planetary community. Whether we live it or not, polytheism is rapidly becoming, or is already, the primary belief system of the global elite.
So what is the attractiveness of polytheism. As part of the natural world, people come to know the deities directly. This is opposed to rote ritual using words that people simply do not understand or know in many “Christian” congregations (this is opposed to what Christ did). Hence the multiplicity of deities, because people with differing personalities and experiences need differing deities. The spirit-deities are many because they represent the forces of nature, such as sky and earth, male and female, yin and yang, and because nature is considered a complex, living, spiritual organism, with animal, plant, and even mineral spirits. The relationships with the deities are “reciprocal,” because the spirits seek a relationship with living humans. The polytheist seeks shamanistic “personal relations with cosmic forces,” through either divination or spirit possession. Techniques of initiation into altered states of consciousness require physical stimuli such as sweat lodges or the taking of drugs such as peyote, plus the use of spiritually charged physical images (what the Bible calls carved images) of the deities as a focal point of devotion. While Gnosticism is often only implicitly occultic, clearly polytheism is openly and unapologetically involved in the worship of demons. Certainly, like Gnosticism and all the other pagan religions, polytheism has no notion of genuine evil and thus seeks, for personal advantage to join the opposites of good and evil to eliminate all notions of guilt. Polytheistic cultures tend not to have a concept of evil, not of the biblical understanding of the relationship between God and the devil.
Polytheism also gives rise to polysexuality, for since there is no Creator, and thus no creational norms, human-divine beings decide what sexuality is right for them. So much is homosexuality a part of religious paganism that historical scholarship agrees that in polytheistic cults throughout time and space, the shaman or priest is either homosexual or pansexual.
Polytheism is alive today under many guises. Mormonism is polytheistic inasmuch as the Mormon god was once a human, and human beings will become gods ruling over their own planets. Also, just as the ancient Gnostics called Yahweh a demon, so one of the leaders of Mormonism, Brigham Young, said that the “Christian God is the Mormon’s Devil and the Mormon’s Devil is the Christian God.” In 1993, a the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Chicago, 8,000 delegates from 125 different religions locked elbows and danced around a vast ballroom celebrating the deep unity of all their gods.
Paganism is here, and is very influential in our culture, and if we do not understand and teach about it to our youth, they will be influenced by it. For too long, churches have lived in a false modernist, dominant, paradigm and they have missed the opportunity to teach and prepare disciples against the polytheism that is around us.
Before we go on:
Think about what is means that the country has willing voted for polytheistic candidates. How can the United States be 60% Christian and that happen? There has been at least one from each side of the aisle.
What does the bumper sticker with all the symbols of various religions imply?