Drawing Down the Moon (6 page)

—SYMMACHUS, 384 C.E.
¹

 

—JAMES HENRY BREASTED
²

 

 

WHILE MOST NEO-PAGANS disagree on almost everything, one of their most important principles is polytheism, and this is generally understood to mean much more than “a theory that Divine reality is numerically multiple, that there are many gods.”
³
Many Pagans will tell you that polytheism is an
attitude
and a
perspective
that affect more than what we consider to be religion. They might well say that the constant calls for unity, integration, and homogenization in the Western world derive from our long-standing ideology of monotheism, which remains the majority tradition in the West. They might add that monotheism is a political and psychological ideology as well as a religious one, and that the old economic lesson that one-crop economies generally fare poorly also applies to the spiritual realm.

If you were to ask modern Pagans for the most important ideas that underlie the Pagan resurgence, you might well be led to three words: animism, pantheism, and—most important—polytheism. Neo-Pagans give these words meanings different from the common definitions, and sometimes they overlap.

Animism
is used to imply a reality in which all things are imbued with vitality. The ancient world view did not conceive of a separation between “animate” and inanimate.” All things—from rocks and trees to dreams—were considered to partake of the life force. At some level Neo-Paganism is an attempt to reanimate the world of nature; or, perhaps more accurately, Neo-Pagan religions allow their participants to reenter the primeval world view, to participate in nature in a way that is not possible for most Westerners after childhood. The Pagan revival seems to be, in part, a response to the common urban and suburban experience of our culture as “impersonal,” “neutral,” or “dead.”

For many Pagans,
pantheism
implies much the same thing as animism. It is a view that divinity is inseparable from nature and that deity is immanent in nature. Neo-Pagan groups participate in divinity. The title of this book implies one such participation: when a priestess becomes the Goddess within the circle. “Drawing down the moon” symbolizes the idea that we are the gods, or can, at least, become them from time to time in rite and fantasy. This idea was well expressed in the quotation at the beginning of the
Whole Earth Catalog
: “We
are
as gods and might as well get good at it.”
⁴
The Neo-Pagan Church of All Worlds has expressed this idea by the phrase: “Thou Art God/dess.”
^f

The idea of
polytheism
is grounded in the view that reality (divine or otherwise) is multiple and diverse. And if one is a pantheist-polytheist, as are many Neo-Pagans, one might say that all nature is divinity and manifests itself in myriad forms and delightful complexities. On a broader level, Isaac Bonewits wrote, “Polytheists . . . develop logical systems based on multiple levels of reality and the magical Law of Infinite Universes: ‘every sentient being lives in a unique universe.' ”
⁵
Polytheism has allowed a multitude of distinct groups to exist more or less in harmony, despite great divergence in beliefs and practices, and may also have prevented these groups from being preyed upon by gurus and profiteers.

In beginning to understand what polytheism means to modern Pagans we must divest ourselves of a number of ideas about it—mainly, that it is an inferior way of perceiving that disappeared as religions “evolved” toward the idea of one god.

The origin of this erroneous idea can be traced to the eighteenth century. We can see it, for example, in the works of the philosopher David Hume, who wrote that just as “the mind rises gradually, from inferior to superior,” polytheism prevails “among the greatest part of uninstructed mankind”; and the idea of a “supreme Creator” bestowing order by will is an idea “too big for their narrow conceptions. . . .”
⁶
Until recently many writers labeled tribal religions “superstition,” while dignifying monotheistic beliefs (usually Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) with the term “religion.” These notions are usually not stated so boldly today, but they persist.

Many anthropologists have long disrupted the notion that religions “evolve” in linear fashion. Paul Radin more than fifty years ago wrote that monotheism exists in some form among all primitive peoples. Ethnologists must admit, he said, that “the possibility of interpreting monotheism as a part of a general intellectual and ethical progress must be abandoned. . . .” He showed that monotheism often existed side by side with polytheism, animism, and pantheism. Radin regarded monotheism and polytheism merely as indicators of those differences in philosophical temperament that exist among all groups of people.

As for monotheism in our society, Radin observed, “The factors concerned in the complete credal triumph of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism have never been satisfactorily explained, but they are emphatically of an individual historical and psychological nature.” He added that no progress in solving this riddle will be made “until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history,” and that the great mistake lies in applying Darwinian thinking to analyses of culture. Radin considered primitive societies to be as logical as modern ones, often having a truer, more concrete sense of reality. Most primitive societies exhibit all types of temperaments and abilities: “The idealist and the materialist, the dreamer and the realist, have always been with us.”
⁷

Harold Moss, a Neo-Pagan writer and priest of the Church of the Eternal Source, once wrote that monotheism existed in many tribal societies ; many later societies developed a polytheistic theology as they became more complex and sophisticated. “Today,” he said, “in place of a single Christianity with multiple Gods, we see a shattered Christianity, each sect worshipping a slightly different God.”
⁸

Another problem confronts us when we attempt to look at old and new Pagan religions with fresh eyes: the notion of “idolatry” and the image of dull natives abasing themselves before a stone idol. I remember seeing this image often in books I read as a child—
The Story of Chanukah
is one that I recall vividly. It was easy to feel pity for the poor heathens, as well as a patronizing superiority. Monotheistic religions have long assumed that the worshipper who stands before a statue or a grove of trees can see no further than that statue or grove, that such a worshipper invests divinity in those things and nothing more, and, contrarily, that other people's worship of neutral, omnipotent, and unknowable deities is necessarily pure and sublime.

The best refutation of these notions is in Theodore Roszak's
Where the Wasteland Ends
. The statue and sacred grove were transparent windows to experience, Roszak says—means by which the witness was escorted through to sacred ground beyond and participated in the divine. The rejection of animism, first by the Jews and later, most dogmatically, by certain Christian groups, resulted in a war on art and all imaginative activities. Roszak finds no evidence that the animist world view is false. He notes that none of us has entered the animist world sufficiently to judge it existentially.

Our idea of idolatry is therefore a kind of racist perception grounded in ignorance. For Roszak, if there
is
any idolatry, it exists in our society, where artificiality is extolled and religion viewed as something apart from nature, supernatural. Roszak has called the modern view “the religion of the single vision.”

 

Much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists, who have long argued that the gods and goddesses of myth, legend, and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower, permit us to be more fully human. These archetypes must be approached and ultimately reckoned with if we are to experience the riches we have repressed. Most Jungians argue that the task is to unite these potentialities into a symphonic whole. One unorthodox Jungian, James Hillman, has argued for a “polytheistic psychology” that gives reign to various parts of the self, not always leading to integration and wholeness.

In theological circles an early champion of a new polytheism in the 1970s was David Miller. Miller relies heavily on Jungian ideas. For him, polytheism is the rediscovery of gods and goddesses as archetypal forces in our lives. Miller's arguments, set forth in
The New Polytheism,
are similar to the views of many Neo-Pagans. Yet at the time of publication Miller was apparently unaware of the widespread emergence of Neo-Pagan groups. At the time he was a professor of religion at Syracuse University and reported that his students had become deeply drawn to the Greek myths, at the same time that theologians and psychologists were reappraising the idea of polytheism. Theologian William Hamilton, for one, had said at a conference that students are now seeking access to all the gods, “eastern and western, primitive and modern, heretical and orthodox, mad and sane.” These gods are “not to be believed in or trusted, but to be used to give shape to an increasingly complex and variegated experience of life.” Hamilton added, “The revolution does not look like monotheism, Christian or post-Christian. What it looks like is polytheism.” This remark was the beginning of Miller's journey.

By the end of it Miller had come to believe that the much talked of “death of God” was really the death of the one-dimensional “monotheistic” thinking that had dominated Western culture from top to bottom, influencing not only its religion but its psychology and politics as well. Polytheism, by contrast, was a view that allowed multiple dimensions of reality.

Far from being merely a religious belief, polytheism, for Miller, is an attitude that allows one to affirm “the radical plurality of the self.” In psychology, for example, it would allow one to discover the various sides of one's personality. Beyond that, it becomes a world view that allows for complexity, multiple meanings, and ambiguities. Like Roszak's “Old Gnosis,” it is at home with metaphors and myths. Yet this new polytheism is “not simply a matter of pluralism in the social order, anarchy in politics, polyphonic meaning in language”; the gods, for Miller, are informing powers, psychic realities that give shape to social, intellectual, and personal existence.

Miller disagrees with a number of theologians who espouse monotheism—in particular, H. Richard Niebuhr, who says that the central problem of modern society is that it
is
polytheistic. Niebuhr, defining gods as value centers, sees modern polytheism as the worship of social gods such as money, power, and sex. Against this social polytheism Niebuhr opposes a radical monotheism that worships only the principle of being.

Miller's reply calls for a deeper polytheism. He sees the gods not as value centers but as potencies within the psyche that play out their mythic stories in our daily lives.

Miller believes that we can experience multiplicity without jeopardizing integration and wholeness. He observes that polytheism
includes
monotheism, but the reverse does not hold true. For most people, religious practice comes down to a series of consecutive monotheisms, all within a larger polytheistic framework.

Here Miller is close to the modern Neo-Pagans who devote themselves to one of a number of gods and goddesses or one of a number of traditions, without denying the validity of other gods or traditions.
¹¹

Miller relies heavily on James Hillman's essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic.” Hillman said that psychology had long been colored by a theology of monotheism, especially in its view that unity, integration, wholeness, is
always
the proper goal of psychological development and that fragmentation is always a sign of pathology. Hillman argued that the images of Artemis, Persephone, and Athena collectively formed a richer picture of the feminine than the Virgin Mary. Carrying this idea to the extreme, Hillman suggested that the multitude of tongues in Babel, traditionally interpreted as a “decline,” could also be seen as a true picture of psychic reality. He then argued that some individuals might benefit from a therapy that, at times, led to fragmentation.