Drawing Down the Moon (7 page)

In the end Hillman advocated a “polytheistic psychology” that would allow many possible voices:

Hillman's contention that Jung always stressed the self as primary and considered all exploration of archetypes as preliminary to something higher is open to dispute. His views have not been accepted by most Jungians. Still, his question, “If there is only one model of individuation, can there be true individuality?” is close to the Neo-Pagan religious and social critique.

Miller's and Hillman's ideas about polytheism at times seem too much like the liberal notion of pluralism, a kind of competition of factions. Most Neo-Pagans that I know see polytheism not as competitive factions but as facets of a jewel, harmonious but differing. Many Neo-Pagans
do,
however, see the gods in Jungian terms. The late Gwydion Pendderwen, one of the best-known bards in the Craft, told me, “The gods are really the components of our psyches. We are the gods, in the sense that we, as the sum total of human beings, are the sum of the gods. And Pagans do not wish to be pinned down to a specific act of consciousness. They keep an open ticket.”

Miller writes that the task at hand is to incarnate the gods, to “become aware of their presence, acknowledge and celebrate their forms.”
¹³
These gods, he observes, are worlds of meaning; they are the comings and goings, the births and deaths within our lives. They are generally unrecognized because our culture is not in harmony with them.

He notes that the old ways of knowing (such as mysticism, alchemy, and gnosticism) still exist, but most of us are divorced from them. The recent widespread interest in occultism is, in part, a wish to reclaim them. These systems are richer in imagery than the Judeo-Christian tradition as it has come down to most of us. Despite this, both Miller and Hillman worry about a Pagan revival. Hillman is apprehensive about a “true revival of paganism as
religion,
” fearing that it would bring dogmas and soothsayers in its wake. He advocates a polytheistic psychology as a substitute.
¹⁴

Miller advocates a return to Greco-Roman polytheism because we are “willy-nilly Occidental men and women” and other symbol systems are inappropriate.
¹⁵
Much of the remainder of Miller's book is an attempt to use Greek mythology to explain modern society. He sees the problems of technology as the playing out of the stories of Prometheus, Hephaestus, and Aesclepius; the military-industrial complex is Hera-Hephaestus-Heracles; the outbreak of the irrational is Pan; and so forth. This may be fine for students of ancient Greek polytheism, but most Neo-Pagans diverge from him at this point.

When Miller's
The New Polytheism
appeared, one Pagan journal called it a “stunning victory for our point of view.” Harold Moss, on the other hand, wrote that Greco-Roman polytheism was not a suitable framework for today.
¹⁶
And one of the strongest criticisms of Miller's book came from Robert Ellwood, professor of religion at the University of Southern California, in his
Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America.

Ellwood accurately picked up the Neo-Pagan complaint about Miller when he wrote, “One may feel he [Miller] gives our revitalized heritages in Celtic (Yeats), Nordic (Wagner), African (LeRoi Jones), and Amerindian (many names) polytheistic religions short shrift.”

Ellwood is no proponent of Paganism, but unlike Miller he spent some time among Pagans and Neo-Pagans. He asks, “Is Polytheism in practice what Miller makes it out to be? What would a serious polytheistic stance in modern America be like?”

Ellwood first looks at the practice of Shinto in Japan and sees polytheism there as a binding, structured system, a reaction, in fact, to increased multiplicity, a means of structuring it into an empire, a cosmos. He argues that polytheism in the past appealed to organizers of the official cults of empires and that the fervent cults of the dispossessed were, largely, monotheistic—the mystery religions, Christianity, and the new religions of Japan.

As for Neo-Pagans in the United States, he acknowledges their “reverence for sun and tree,” their sincerity, and the reality of their experience. “The personal vision of some of the Neo-Pagans is deep and rich; they are seers if not shamans,” he says. But he sees these groups as unstable, and concludes that “polytheism puts a severe strain on group formation and continuity,” and that it “can only be an intensely personal vision,” the vehicle for the subjective. Each group is “tiny, struggling, and probably ephemeral”; he finds it difficult to believe that Neo-Paganism as a religious view can deal adequately with human alienation. He claims that polytheism has never been a cause, only a backdrop against which causes have moved.

Ellwood considers the great spiritual problem of the day to be “dealing with multiplicity,” but implies that Miller's position, and polytheism in general, lead ultimately to a life of “anchorless feelings,” constant changes in lifestyles that will eventually precipitate a backlash. One such form of backlash, he notes, can be seen in the Jesus Movement with its slogan “One Way,” and of course there are many other new monotheistic movements. Certainly one would have to agree that Neo-Paganism is a minority vision, struggling amid the majority trend toward authoritarian cults.

Ellwood sees polytheism in the United States as the “polytheism of the lonely poet” rather than that of the temple priest. It is epitomized by the lonely shaman, withdrawn from common feelings and goals. Such images are already staked out, Ellwood says; they can be seen in the personages of Ged in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy, Gandalf in J.R.R. Tolkien's
Lord of the Rings
trilogy, and Don Juan in the series of books by Carlos Castaneda. These are all persons who form no lasting groups, have no lasting friends; they share an intuitive knowledge and wisdom, but ultimately remain alone and sad.
¹⁷

For Ellwood, polytheism can never provide social cohesion, nor can it increase multiple options except in private ways. He implies that it is fundamentally antipolitical and antisocial.

Practicing Pagans might say to Ellwood that their religion is not at odds with the experience of wholeness. And while there are always groups that end, and new ones that begin, the Pagan community is much more cohesive today than when Ellwood was writing. Since the 1990s, modern Pagans have begun to form lasting communities—not only legally recognized religious organizations, a trend that has been occurring for thirty years, but seminaries, nature sanctuaries, and organizations and gatherings with a twenty-five year track record.

Most Neo-Pagans would agree with Ellwood that “only monotheistic or monistic religions ‘convert' nations. We are not likely to see a temple to Hera, Heracles or Hephaestus on the lawn of the Pentagon.” Most would also regard this as a great strength of polytheism—that it does not lend itself to holy wars. Even David Hume's fierce condemnation of polytheism as idolatry and superstition was mitigated by his acknowledgment of polytheists' tolerance of almost any religious practice, in contrast to the intolerance shown by almost all monotheistic religions.

In practice, Neo-Pagans give a variety of reasons for their polytheism.
¹⁸
“A polytheistic world view,” wrote one, “makes self-delusion harder. Pagans seem to relate to deities on a more symbolic and complex level. Personally I think all intellectualizing about deities is self-delusion.” Others told me that polytheism was more likely to encourage reverence for nature. A woman wrote to me: “Polytheism and particularly animism demand the cherishing of a much wider range of things. If you are a monotheist and your particular god is not life-oriented, it is easy to destroy the biosphere you depend on for sustenance—witness where we are right now.”

A third reason given to me is the one most emphasized by Miller: diversity and freedom. Alkemene, a Craft priestess in New York, wrote to me:

This idea of diversity and tolerance was also stressed by Isaac Bonewits, who told me, “The Pagans were tolerant for the simple reason that many believed their gods and goddesses to be connected with the people or the place. If you go to another place, there are different gods and goddesses, and if you're staying in someone else's house, you're polite to their gods; they're just as real as the ones you left back home.” Bonewits called monotheism an aberration, but “particularly useful in history when small groups of people wanted to control large numbers of people.” In
The Druid Chronicles
he observed that monotheism, “far from being the crown of human thought and religion as its supporters have claimed for several bloody millennia, is in fact a monstrous step backwards—a step that has been responsible for more human misery than any other idea in known history.”
¹⁹

Many other Neo-Pagans emphasized that polytheism allowed for both unity and diversity, and several asserted that they were monotheists at some moments and polytheists at others. Penny Novack, a Pagan poet, once wrote that glimpses of the One could make her happy, awed, and excited, “but I can't imagine a religion based on it.”

Still another wrote to me:

And those Neo-Pagans in the Craft, the followers of Wicca, might well be considered “duotheists,” conceiving of deity as the Goddess of the Moon, Earth, and sea, and the God of the woods, the hunt, the animal realm. Feminist Witches are often monotheists worshipping the Goddess as the One. Morgan McFarland, who headed the Dallas convenstead of Morrigana, told me, “I consider myself a polytheist, as in the statement Isis makes in
The Golden Ass
when she says, ‘From me come all gods and goddesses who exist.' So that I see myself as monotheistic in believing in the Goddess, the Creatix, the Female Principle, but at the same time acknowledging that other gods and goddesses do exist through her as manifestations of her, facets of the whole.” One male polytheist said that certain portions of the Craft were afflicted with “the curse of Goddess monotheism which is apparently driving so many Witches mad.”
²⁰
Of the many answers to the question “What does it mean to you to be a Pagan and a polytheist?” the answer that I like best came from the late Wiccan priestess Alison Harlow:

That last sentence struck me profoundly. What an uncommon reaction to people's differences and how unlike the familiar reactions of fear and hostility! What kind of a person is able to say this—to celebrate differences? This is the question I struggle with. Who are those who can embrace polytheism, accepting a bit of chaos in their spiritual perspective without denying rational modes of thinking? Who are those who are able to suspend belief and disbelief at will and are equally comfortable with scientific discourse and magic ritual? Who, in short, can afford a nonauthoritarian religion? Are we talking about a broad-based phenomenon in this country? Surely not. Are we talking about ways of being that are available only to those strong enough to break with certain aspects of the dominant culture?

My own experience with the Pagan resurgence has made me reluctant to categorize Neo-Pagans according to simple age and class divisions. I am not comfortable with the “radical” analysis that says that the recent rise of occult groups is a white middle-class phenomenon. It is too simple, although many of those I subsequently met did fall into this category.