Monotheism vs Polytheism

[Kyriakos]

Loons in what way? Genuinely mentally ill? Over-enthusiastic re-enactors? (some SCA people have gotten a bit carried away at times)

Or are they true believers in Zeus, Hera, Apollo, etc.?

Well, to be brief, afaik they take annual trips to mount Olympus, to do some ceremony. It isn't really high-brow stuff

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Well, to be brief, afaik they take annual trips to mount Olympus, to do some ceremony. It isn't really high-brow stuff

So they're basically recreational re-enactors.

I wouldn't characterize them as "loons" unless they really start to believe in the old mythology. After all, I spent 12 years in a medieval re-enactment group, and our focus was more educational than flashy entertainment (although we could do that as well, if called upon; we provided a demonstration of swordfighting and fencing at a local theatre, as part of the publicity for the "First Knight" movie that starred Sean Connery and Richard Gere).

 

[Kyriakos]

So they're basically recreational re-enactors.

I wouldn't characterize them as "loons" unless they really start to believe in the old mythology. After all, I spent 12 years in a medieval re-enactment group, and our focus was more educational than flashy entertainment (although we could do that as well, if called upon; we provided a demonstration of swordfighting and fencing at a local theatre, as part of the publicity for the "First Knight" movie that starred Sean Connery and Richard Gere).

I wouldn't be surprised if among them some do think they are following the old religion, while some others (organizers) are making some money off this as a scam.

 

[caketastydelish]

What's India now, chopped liver?

India was only unified in any political sense after the British conquered them which I think is very telling in and of itself. Even then Pakistan split. And the country is in massive poverty and never accomplished as much as any other empire which conquered others.

 

[W|M]

 

[sophie]

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

India was only unified in any political sense after the British conquered them which I think is very telling in and of itself. Even then Pakistan split. And the country is in massive poverty and never accomplished as much as any other empire which conquered others.

I'm guesing you were geopolitically educated in the Murican school system...

it's OK, we understand.

 

[Traitorfish]

And by much the same token,

Truth is that India didn't start on the path to genuine political unification until 1947, and it was Indians who did the unifying.

 

[warpus]

Hmmm technically wouldn't monotheism have appeared before polytheism? I mean at some point there was a stage where 0 gods were worshipped. Then some guy came along and said: "Hey let's worship this god, the sky" (or whatever). Then at some point somebody said: "But what about the moon?". But in between these two statements it seems that monotheism must have existed for some period of time, whether it was decades, years, days, or minutes.

 

[Traitorfish]

Hmmm technically wouldn't monotheism have appeared before polytheism? I mean at some point there was a stage where 0 gods were worshipped. Then some guy came along and said: "Hey let's worship this god, the sky" (or whatever). Then at some point somebody said: "But what about the moon?". But in between these two statements it seems that monotheism must have existed for some period of time, whether it was decades, years, days, or minutes.

Not really. The "default" outlook for humans seems to be some sort of animism. In animistic belief-systems, there's not a clear distinction between "gods" in the sense we'd recognise and other forms of life- animals, trees, mountains, ancestors. Some are more or less powerful, more or less corporeal, but that's a matter of degree, not fundamentally of kind. The elevation of specific beings above the rest, as divinities, comes a lot later, with the emergence of institutions capable of elevating certain beings above the rest, usually institutions which are tied up with elevating certain people above the rest.

Even then, it only really seems to be completed in retrospect, when monotheists take the sorts of gods that got big shrines in royal complexes and mark them out as being of a separate kind than the little gods who got shrines in peasant houses. So from a certain angle, you can indeed say that monotheism precedes polytheism, but only in the sense that you need monotheism to make "polytheism" meaningful as a concept.

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

Not really. The "default" outlook for humans seems to be some sort of animism. In animistic belief-systems, there's not a clear distinction between "gods" in the sense we'd recognise and other forms of life- animals, trees, mountains, ancestors. Some are more or less powerful, more or less corporeal, but that's a matter of degree, not fundamentally of kind. The elevation of specific beings above the rest, as divinities, comes a lot later, with the emergence of institutions capable of elevating certain beings above the rest, usually institutions which are tied up with elevating certain people above the rest.

Even then, it only really seems to be completed in retrospect, when monotheists take the sorts of gods that got big shrines in royal complexes and mark them out as being of a separate kind than the little gods who got shrines in peasant houses. So from a certain angle, you can indeed say that monotheism precedes polytheism, but only in the sense that you need monotheism to make "polytheism" meaningful as a concept.

Dang, and here I thought animism was believing in anime...

 

[warpus]

Not really. The "default" outlook for humans seems to be some sort of animism

I was being slightly facetious as what happened was likely a pantheon of gods arising initially at about the same time. But technically there must have been that first god, even if that lasted a couple minutes or seconds. I mean, there must have been a time before animism.

 

[timtofly]

Well the designer of the universe....

The whole point about gods, was trying to establish a connection with a past that was broken. It is dimensional thought, not cause and effect thought.

 

[Traitorfish]

I was being slightly facetious as what happened was likely a pantheon of gods arising initially at about the same time. But technically there must have been that first god, even if that lasted a couple minutes or seconds. I mean, there must have been a time before animism.

Why? Human beings aren't pre-installed with a clear distinction between the animate and the inanimate, it's learned. Every three year old is a natural animist. There's no reason to believe that humans started off as stony empiricists, and then just added a bunch of gods later on.

 

[Mouthwash]

May be slightly off-topic here, but would it be fair to characterize Nazi Germany as pagan?

 

[warpus]

Why? Human beings aren't pre-installed with a clear distinction between the animate and the inanimate, it's learned. Every three year old is a natural animist. There's no reason to believe that humans started off as stony empiricists, and then just added a bunch of gods later on.

You forget that we were not always human! At some point we were creatures who did not have any concept of gods. That had to begin at some point, so technically at some point you had "the first god"

 

[Traitorfish]

You forget that we were not always human! At some point we were creatures who did not have any concept of gods. That had to begin at some point, so technically at some point you had "the first god"

Animals don't have an innate sense of the animate and inanimate, either. There are a million cat videos on YouTube which testify to this. Humans are possibly the only creatures to have developed a clear animate/inanimate distinction, and given that every human learns this distinction individually, as part of childhood development, it's not an enormous stretch to say that we also learn it collectively. Without meaning to imply that animistic belief-systems are in some way infantile, as societies, any early human society was going to have to start drawing these distinctions for themselves, and they were doing so without the benefit, or perhaps from their perspective the baggage, of modern materialistic science. It seems most likely that the default position is that everything we encounter is a discrete and complete being, every rock and every tree and every gust of wind, and that we then embark on a process of whittling down what we are willing to attribute animacy to, so that a rock is inanimate but a mountain is very much alive, that a tree is just a tree but a forest is a power to be reckoned with, and "gods" emerge from this as those beings of enough significance to demand our regular attention, which present humans with relationships which are inescapable and therefore need to be carefully cultivated through the correct process of rituals and exchange, much as humans (and especially high-status humans) cultivate relationships between themselves.

May be slightly off-topic here, but would it be fair to characterize Nazi Germany as pagan?

Not really. There were circles within the Nazi movement that dabbled in paganism, but it was never mainstream within the movement, let alone German society at large. Even those circles were really an outgrowth of nineteenth century mysticism with a lot of Norse trappings, rather than any sincere neopaganism. If Nazism had a religion, it was pretty much the deformed weirdo-Christianity the Nazis always said it was, with all the peace and love stuff replaced with "DEUS VULT" in point-100 letters.

 

[timtofly]

May be slightly off-topic here, but would it be fair to characterize Nazi Germany as pagan?

It would seem most Germans did not change their respective religious practices over night. If paganism is trying to revive entities from other dimensions, then nazi practices may be considered pagan.

 

[warpus]

"gods" emerge from this as those beings of enough significance to demand our regular attention

Yeah and there would have had to be a first god to emerge at some point. Mind you others likely emerged right after

 

[Traitorfish]

Yeah and there would have had to be a first god to emerge at some point. Mind you others likely emerged right after

But at that point you're playing a game with definitions, saying that such-and-such spirit is the first which meets whatever arbitrary criteria that culturally-monotheistic modern have set for "god"-hood. It's not an honest description of how human belief-systems actually developed, or how some contemporary belief systems, like Shinto or shamanism, actually view the world.

As I said, this notion of divinity as opposed to mortality, of there being one kind of thinking-being called "humans" who live on the Earth, and another kind of thinking-being called "gods" who live in the sky, is a pretty recent innovation, and may arguably reflect the assumptions of monotheists imposed back onto polytheistic societies. Even when polytheists did set aside a certain set of beings as "gods" in the Olympian sense, as something above and beyond the mortal world, these were rarely the only beings which humans revered or made offerings to. The ancient revered gods of hearth and field and forest as much as gods of sky and kingship and war. Further, this above-ness wasn't always clearly metaphysical, clearly a difference of kind; the Olympians shared kinship with the titans and the Aesir with the giants, so what distinguished both groups was not their essence so much as their status as the dominant tribe of supernatural beings. While there was a fundamental difference set between humans and supernatural beings which may not exist in a purely animistic culture, there wasn't the sort of hard metaphysical distinction between the troll that lives in that big rock and edge of town and Odin the All-Father that we might suppose.

It's not even clear that pre-modern monotheists drew such a hard distinction; plenty of monotheistic societies, like Ireland, Iceland or the Indonesia (no alliteration intended), continued to take it for granted that the world was populated by a great many things that weren't human, but because these cultures revered a single, capital-G God, these beings became "elves" or "trolls" or "spirits", even if the attitudes held towards them, and the rituals used to placate them, were not clearly distinct from those used to placate small or even big gods in a polytheistic culture. "God", here, refers to a specific being, rather than to a kind of being, and capital-G "God" appears to be able to coexist more or less comfortably with beings who would in any other context be described as small-g "gods", so long as everyone is careful about their terminology.

There's a whole process by which humans gradually start distinguishing animate from inanimate, then human-animate from non-human animate, then natural-animate from supernatural-animate, then worldly-animate from heavenly-animate, and then, only at the far end of this process, when they are already steeped in distinctions, "Man" from "God". Without meaning to suggest that this is a predetermine path that all religions follow- it's evidently not, at Hinduism and Shintoism demonstrate- it seems to be the genealogy of West-Eurasian monotheism, and I don't think it's wise to project the categories found at the far end of this millennia-spanning process onto its origins.