The Seba library treats Pantheism in 9 passages, across 6 authors (including McGilchrist, Iain, Hillman, James, Simondon, Gilbert).
the distinction between the creator and the created is not a distinction between two entities, but a distinction between two ways of conceiving a single reality
McGilchrist presents Spinozist pantheism as identifying creator and created under a single ontological description, then argues panentheism supersedes it by preserving genuine otherness and the possibility of divine relationship.
, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
We need immanence, yes, which pantheism offers; but we need the union of transcendence with immanence, which only some form of panentheism
McGilchrist diagnoses pantheism as correctly affirming divine immanence but structurally incapable of the transcendence-immanence unity that panentheism alone can provide.
, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
A polytheistic vision differs from undifferentiated pantheism, holy vitalism, and naturalistic animism – which from the standpoint of monotheistic consciousness tend to be bunched together as ‘pagan’ and ‘primitive.’
Hillman explicitly demarcates archetypal polytheism from pantheism, rejecting the notion of gods as primal energy suffused through nature in favour of gods as the formal intelligibility of phenomena.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
Gods in archetypal psychology are not some primal energy suffused through the universe nor are they imagined to be independent magical powers working on us through things.
Hillman clarifies that pantheism’s diffuse divine energy is precisely what archetypal psychology rejects, substituting instead the concept of gods as ordered, intelligible presences within phenomena.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
pantheism does not avoid this anthropomorphism, for it can do nothing but expand the singular individual to the dimensions of the cosmos; but the analogy between microcosm and macrocosm…sustains the individuality of the macrocosm.
Simondon argues that pantheism fails to escape the individualism it appears to transcend, instead reproducing anthropomorphic individuality at a cosmic scale and thereby generating the Spinozist paradox of freedom within necessity.
, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information, 2020thesis
Where the daimones are alive ‘polytheism,’ ‘pantheism,’ ‘animism,’ and even ‘religion’ do not appear.
Miller argues that ‘pantheism’ is a retrospective, monotheistically generated label: genuine polytheistic consciousness requires no such term, suggesting the concept is an artefact of the very framework it claims to oppose.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
Xenophanes — the conclusion can hardly be resisted — was at the same time a monotheist, a polytheist, and a pantheist.
Miller, reading Voegelin on Xenophanes, uses the coexistence of monotheism, polytheism, and pantheism in a single thinker to argue that theological categorisation is a rationalistic imposition foreign to authentic religious experience.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
He evolved ideas which were profoundly different from conventional Judaism and which had been influenced by scientific thinkers such as Descartes and the Christian scholastics.
Armstrong’s account of Spinoza’s excommunication contextualises the historical emergence of pantheism as a heterodox position generated at the intersection of Jewish, scientific, and scholastic thought.
, A History of God, 1993supporting
pantheism 155
A bare index reference placing pantheism in proximity to dream symbolism and ocean imagery, signalling its presence in the text without developed argument.
, Understanding Dreams and Other Spontaneous Images: The Invisible Storyteller, 2018aside