Polytheism

Jung writes: 'The anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism.' Although he pays high respect to the 'numina, anima and animus' and conceives the self as a conjunction, he nevertheless also implies that as anima/animus is a pre-stage of self, so is polytheism a pre-stage of monotheism.

Hillman's appendix to Miller identifies Jung's developmental subordination of polytheism to the self as the central point of contention that archetypal psychology must address.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology that stresses the plurality of the archetypes. A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon and represented, at its best, in the psyche of Greek antiquity and of the Renaissance, is of less significance for modern man than is the self of monotheism.

Hillman frames the polytheism/monotheism dispute as a foundational challenge to the Jungian privileging of the self, arguing that a polytheistic pantheon of complexes is not a lesser stage but a superior psychological model.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology that stresses the plurality of the archetypes. A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon and represented, at its best, in the psyche of Greek antiquity and of the Renaissance, is of less significance for modern man than is the self of monotheism.

This parallel passage in the Brief Account restates Hillman's central thesis that polytheistic psychology represents an epistemologically richer alternative to the monotheistic self.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation. The situation is characterized by plurality, a plurality that manifests itself in many forms. Socially, polytheism is a situation in which there are various values, patterns of social organization, and principles by which man governs his political life.

Miller establishes polytheism as a comprehensive cultural and psychological diagnosis of modernity's irreducible pluralism, distinguishing it from mere religious pluralism.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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The anxiety that derives from heroic efforts toward integration eases in a condition of polytheism. At the same time, the guiding principle of polytheism is to give each divine figure the attention he or she requires.

Hillman argues that polytheism relieves the psychological burden of integration by legitimising the coexistence of conflicting psychic figures, each deserving its own attention.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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Polytheistic psychology would meet this so-called disintegration in its own language, by means of archetypal likeness: similis similibus curantur. Each particular phenomenon in an experience of breakdown would be viewed less in terms of the construct breakdown.

Hillman proposes that polytheistic psychology treats psychic fragmentation homeopathically — by amplifying its own archetypal images rather than compensating with unifying symbols.

Hillman, James, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis

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Monotheistic psychology counters disintegration with archetypal images of order (mandalas). Unity compensates plurality. Polytheistic psychology would meet disintegration in its own language and archetypal likeness; there would be less need for compensation through opposites.

Hillman contrasts the compensatory logic of monotheistic psychology with the immanent method of polytheistic psychology, which addresses disintegration through its own archetypal register.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis

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Monotheistic psychology counters disintegration with archetypal images of order (mandalas). Unity compensates plurality. Polytheistic psychology would meet disintegration in its own language and archetypal likeness; there would be less need for compensation through opposites.

Parallel passage establishing the structural opposition between mandala-based monotheistic compensation and the archetypal immanence of polytheistic psychology.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis

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Psychological polytheism is concerned less with worship than with attitudes, with the way we see things and place them. Gods, for psychology, are neither believed in nor addressed directly. They are rather adjectival than substantive; the polytheistic experience finds existence qualified with archetypal presence.

Hillman clarifies that psychological polytheism operates as an attitude or mode of perception rather than a religious belief system, with gods functioning as qualitative modes of archetypal presence.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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By turning to polytheism we leave behind the riddling conundrums built upon monotheism — either religion or psychology, either one or many, either theology or mythology. We enter a style of consciousness where psychology and religion are not defined against each other.

Hillman argues that polytheism dissolves the binary oppositions imposed by monotheistic logic, enabling psychology and religion to interpenetrate without mutual exclusion.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis

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Polytheism is not necessarily half of a philosophical pair, requiring monotheism for its other side. In itself polytheism is a style of consciousness — and this style should not even be called 'polytheistic,' for strictly, historically, when polytheism reigns there is no such word.

Miller contends that polytheism is not a dialectical opposite of monotheism but an autonomous style of consciousness that predates and exceeds the binary framing imposed by monotheistic discourse.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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The new polytheism is not only a contemporary sensibility. It is also a way of rethinking the past tradition of thinking, and especially the orthodox tradition of religious thinking. The new polytheism allows us to put together the relation of mythology and philosophy.

Miller presents the new polytheism as simultaneously a contemporary cultural diagnosis and a revisionary hermeneutic for the entire Western philosophical and theological tradition.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis

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Despite the historical evidence of religions, there is a fond notion without adequate foundation that monotheism is the pinnacle and that 'the evolution of religion thus manifests, it would seem, a definite tendency toward an integration of our mental and emotional life.'

Hillman challenges the assumption that monotheism represents an evolutionary pinnacle, citing historical evidence that monolatry and polytheism coexisted even within avowedly monotheistic traditions.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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The fantasy of polytheism permits no single one to be elevated to The One in a literalistic manner. Zeus posits himself above all others, for the archetypal idea of oneness presents itself as first, superior, progenitor. But Zeus is only one among other equals, a primus inter pares.

Hillman uses the mythological figure of Zeus to illustrate that polytheistic imagination resists absolutism — even the highest god remains bounded by others.

Hillman, James, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting

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Polytheism involves making, seeing and living plural patterns of behaviour but not making morality out of myth. Polytheism is claimed to permit non-ego experience — i.e. challenging our conventional notion of the necessity of an experiencing ego.

Samuels summarises the post-Jungian case for polytheism as a mode that decouples myth from moral prescription and disrupts the primacy of the ego as the sole locus of experience.

Samuels, Andrew, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting

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Polytheism means that many gods are worshipped not only at the same place and at the same time, but by the same community and by the same individual; only the totality of the gods constitutes the divine world. However much a god is intent on his honour, he never disputes the existence of any other god.

Burkert establishes the religious-historical principle that polytheism is constituted by the totality of gods worshipped simultaneously by the same persons, with no deity denying the reality of the others.

Burkert, Walter, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting

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Our life is polytheistic; it is a many-splendored thing, down deep, if we only knew it. A polytheistic theology, because it makes contact with the immediacy of life out of the depths, is itself a religion with no scripture, but with many stories.

Miller articulates polytheistic theology as narrative and experiential rather than doctrinal, grounded in the immediate multiplicity of lived depth rather than scriptural authority.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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There is no orthodoxy in polytheistic theology. A polytheistic theology will be stories of the Gods (rather than theistic systems) and an aesthetic creation (rather than a logic of life). It will be theopoiesis.

Miller characterises polytheistic theology as anti-systematic, proceeding through narrative and aesthetic creation rather than doctrinal logic.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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The long historical prejudice against images for their association with polytheistic paganism, or in monotheistic language: 'idolatry and demonism.' I urged the clinician to study not only the images of sickness but also this sickness of images.

Hillman locates the clinical suppression of imagination in Western culture's monotheistic condemnation of polytheistic imagery as idolatry, proposing that the sickness of images is itself a diagnostic category.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting

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The long historical prejudice against images for their association with polytheistic paganism, or in monotheistic language: 'idolatry and demonism.' I urged the clinician to study not only the images of sickness but also this sickness of images.

Parallel passage in the Brief Account connecting the historical demonisation of polytheistic imagery to a culturally embedded pathology of the imagination relevant to clinical work.

Hillman, James, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting

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Not only is social and psychological fascism a danger lurking in monotheistic thinking, but there is danger in polytheism, too, especially if one thinks it, like Niebuhr, in a sociological way.

Miller acknowledges the critical counter-argument that polytheism, when reduced to a sociological description of fragmented values, carries its own dangers of anarchy and ideological capture.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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By polytheizing his psychology, Hillman provides theology the opportunity to save itself from psychologizing its monotheism. Something far more important than number is at stake in the question of monotheism and polytheism.

Miller argues that Hillman's polytheistic psychology liberates theology from the reductive move of psychologising its own monotheism, insisting the debate concerns modes of consciousness rather than numerical plurality.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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In Greek mythology, the flexibility of the gods and goddesses is one of their primary traits. They may fight each other, but they recognize each other's validity.

Moore draws on the Greek polytheistic model to argue that suppleness and mutual recognition among divine figures offers a therapeutic corrective to the rigidity of narcissistic consciousness.

Moore, Thomas, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting

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Only when stepping back and theorizing in the reflective stance about polytheistic consciousness can we speak about radical relativism. Only when one has assumed the old ego position of evaluation and choice outside the engagement of myth in life.

Hillman cautions that the charge of radical relativism against polytheistic consciousness is itself a product of the ego's detached, evaluative stance rather than of genuine mythic engagement.

Hillman, James, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting

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Monotheism is a narrowed and extremest partial truth, while polytheism is higher because it is more basic, ubiquitous, and lasting. The many contains the unity of the one without losing the possibilities of the many.

Miller reports Giegerich's inversion of the usual hierarchy, positioning polytheism as ontologically prior to and more encompassing than monotheism.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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Ancient Greek religious images — Gods, Soul, Fate, Law — are the fundamentals of all later thinking, scientific and mystical, even to this very day. These old images have become our notions of substance, cause and effect, matter, and so on.

Miller, citing Cornford, argues that polytheistic Greek religious images are the concealed foundational substrate of all subsequent Western thinking, scientific and philosophical alike.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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The anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism.... The extermination of polytheism [was] a step in the direction of the suppression of individual symbol-formation.

Jung's correlation of anima/animus with polytheism is cited alongside his view that the historical suppression of polytheism arrested the individual capacity for symbolic formation.

Hillman, James, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting

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Polytheism we may define as the recognition and worship of a plurality of gods; monolatry as the worship of a single god — one's own — while recognizing others.

Campbell provides a foundational typological distinction between polytheism, monolatry, and monotheism, clarifying the conceptual terrain within which depth-psychological arguments are situated.

Campbell, Joseph, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting

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There is a radical experience of the plurality of both social and psychological life; one discovers that a single story, a monovalent logic, a rigid theology, and a confining morality are not adequate to help in understanding the nature of real meaning.

Miller diagnoses modern cultural fragmentation as a symptom of the inadequacy of monotheistic frameworks, calling for a recovery of polytheistic symbol-systems.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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The tension that has existed in the West between monotheism and polytheism can be seen in the curious case of a symbol which has meant a great deal to man throughout Occidental history. This is that of the circle.

Miller traces the Western tension between monotheism and polytheism through the symbolism of the circle, linking Xenophanes' abstract single deity to the monotheistic suppression of plurality.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting

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The emphasis upon the self of psychological monotheism may help explain the theological interests of contemporary Jungians and the peculiar blending of psychological and theological concerns.

Miller notes that the Jungian privileging of the self carries an implicit senex archetypal bias that explains Jungian psychology's persistent entanglement with theological monotheism.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside

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What Brown calls poly-morphous and what Laing calls antiunilateralism, Hillman names straight out as polytheism.

Miller aligns Hillman's explicit polytheism with the polymorphous perversity of Brown and the anti-unilateralism of Laing as convergent diagnoses of the psyche's irreducible plurality.

Miller, David L., The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside

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