Within the depth-psychology corpus, polytheism functions not primarily as a description of ancient religious practice but as a structural metaphor for the plural, irreducible constitution of the psyche itself. The decisive theoretical intervention belongs to James Hillman, whose appendix to David L. Miller’s 1974 manifesto ‘The New Polytheism’ reframes Jung’s own hierarchical schema — in which polytheism is a developmental pre-stage to the monotheistic ‘self’ — as a liability rather than a progression. For Hillman and archetypal psychology, polytheism designates a mode of psychological consciousness that honors the multiplicity of archetypal dominants without subordinating them to a single organizing principle. Miller extends this into cultural diagnosis: the ‘death of God’ in Nietzsche’s sense releases not atheism but a plurality of gods, each commanding a coherent domain. Against this affirmative reading, inherited tensions persist: Jung’s Aion explicitly ranks monotheism higher; Samuels registers the claim cautiously; Moore treats the gods’ flexibility as a therapeutic resource against narcissistic rigidity. Burkert, approaching from classical scholarship, insists that polytheism is not the arithmetic sum of individual god-cults but a totalizing divine world in which every deity’s existence is mutually presupposed. The central tension throughout the corpus is whether psychological polytheism constitutes a mature pluralism or a regressive dissolution of integration — a debate that organizes virtually every text in which the term appears.
Jung writes: ‘The anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism.’ … as anima/animus is a pre-stage of self, so is polytheism a pre-stage of monotheism.
Hillman’s appendix identifies the foundational Jungian text that ranks polytheism developmentally below monotheism, establishing the central tension that archetypal psychology must contest.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon … is of less significance for modern man than is the self of monotheism.
Hillman argues that Jung’s preference for self over anima/animus implicitly devalues polytheistic psychology’s core commitment to archetypal plurality.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
A primacy of the self implies rather that the understanding of the complexes at the differentiated level once formulated as a polytheistic pantheon … is of less significance for modern man than is the self of monotheism.
This parallel text restates the foundational critique: Jung’s developmental hierarchy undermines the archetypal-psychological case for a permanently valid polytheistic consciousness.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983thesis
Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation. The situation is characterized by plurality … Socially understood, polytheism is eternally in unresolvable conflict with social monotheism, which in its worst form is fascism.
Miller defines polytheism as a lived social and psychological condition of irreducible plurality, positioning it as the structural antagonist of all monistic — including politically authoritarian — organization.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
Polytheistic psychology would meet this so-called disintegration in its own language, by means of archetypal likeness: similis similibus curantur … There would be less need for compensation through opposites.
Hillman argues that polytheistic psychology heals fragmentation not by opposing it with integrative images (mandalas) but by meeting each disintegrative phenomenon through its own archetypal likeness.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
By turning to polytheism we leave behind the riddling conundrums built upon monotheism — either religion or psychology, either one or many … We enter a style of consciousness where psychology and religion are not defined against each other.
Hillman presents polytheism as a style of consciousness that dissolves false either/or oppositions endemic to monotheistic logic and restores the condition of psychologically rich, pre-theological cultures.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
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.
Miller clarifies that psychological polytheism is an epistemological stance — a mode of perceiving existence as qualified by archetypal presence — not a literal religious cult or creed.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
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.
The contrast between monotheistic and polytheistic psychologies is rendered in therapeutic terms: unity-through-compensation versus encounter-through-likeness.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
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.
Parallel formulation confirming that the monotheism/polytheism distinction operates as a fundamental methodological cleavage within depth psychology’s therapeutic theory.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
The anxiety that derives from heroic efforts toward integration eases in a condition of polytheism … the guiding principle of polytheism is to give each divine figure the attention he or she requires.
Polytheism is presented as a therapeutic disposition that replaces the ego’s integrative anxiety with a receptive honoring of each archetypal figure on its own terms.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989thesis
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 argues that polytheism is not a reactive philosophical position but a self-sufficient mode of consciousness that precedes and exceeds its nominalization as a theological category.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
Despite the historical evidence of religions, there is a fond notion without adequate foundation that monotheism is the pinnacle … Jung may not be borne out by the historical facts of religion, but he is borne out by the psychological bias of the historians of religion.
Hillman challenges the assumed teleology from polytheism to monotheism as a historical fiction perpetuated by scholars whose own biases mirror Jung’s developmental scheme.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
Our life is polytheistic; it is a many-splendored thing, down deep, if we only knew it … ‘The things of heaven and earth are such a wide realm that the organs of all being together only can provide comprehension.’
Miller grounds psychological polytheism in the lived immediacy of experience, enlisting Symmachus’s classical defense of religious plurality against Ambrose’s orthodoxy.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
only the totality of the gods constitutes the divine world … There is no jealous god as in the Judeo-Christian faith. What is fatal is if a god is overlooked.
Burkert establishes the classical structural principle of polytheism: the divine world is constituted by the interdependent totality of all gods, not by any single deity — the oversight of any one carries existential consequence.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
The fantasy of polytheism permits no single one to be elevated to The One in a literalistic manner … In this polytheistic vision the struggle between the one and the many, good and evil, and all the either-or problems of the monotheistic fantasy become irrelevant.
Hillman argues that the polytheistic imagination structurally prevents any archetype from achieving totalizing dominance, dissolving the binary oppositions that sustain monotheistic psychological structures.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975supporting
The new polytheism allows us to put together the relation of mythology and philosophy … seeing a connection between all the Gods and Goddesses of ancient Greece and an Occidental way of thinking … that we had supposed was monotheistic.
Miller’s programmatic statement locates polytheism as the concealed substructure of Western philosophy and theology, revealing that what appeared monotheistic was always dependent on polytheistic thinking.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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 summarizes the post-Jungian case for psychological polytheism as a non-moralistic, ego-transcending approach to the imaginal world that follows naturally from the collapse of Christian symbolic consensus.
, Jung and the Post-Jungians, 1985supporting
the special type of temperament and emotion that produces monotheism and favours the self above anima/animus … would be the senex. This archetype might also help account for theological monotheism’s obdurate persistence, religious intolerance, and conviction of superiority.
Hillman psychologizes the preference for monotheism itself, attributing it to the senex archetype and thereby casting the monotheism/polytheism debate as an intra-psychic conflict between archetypes.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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 articulates polytheistic theology as inherently narrative and aesthetic rather than systematic, aligning it with Hopper’s concept of theopoiesis and distinguishing it from doctrinal religion.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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.’
Summarizing multiple interlocutors, Miller presents the strongest inversion of the developmental hierarchy: polytheism is ontologically prior and more comprehensive than monotheism.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
In Greek mythology, the flexibility of the gods and goddesses is one of their primary traits … Suppleness is an extremely important quality of soul.
Moore draws on polytheistic divine flexibility as a therapeutic counterweight to narcissistic rigidity, linking care of the soul directly to the mythological recognition of multiple, mutually acknowledged divine figures.
, Care of the Soul Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition: A Guide, 1992supporting
polytheistic psychology takes its fundamental structures, the Gods, mythically, in their own language, and not literally, idolatrously, as objects of belief … it is the fixed concretism (wood and stone), the literal relation to myths and images and Gods, a proscription to which we too subscribe.
Hillman distinguishes psychological polytheism from idolatry by insisting that its mythic-metaphorical mode of engaging the gods is precisely what the Biblical prohibition against idols also proscribes when taken literally.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
Only when stepping back and theorizing in the reflective stance about polytheistic consciousness can we speak about radical relativism … only the ‘ego’ can speak of mythical complexity as ‘radical relativism,’ rather than as dramatic tragedy or the constellation of fate.
Hillman cautions that labeling polytheistic consciousness as ‘radical relativism’ is itself an ego-position that stands outside myth, while genuine polytheistic engagement is dramatic, fated, not merely optional.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
not only is social and psychological fascism a danger lurking in monotheistic thinking, but there is danger in polytheism, too … The greater the fragmentation the greater is the peril — and the attractiveness — of some monistic organization.
Miller acknowledges the risk inherent in polytheistic plurality — that extreme fragmentation invites the very totalitarian reaction it opposes — introducing a dialectical self-critique into the new polytheism’s program.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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 performs a reciprocal service for theology, liberating it from the reductive psychologization of its own monotheistic categories.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
The anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism … This age-old function of the symbol is still present today, despite the fact that for many centuries the trend of mental development has been towards the suppression of individual symbol-formation … the extermination of polytheism.
Jung’s own formulation, cited here in the anima context, links the suppression of individual symbolic activity directly to the historical extermination of polytheism, lending developmental weight to Hillman’s cultural diagnosis.
, Anima: An Anatomy of a Personified Notion, 1985supporting
deeper than any superficial analogies between Occidental thinking and polytheism is the fact that ancient Greek religious images — Gods, Soul, Fate, Law — are the fundamentals of all later thinking, scientific and mystical, even to this very day.
Drawing on Cornford, Miller establishes the historical and intellectual thesis that Western rational thought is constitutively grounded in polytheistic religious imagination, not merely analogically related to it.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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 … it has surfaced radically in our age and calls now for a recollection, a new look at what polytheism was really all about.
Miller frames the cultural turn to polytheism as a response to the demonstrated inadequacy of monovalent meaning-structures for engaging the radical plurality of contemporary experience.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
What Brown calls poly-morphous and what Laing calls antiunilateralism, Hillman names straight out as polytheism.
Miller situates Hillman’s polytheism within a constellation of contemporaneous psychological and existential concepts — Brown’s polymorphism, Laing’s anti-unilateralism — as the most direct naming of a shared intellectual project.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
the long historical prejudice against images for their association with polytheistic paganism, or in monotheistic language: ‘idolatry and demonism.’
Hillman identifies the clinical pathology of image-sickness in Western culture as rooted in the monotheistic demonization of the imaginal world through its association with polytheistic paganism.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
the long historical prejudice against images for their association with polytheistic paganism, or in monotheistic language: ‘idolatry and demonism.’
Parallel passage reinforcing that the cultural suppression of imagination is historically legible as a monotheistic campaign against polytheistic image-culture.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983supporting
Polytheism we may define as the recognition and worship of a plurality of gods; monalatry as the worship of a single god — one’s own — while recognizing others.
Campbell offers a typological differentiation between polytheism, monolatry, and monotheism that provides definitional precision to a terminology the depth-psychology corpus tends to deploy more speculatively.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964aside
I have called it ‘polytheism.’ Others use different words … Henry Corbin urged discretion with regard to naming this situation … he was following a path already charted by William James.
Miller acknowledges the contested status of the term itself, noting that Corbin and James preferred other formulations, which signals the term’s provisionality as a conceptual marker.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside
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 … that of the circle.
Miller traces the historical tension between monotheism and polytheism through the symbol of the circle, identifying the sphere’s appropriation by monotheistic theology as a suppression of polytheistic plurality.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside