Within the depth-psychology corpus, ‘polytheistic’ functions not merely as a descriptor of ancient religious plurality but as a radical epistemological and psychological category — a style of consciousness that stands in constitutive tension with monotheism. David L. Miller’s The New Polytheism (1974) and James Hillman’s appendix to that volume, ‘Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,’ together represent the fullest elaboration of the term’s theoretical stakes. Miller argues that the fracturing of modern social, intellectual, and psychological life demands not merely tolerance of plurality but a polytheistic theology adequate to plural experience. Hillman recasts the term clinically: a polytheistic psychology meets psychic disintegration in its own language rather than compensating it with images of unity; it circulates consciousness among a field of powers, each complex receiving its due. The tension between monotheistic integration — represented by Jung’s self-archetype and its senex coloring — and polytheistic differentiation through anima, animus, and the divine figures runs through the entire debate. Burkert’s classical scholarship grounds the term historically, insisting that polytheism is not a sum of individual cults but a totality in which the divine world is constituted only by all gods together. Hillman’s archetypal psychology explicitly situates itself against Northern European Protestant-Jewish monotheistic Weltanschauung, finding its imaginative home in the southern, Mediterranean, polytheistic imaginal geography. The term thus indexes a methodological choice: whether the psyche is to be governed by a single sovereign principle or allowed its native multiplicity.
Polytheistic psychology obliges consciousness to circulate among a field of powers. Each God has his due as each complex deserves its respect in its own right.
Hillman’s appendix presents polytheistic psychology as a clinical-structural necessity: consciousness must circulate among multiple archetypal powers rather than subordinating all to a single dominant principle.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation. The situation is characterized by plurality, a plurality that manifests itself in many forms.
Miller defines polytheism as a comprehensive cultural, social, and psychological condition of irreducible plurality that cannot be resolved into any single center of value.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
Our life is polytheistic; it is a many-splendored thing, down deep, if we only knew it… A polytheistic theology will release man into depth.
Miller argues that polytheistic theology accesses the immediate depths of life, relieving individuals from the puritanical demand for completeness imposed by monotheistic frameworks.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
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.
Hillman contends that adopting a polytheistic style of consciousness dissolves the false binaries generated by monotheistic frameworks, allowing psychology and religion to interpenetrate rather than exclude each other.
, Re-Visioning Psychology, 1975thesis
Without a consciously polytheistic psychology are we not more susceptible to an unconscious fragmentation called schizophrenia?
Hillman proposes that the absence of a consciously held polytheistic psychology leaves the psyche vulnerable to unconscious disintegration, whereas polytheistic awareness would meet fragmentation through archetypal likeness rather than compensatory unity.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
Polytheism is not necessarily half of a philosophical pair, requiring monotheism for its other side. In itself polytheism is a style of consciousness.
Hillman argues that polytheism must not be understood as simply the dialectical opposite of monotheism but as an autonomous, self-sufficient mode of imagining and experiencing reality.
, 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.
Hillman contrasts the monotheistic compensatory strategy of imposing unifying imagery against breakdown with the polytheistic approach of meeting each disintegration through its own archetypal idiom.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983thesis
A polytheistic religion is actually a polytheistic theology, a system of symbolizing reality in a plural way in order to account for all experience.
Miller distinguishes polytheism as theology from polytheism as religious practice, arguing that a pluralistic experience of modern life calls for a theological system capable of accounting for the full range of human experience.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974thesis
Hillman’s work consistently defies the systematic mindset and underscores the polytheistic nature of psychic life. Many Jungians have found this critique untenable; others manage to view the psyche through both monotheistic and polytheistic lenses.
This passage identifies the polytheistic stance as constitutive of archetypal psychology’s methodological identity, noting the internal Jungian controversy over whether the psyche can be viewed through both frameworks simultaneously.
, Senex & Puer, 2015thesis
The fantasy of polytheism permits no single one to be elevated to The One in a literalistic manner. Zeus posits himself above all others… But Zeus is only one among other equals, a primus inter pares.
Hillman shows that in polytheistic mythical thinking the drive toward oneness is itself mythologized — Zeus represents the archetypal idea of primacy but remains bounded by the other gods, preventing any absolute elevation.
, 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.
Hillman clarifies that psychological polytheism operates as an adjectival, attitudinal mode of perception — recognizing archetypal presences as qualities of experience — rather than as a literal religious practice.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
The emphasis upon the self of psychological monotheism may help explain the theological interests of contemporary Jungians… and the peculiar blending of
Hillman identifies the senex archetype as the psychological substrate underlying monotheistic insistence on the self as supreme, linking theological monotheism’s intolerance to a specific archetypal temperament.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
A polytheistic model of the psyche seems logical and helpful when confronting the many voices and figments that pop up in any single patient.
Hillman grounds the clinical utility of polytheistic psychology in the observable multiplicity of voices and figures encountered in psychotherapeutic practice.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
The anxiety that derives from heroic efforts toward integration eases in a condition of polytheism… In a polytheistic view of the psyche, conflicts no longer seem so decisive.
This passage presents polytheism as a psychological stance that de-escalates internal conflict by honoring multiple forces simultaneously rather than forcing resolution through ego-driven integration.
, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman, 1989supporting
Only when stepping back and theorizing in the reflective stance about polytheistic consciousness can we speak about radical relativism.
Hillman cautions that polytheistic consciousness, when observed from outside through an ego standpoint, is misread as radical relativism, whereas from within it is lived as dramatic engagement and fate.
, Mythic Figures, 2007supporting
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.
Miller presents the new polytheism as a hermeneutical lens that recovers the concealed polytheistic foundations underlying Western philosophical and theological traditions.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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.
Burkert establishes the classical historical definition of polytheism as a constitutive totality rather than a collection of separate divine cults, providing the scholarly foundation for the depth-psychological reappropriation of the term.
, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, 1977supporting
Monotheism is a narrowed and extremest partial truth, while polytheism is higher because it is more basic, ubiquitous, and lasting.
Giegerich’s position, cited by Hillman, inverts the traditional theological hierarchy, arguing that polytheism surpasses monotheism in scope and ontological primacy.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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).
Miller characterizes polytheistic theology as essentially narrative and aesthetic rather than systematic, identifying theopoiesis as its proper mode of expression.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
Polytheistic psychology takes its fundamental structures, the Gods, mythically, in their own language, and not literally, idolatrously, as objects of belief.
Hillman distinguishes polytheistic psychology from idolatrous literalism, insisting that the gods function as mythical-imaginal structures rather than as objects of positive theological belief.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
The story of how we got to be monotheistic in so many areas of life begins with an argument… between the relative merits of monotheism as over against polytheism.
Miller situates the polytheism-monotheism debate within a specific mid-twentieth-century theological controversy, tracing the cultural genealogy of dominant monotheistic assumptions across Western life and thought.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
What are we to make of the possibility that the only way for a monotheistic faith to attain the understanding it seeks is through a polytheistic thinking?
Miller raises the paradox that Christian monotheistic faith may require polytheistic modes of thought — derived from Greek mythology and philosophy — to achieve adequate self-understanding.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
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 provides a comparative-religion taxonomy distinguishing polytheism from monolatry and monotheism, supplying the definitional framework within which depth psychology’s revalorization of polytheism operates.
, Occidental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume III, 1964supporting
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… in a sociological way.
Miller acknowledges the danger that polytheism, when sociologically rather than theologically conceived, can devolve into anarchic fragmentation, calling for a disciplined differentiation between the two registers.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
A basic tension at the heart of the experience of all men and women… calls now for a recollection, a new look at what polytheism was really all about.
Miller frames the contemporary resurgence of interest in polytheism as a response to the radical inadequacy of single-story, monovalent frameworks to account for the plurality of modern lived experience.
, 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.
Miller argues that Hillman’s polytheistic turn in psychology performs a mutual rescue: it liberates psychology from subjectivism and theology from the reduction of the divine to psychological projection.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974supporting
Unlike the main psychologies of the twentieth century, which have drawn their sources from Northern Europe (the German language and the Protestant-Jewish monotheistic Weltanschauung), archetypal psychology starts in the South.
Hillman geographically and culturally differentiates archetypal psychology from its Northern European monotheistic predecessors, identifying its spiritual home in the Mediterranean polytheistic imaginal tradition.
, Archetypal Psychology, 1983supporting
Unlike the main psychologies of the twentieth century, which have drawn their sources from Northern Europe (the German language and the Protestant-Jewish monotheistic Weltanschauung), archetypal psychology starts in the South.
A parallel formulation to the Archetypal Psychology passage, reinforcing the geographical-cultural contrast between monotheistic Northern psychology and archetypal psychology’s polytheistic Mediterranean orientation.
, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account, 1983aside
In a letter following the publication of the first edition of The New Polytheism, the French scholar of Iranian Sufism, Henry Corbin, urged discretion with regard to naming this situation… ‘polytheism.’
Miller records Corbin’s reservation about the term ‘polytheism,’ illustrating that even sympathetic interlocutors questioned whether the word was the most precise vehicle for the psychological-spiritual reality being described.
, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, 1974aside
Catholic monotheism vs. ancient polytheism
Russell’s index entry records the institutional context in which the monotheism-polytheism opposition was debated within Hillman’s academic milieu, particularly at the University of Dallas.
, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023aside