Polytheistic psychology

Polytheistic psychology is the claim that the soul is irreducibly plural — that its structures are given not by a single organizing center but by the many gods themselves, each governing a distinct domain of experience, each deserving its due. The position was developed principally by Hillman, with theological articulation by Miller, on philological ground laid by Walter F. Otto and Karl Kerényi. Its founding gesture is a refusal: the refusal to let unity rank above multiplicity in psychological description.

The immediate target is Jung's late formulation in Aion, where he writes that "the anima/animus stage is correlated with polytheism, the self with monotheism" — implying that as anima and animus are a pre-stage of the Self, so polytheism is a pre-stage of monotheism. Hillman names the stakes directly:

The preference for self and monotheism presented there strikes to the heart of a psychology which stresses the plurality of the archetypes.

This is not a minor disagreement about terminology. If the Self is the archetype most important for modern man — as Jung claims in the same passage — then the entire exploration of consciousness through the gods (Eros and Psyche, Saturn, Apollo, Dionysus) becomes merely preliminary, a pre-stage to something more important. Archetypal psychology refuses that hierarchy. It insists that the complexes, with their archetypal cores, are not rungs on a ladder toward unity but autonomous presences deserving recognition in their own right.

The philological warrant for this position runs through Snell's demonstration that in Homer every human act is simultaneously a divine act — the soul is not a unified agent but a field of semi-autonomous organs (thūmos, phrenes, noos, kradie) open to divine influence from without. Sullivan's careful philological work confirms that in early Greek literature no single term expresses what we would call "personality" or "self"; the psychic entities are distinct, fluid, and irreducible to one another. The plurality is originary, not deficient. Polytheistic psychology reads this structure not as a developmental way-station toward Greek rationality (Snell's own reading) but as evidence of how the soul actually is.

The therapeutic consequence follows directly. Monotheistic psychology, confronted with fragmentation, reaches for compensatory images of order — mandalas, the quaternity, the integrating Self. Polytheistic psychology meets fragmentation in its own language:

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. Instead it would be led back (epistrophe) to its archetypal source.

The Latin phrase — like is cured by like — signals a homeopathic rather than allopathic logic. Where the monotheistic impulse compensates plurality with unity, the polytheistic impulse differentiates: which god is speaking here? Hermes, Dionysus, Demeter, Persephone each carry a different style of dissolution, a different claim on the soul's attention. To collapse them into "breakdown" is to lose the specific message each carries.

Miller's contribution is to show that this is not a regression to primitive religion but a recovery of the deep grammar of Western theology itself. Monotheism, on his reading, is polytheism denied and distorted — Trinitarian doctrine is Hesiod's Theogony under ecclesiastical repression. The Christian victory over the pagan world, as Hillman puts it, can be summed up in Gregory of Nazianzus's phrase: "we take prisoner every thought for Christ." The one God swallows the others; Pan dies; specific patterns of consciousness mimetic to the old gods are deprived of their archetypal backgrounds and return only through the back door of pathology.

This is the diagnostic pressure the position exerts. Without a consciously polytheistic psychology, Hillman argues, we are more susceptible to an unconscious fragmentation — the very schizophrenia that monotheistic psychology fears and compensates. The gods return whether or not we have a language for them. The question is whether they return as recognized presences or as symptoms.

Polytheistic psychology is also, Hillman insists, religious — not less so than monotheism, but differently so. Religion is not defined by the number of its gods but by the binding of events to divine presences. "Myths may change in a life, and the soul serves in its time many gods." The commandment to have no other gods before me is not suspended but extended: each mode of consciousness follows its own principle of individuation within its particular divine model. No one model stands before another. All are necessary; together they serve one law only — necessity.

  • James Hillman — portrait of the founder of archetypal psychology and principal architect of the polytheistic position
  • David L. Miller — the theologian who gave polytheistic psychology its doctrinal grammar
  • Polytheistic psychology — the concept entry with further reading on the Homeric plural self and its clinical implications
  • The Self — Jung's archetype of wholeness, the precise point where Hillman and Jung part company

Sources Cited

  • Hillman, James, 1983, Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account
  • Hillman, James, 1989, A Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman
  • Miller, David L., 1974, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses
  • Sullivan, Shirley Darcus, 1995, Psychological and Ethical Ideas: What Early Greeks Say