The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses

The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses is a work by David L. Miller (1974).

Core claims

• Miller’s polytheism is not a theological proposal but an anti-systematic method: the book deliberately refuses to synthesize its own argument, enacting in its fragmentary structure the very polytheistic consciousness it describes.
• The decisive move is relocating the Gods from comparative religion into the deep grammar of Western theology itself — Trinitarian doctrine becomes Hesiod’s Theogony, soteriology becomes Dionysus, eschatology becomes Hermes — so that monotheism is revealed as polytheism under repression.
• Henry Corbin’s prefatory letter reframes the entire project: the confusion of Being (Esse) with a supreme being (ens supremum) is the “metaphysical catastrophe” that makes monotheism self-defeating, and only a theophanic multiplicity — what Corbin calls “mystical kathenotheism” — can rescue the divine from its own idolatry.

Related questions

• How does Henry Corbin’s distinction between Theotês and theos in the preface to Miller’s New Polytheism deepen or challenge Hillman’s claim in Re-Visioning Psychology that the Gods have become diseases?
• Miller argues that each major strand of twentieth-century theology is secretly animated by a specific Greek deity. How does this diagnostic method compare to Jung’s analysis of the Yahweh-image in Answer to Job as a psychological event within the God-image itself?
• Corbin’s prefatory letter describes monotheism as a “metaphysical catastrophe” that confuses Being with a supreme being. How does this converge with or diverge from Edward Edinger’s account of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype, where inflation results from the ego’s identification with the Self?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/miller-polytheism-rebirth-gods/

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