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Updated: May 6, 2025
It is to be remarked that, while this branch of the inquiry is practically omitted by Mr. Spencer, Mr. Tylor can spare for it but some twenty pages out of his large work. He arranges the probable germs of the savage idea of a Supreme Being thus: A god of the polytheistic crowd is simply raised to the primacy, which, of course, cannot occur where there is no polytheism.
From this polytheistic position the people took a step forward to a state of mind which Professor Max Muller calls henotheism; that is, they believed in the real existence of many gods, but that they were under allegiance to only one, their national Deity, and that him only they must serve.
It is quite possible that there may have been esoteric explanations, known to the priests and the more learned, which, resolving the personages of the Pantheon into the powers of nature, reconciled the apparent multiplicity of gods with monotheism, or even with atheism. So far, however, as outward appearances were concerned, the worship was grossly polytheistic.
E.B. Tylor, makes the foundation of all religion animistic, but recognizes the non-human character of polytheistic gods.
Polytheistic creeds are far less jealous than monotheism; and the development of Zoroastrianism had been in a polytheistic direction.
But the vast majority of the world, even in the so-called civilized countries, worship taboos, symbols, have a modified polytheistic belief or a personalized God, still attempt to persuade the Power in their own behalf, to act favorably to their own purposes and follow those who claim knowledge of the divine and inscrutable, the priest, minister, rabbi, the man of God, in a phrase.
He was a priest of a grossly polytheistic religion, but acknowledged only the One Supreme God, whose instrument he felt himself to be. His services to the state were transcendent, but his supremest mission was to preserve the Hebrew nation. The condition of the Israelites in Egypt after the death of Joseph, and during the period of their sojourn, it is difficult to determine.
The steps by which the old polytheistic Israelite nation passed into the monotheistic Judaism can be traced historically, but the impulse to the movement was a part of the genius of the people and cannot be further explained.
One may be described as polytheistic pantheism. Most Hindus are apparently polytheists, that is to say they venerate the images of several deities or spirits, yet most are monotheists in the sense that they address their worship to one god. But this monotheism has almost always a pantheistic tinge.
Turning to testimony of a different kind, we find Macaulay speaking about the polytheistic idolatry he knew between 1834 and 1838. "The great majority of the population," he writes, "consists of idolaters." Macaulay's belief was that idolatry would not survive many years of English education, and we shall now take note how in the century the sphere of idolatry and polytheism has been limited.
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