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Updated: May 6, 2025
Of all the Aryan peoples, Greece represented her Olympus in the most glorious mythical form, set forth by all the arts of description. From the polytheistic point of view, nothing can be æsthetically more perfect than the myths of Apollo and the Muses, which personify harmony in general, and whatever is peculiar to the arts.
The reverse conception, however, has prevailed in religious systems, polytheistic or monotheistic.
Thus, the light which mythology may be expected to throw on the idea of God is one, which, however it may illumine the polytheistic idea of God, will not be found to shine far beyond the area of polytheism. Myths then are narratives, in which the doings of some god or gods are related. And those gods existed in the belief of the community, before tales were told, or could be told, about them.
A greater proof of the unnaturalness of Monotheism to the human mind before a certain period in its development, could not well be required. The highest form of Monotheism, Christianity, has persisted to the present time in giving partial satisfaction to the mental dispositions that lead to Polytheism, by admitting into its theology the thoroughly polytheistic conception of a devil.
The vastness of the cosmic field she was now compelled to traverse, the innumerable ramifications of polytheistic and monotheistic creeds, necessitated unwearied research, as she rent asunder the superstitious veils which various nations and successive epochs had woven before the shining features of truth.
Taking over the legends of gods and heroes, as narrated in poetry and tradition, the earlier tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, as they shaped and reshaped their material for the stage, were evolving for themselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the top of the polytheistic view, the idea of a single supreme and righteous God.
The Hindu system, it is well known, is at once pantheistic and polytheistic. The universe, we are told, is God expanded. I have mentioned the hideous aspect of the images worshipped at Benares, and their hideous aspect well accords with the character attributed to the gods worshipped under these forms. We are all familiar with the maxim, Like priest, like people.
"The Babylonian stories of creation are full of grotesque and polytheistic ideas, while those of the Bible speak only of the one living and true God." "All things," the Babylonian legend says, "were produced at the first from Tiamat." "The gods came into being in long succession, but, at length, enmity arose between them and Tiamat, who created monsters to oppose them.
Huxley gives no theory of how these gods came into belief, except the suggestion that 'the polytheistic theology has become modified by the selection of the cosmic or tribal god, as the only god to whom worship is due on the part of that nation, without prejudice to the right of other nations to worship other gods.
Life here below was but a brief, if decisive, preliminary to the real life to come. The mediaeval Christian was essentially more polytheistic than his pagan predecessors, for he pictured hierarchies of good and evil spirits who were ever aiding him to reach heaven or seducing him into the paths of sin and error.
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