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Updated: May 6, 2025
In Persia also, since the Mazdean system recognized a considerable number of deities, it cannot be doubted that the people were polytheistic, not to speak of the probability that there were survivals of a lower form of religion which preceded Mazdaism.
The triumphant ecclesiastics proclaimed that the images of the gods had failed to defend themselves when the time of trial came. Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races, the Semitic have maintained the unity of God.
In the earlier as well as the later literature of Greece we find traces of Pantheism, while the Polytheistic worship, which universally prevailed, was its natural product and appropriate manifestation. The ancient Orphic doctrines, which were taught in the Mysteries, seem to have been based on the oriental idea of Emanation.
This is 'monolatry, and 'the ethical code, often of a very high order, comes into closer relation with the theological creed, why, we are not informed. Nor do we learn out of what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason.
Leaving it, then, to pursue this even course of descent, let us refer once more to that other line of religious history, the one passing through the idolatrous and polytheistic nations of antiquity, and trace from it the regular rise and progress of another division of the masonic institution, which, by way of distinction, has been called the Spurious Freemasonry of Antiquity.
As we have seen in the last chapter, the course of political affairs had detached the power of the state from the philosophical and polytheistic parties. Joined to the new movement, it was not long before it gave significant proofs of the sincerity of its friendship by commencing an active persecution of the remnant of philosophy.
In this case also the process is gradual; by attempting a more rational explanation of physical phenomena, man attains to ultimate conceptions which express direct cosmic laws, and he regards these laws as substantial entities, which in their originally polytheistic form were the gods who directed all things.
So long as natural action was supposed to be in the immediate control of numerous gods and demigods, so long, in a word, as the explanation of Nature was what we term polytheistic, this association of science with other forms of learning was not only natural but inevitable.
But the Genesis narratives are distinguished by their freedom from the polytheistic ingredients which disfigure the corresponding narratives elsewhere. They are on the elevated plane of that pure theism which is the kernel of the Hebrew faith.
I am Chepera in the morning, Ra at noon, Tum in the evening. M. de la Rougé maintains that Egyptian religion, monotheistic at first, with a noble belief in the unity of the Supreme God and in His attributes as the Creator and Law-giver of man, fell away from that position and grew more and more polytheistic.
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