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Updated: June 8, 2025
So that what in Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics meets us at every step the combination of monotheism with polytheism is no contradiction, but merely an intelligent variation of phrase to indicate various aspects or functions in physical and moral things. When religion appears to us in this light its contradictions and controversies lose all their bitterness.
Seeing something mysterious and wonderful, he believes all things mysterious and wonderful; and he is afloat without shore or compass, on the wildest sea of superstition and necromancy. He sees a god in every phenomenon, and fears a sorcerer in every enemy. Life, under such a system of polytheism and wild belief, is a constant scene of fears and alarms.
If, then, the many gods of polytheism were either destitute or disregardful of morality, they could not be the moral power of which the common consciousness had been dimly aware: that moral power, that moral personality, must be other than they.
This noble and more rational theory of eternal and causative Ideas resembles anthropomorphic polytheism in concentrating into one supreme Idea the intellectual Zeus, the Being of beings, according to another mythical and scientific representation by Aristotle, and it was afterwards combined with the Semitic idea of the Absolute.
We must not be deceived by the recrudescence, at a much later date, of a metaphysical Paganism in the Alexandrian and other philosophical schools, provoked not by attachment to Polytheism, but by distaste for the political and social ascendancy of the Christian teachers.
The more educated portions of the community maintain allegiance to the new teaching, perhaps; but among the lower classes it soon becomes degraded to, or amalgamated with, some form of polytheism more or less pronounced, and either secret or declared.
Thus we see that, although inculcating homage to a multitude of subordinate divinities, the ancient Astrolatry was only an apparent Polytheism; its enlightened votaries, recognizing the dogma of the unity of God, were in reality Monotheists, paying supreme adoration to the mythical genius of the Sun, to whom we will now direct attention.
When Christianity became popular, and was threatening the overthrow of polytheism, an attempt was made to counteract its influence in the reign of Alexander Severus, who himself came from the East, by organising this worship.
Accordingly, the pretension of philosophers to explain physical phaenomena by physical causes, or to predict their occurrence, was, up to a very late period of Polytheism, regarded as a sacrilegious insult to the gods. Anaxagoras was banished for it, Aristotle had to fly for his life, and the mere unfounded suspicion of it contributed greatly to the condemnation of Socrates.
The memory of all that is half civilized and wholly unique and uncommon: of sleepy and smoky wigwams, where the ten tribes hold powwow in a confusion of gutturals, with a plentiful mixture of saliva; for it is a moist language, a gurgle that approaches a gargle, and in three weeks the unaccustomed ear scarcely recovers from the first shock of it; a memory of totem poles in stark array, and of the high feast in the Indian villages, where the beauty and chivalry of the forest gathered and squatted in wide circles listening to some old-man-eloquent in the very ecstasy of expectoration; the memory of a non-committing, uncommunicative race, whose religion is a feeble polytheism a kind of demonolatry; for, as good spirits do not injure one, one's whole time is given to the propitiation of the evil.
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