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Updated: June 8, 2025
Hommel demonstrates from the personal surnames contained in the inscriptions the existence of a "very exalted monotheism" in the most ancient times of the Arabian nation, about 2500 B. C., and among the Semitic tribes of northern Babylonia. This "monotheistic religion" degenerated under the influence of Babylonian polytheism.
The Aryans and Semites, while both dissatisfied with polytheism and seeking the one among the many, moved along different paths and did not reach exactly the same goal.
If such honor to a mortal seemed extravagant, yet in his view a wise emperor was far worthier of reverence than the imaginary ghosts of the popular superstitions. Yet, even Confucius could not quite succeed in banishing the idea of divine help, nor could he destroy that higher and most venerable worship which has ever survived amid all the corruptions of polytheism.
In ancient times they seem to have done the same, as the monuments of Egypt and Babylonia declare; and the intimate knowledge of Nature and its Creator which they had in the morning of our world, degenerated into the nature worship and polytheism which we find so nearly universal at the first dawn of secular history.
It is indeed most important preaching to preach that there is not one God for religion and another God for human fellowship and another God for buying and selling that pestilent polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time, and blessed are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to disenchant the brethren of their power...."
All religion is a delusion which transfers the motives and thoughts of men to those who are not men. No ecclesiastic has as yet offered a satisfactory answer as to why there has been a marvelous disappearance of the working of miracles, and why human actions alone are now to be seen in this world of ours. We are witnessing today what happened in the Roman empire during the decline of polytheism.
Gradually men began to reason and to think, and they refined the polytheism into the "higher" idea of one great, central, immaterial all-pervading power, which they called God. Mr.
The plurality of gods appears to be the manifestation of the divine principle; their action on the world lost almost all trace of arbitrary power and of their former versatility and caprice. The superstition of polytheism remained, but it had an inward tendency to more rational conceptions and principles.
THE MYTHOLOGY. The mythology of the northern nations, as represented in the Edda, was founded on Polytheism; but through it, as through the religion of all nations, there is dimly visible, like the sun shining through a dense cloud, the idea of one Supreme Being, of infinite power, boundless knowledge, and incorruptible justice, who could not be represented by any corporeal form.
The self is only a manifestation of Brahma. The trend is toward absolute pantheism. The individual is lost in the whole, and the realization of this is salvation. But humanity cannot be content without the semblance of personality in God, and since everything has become divine, it was easy to regard not only natural powers, but also personal beings as gods. Polytheism was the result.
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