True Polytheism Has Never Been Tried

I think perhaps, true polytheism has never been tried.

At least, what we typically call polytheism such as Hinduism, Shintoism, the ancient Sumerian, Babylonian, and Egyptian traditions, the European 'polytheists' like the Orphics, Latins, Norse, Slavs, etc.

We run into a problem with this kind of discussion because how we define 'monotheism' vs 'polytheism' is rooted in an Abrahamic bias¹, but this Abrahamic bias does not represent the actual foundation of either of these words. If we take the words literally, nearly every single faith that we can think of is 'Polytheistic', at least in a system which renders 'Gods' as something similar to the Shinto concept of 'Kami'². The problem here is that taxonomies of what God is and what Gods are are completely schizophrenic and not really based in any kind of reality or ontological framework, at least not usually.

In Hinduism it is true that in nearly every sect of it there is still a single monadic 'thing', the Brahman³, in Daoism despite all of the various Chinese Gods like Wujimu⁴ everything is ultimately just the Dao, in Shintoism too nearly every single tradition has a single original causal element from which all things came from. In the Norse tradition we have again Ymir⁵ from which all things came, in the Orphic tradition we have everything⁶ coming from the Cosmic Egg⁷, the Hindus also have their Cosmic Egg⁸ as the original primordial element of creation, so did the Uralics/Finns and so did the Persians⁹.

So my point here is to say that what do we define as God? If you are a Christian and raised in such a way there is only One God, that is repeated over and over, similarly if you are Muslim. Yet what can we call the 'Pagan Gods' that have been turned into Saints¹⁰ if not Gods? It is easy to say, 'Well that is different', but it really is not. On another level entirely, it doesn't matter if its different or not, because these terms do not really tell us anything particularly interesting about the religions themselves, these terms are almost hallucinatory in nature.

Nearly every single organized or semi-organized religious tradition on Earth has a cosmology that places an origin to the universe and of all things and whether it is given agency or not is irrelevant and so too if that single causal agent is also split up into different parts or whatever, all of this matters very little in the grand scheme of things. There are religions that break this though, many indigenous religions of Africa, the Amazons, Southern India (of non-Hindu origin), and Oceania have no idea of a single causal monadic principle of creation, and I think that this is actually quite interesting and a useful distinction to make. These religions are, in many ways, true 'polytheism' if we are defining 'theism' as not 'Belief in the Abrahamic God' but rather 'Belief in a monadic causal principle from which all things originate'. This I believe is a much better definition, and one that I think fits quite nicely in the actual observations of world religious study.

These 'true polytheistic' religions are all quite interesting because they almost all predominantly come from traditions and groups of people that are pre-Agricultural and pre-Nomadic, typically hunter gatherer societies. These groups almost universally see time as an ever present thing¹¹ that has no beginning nor an end, and every force in nature is equal, not equal in an equal amount of power, but equal in the sense that we are all free within this system¹² to use what we have at will. There are ways to combat the spirits of nature and the spirits of nature fight against one another, just as the animals of the jungle fight amongst one another, that is the way of the Gods as well, and man is among them just another animal.

I think this kind of 'polytheism' is actually truly fascinating and much more interesting than the traditional idea of 'polytheism' because in the 'traditional polytheism' it is very easy to make the case through a comparative lens to say something like "Well in Hinduism its like Brahman is God and then everything else is Archangels, Angels, and Saints" and you could use this same argument for pretty much every other 'traditionally polytheistic' religion I mentioned. You cannot do that with these 'true polytheistic' religions, the actual ontology that they operate under is completely different, its pre-agricultural, and I think it is deeply fascinating and tells us a lot about our past and about the evolution of religious systems.

Maybe this doesn't fully answer the question, but I wanted to talk about this for awhile and this seemed like a good send-off point.

Ultimately, I think I would reclassify the idea of Monotheism/Polytheism to be something more along the lines of

Monadism - a religion which has¹³ a causal principle element of creation and a cosmology that has a beginning and/or end.
Amonadism - a religion which has no causal principle element of creation and a cosmology that lacks a beginning and end.

I also think if you think about it, it makes sense that settled societies would have a more abstract sense of time than unsettled pre-agricultural hunter gatherer societies, there was no need for record keeping, in a way 'cosmology' of the ancient world is just record keeping¹⁴ of the story of -all things-. There was little need to think about an origin or an end, but once the abstractions of civilization came about these things became demanded. I mean fuck, isn't the current oldest document on the face¹⁵ of the Earth a fucking spreadsheet about market prices or some shit?

I think there's something to the idea that writing & civilizational abstractions gave rose¹⁶ to Monadism especially as these also would have been the first time in man's history that he had nearly full and complete control of his environments, the agricultural revolution was ultimately the point¹⁷ in man's history in which he was able to overcome nature and rise above it, it makes perfect sense then why these societies no longer believed themselves to be among the many warring spirits of a confusing world of pain & torment.