An Example of Polycentric Polytheism

I read an article recently which provided an excellent example both of how what I have called 'polycentric polytheism' operates live, so to speak, and of how it is prone to be misunderstood even by otherwise insightful commentators who lack the conceptual structures with which to properly articulate it.

The article is "How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the 'Orisa'," by Karin Barber (Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 51, No. 3, 1981—available on JSTOR, if you have access). The article seeks to understand the reciprocity between humans and Gods in Yoruba religion, which possibly extends as far as the notion that the Gods (orisa in Yoruba) are "maintained and kept in existence by the attention of humans," and that "[w]ithout the collaboration of their devotees, the orisa would be betrayed, exposed and reduced to nothing," (724). I say 'possibly', because while Barber claims that "[t]his notion seems to have been intrinsic to the religion since the earliest times," (ibid.) she cites nothing in support of the claim, despite the fact that the precise context in which such a belief is uttered, and the precise words in which it is declared, are everything.

At any rate, Barber seeks to argue that this belief would not, in any case, be the sign of a ‘skeptical’ subordination of the Gods, but actually indicates the intense personal engagement of individuals with their chosen Gods. Individuals, through their own success, magnify the Gods who favor them, and can even leave their mark on the cultic practices of their patron(s), which are hence not immutable for all time (I'm not sure why anybody ought to have expected them to be, except for bias toward ‘Peoples of the Book’); by the same token, a person who feels that a deity to whom they have shown special attention is not, or is no longer, responsive to them, will likely turn their attentions to a different God.

None of this, naturally, will be very surprising to practicing polytheists, who deal with these sorts of issues all the time in their personal devotion; see, e.g., Dver’s remarks here. Scholars have a good deal of trouble, though, understanding how this works, due to the disciplinary prohibition they imposed upon themselves against positing the actual existence of deities, even merely as a heuristic device. After all, in order to study a phenomenon, doesn’t one need to at least provisionally posit its reality in approximately the contours of its presencing? At any rate, this is what phenomenologists, and in a rather different fashion, structuralists, do.

Barber, though, takes a strict sociological approach to the material that effectively presupposes that the Gods cannot be real individuals or agencies, and hence must be 'man made' in some respect. To her partial credit, she sets out then to, in effect, undo as much of the violence done to the intelligibility of the phenomena by this presupposition as possible. Indeed, Barber’s ultimate aim seems to be to make the case that the Yoruba self-understanding of their theology is not incompatible with a sociological understanding of it, and this is a nice example, I guess, of a sociologist going about as far as they can within their paradigm.

This is an old argument, of course. I found interesting, however, how Barber dealt specifically with evidence as to the polycentric nature of Yoruba polytheism. She notes that "[t]here is no clearly agreed-upon hierarchy or other ordering of the orisa in the pantheon. Each one is all things to its own devotees," (736); hence

[E]veryone asks for the same things from her orisa, and everyone therefore credits her own orisa with the power to bestow them. The same qualities of generosity, life-giving power, destructive power and personal magnificence are attributed to all the orisa by their own devotees. (735)

Now, this sort of practice might be surprising to some modern polytheists, though it will certain not be surprising to many others, particularly those operating within or in contact with unbroken traditions like Hinduism. Some neopagans, i.e., revivalists, however, have internalized what is, in effect, a scholar's perspective on polytheism, which is that a pantheon is basically like a government, with a number of roles, positions or posts that can be filled by exactly one God apiece. Indeed, some think that this structure is the great virtue of polytheism. The division of labor renders the Gods fully intelligible, and this facilitates 'translation' of different pantheons into one another. How civilized!

The problem, of course, is that this model, in which Gods are defined by their functions in a highly organized, differentially articulated pantheon, has precious little to do with how polytheism actually functions when it is a going concern; it has more to do with how polytheism looks in literary sources like Homer. (Readers of my work will know that I say this with no prejudice whatsoever toward the poets, and the theological importance of their work.) Scholars, for their part, realized at a certain point the insufficiency of the division-of-labor model for understanding religious practice in antique or modern polytheist religions; but instead of retooling their understanding of polytheism, they offered formulations like ‘henotheism’ and ‘monolatry’, or some form of ‘monism’, which have their evidentiary bases, and hence their strengths and weaknesses, but which, in the way they were applied and the spirit in which they were intended, all had in common a fundamental tendency to dissolve all the Gods into one. But this was supposed to be a mystical one-that-is-many, of course; and once again, it was opined that this was the great virtue of polytheism, only of course it's only the simple-minded who would call it ‘polytheism’. To obscurantism, then, was added elitism: how civilized!

What none of these scholars have ever been willing to confront, of course, is that there is anyone at the other end of the relationship between humans and the divine. This makes atheism and monotheism almost indistinguishable at a certain point; as a friend of mine once put it, "There's only one God, and He doesn't exist." One God is very much like No God; and once you get done devaluing the actual names, images, and attributes of Gods, because All Gods are One God, atheism is a very minor further step from the 'mystical' model. The model with the rigidly articulated pantheon, the 'government' or limbs-of-one-body model, ends up in the same place, just with an extra step or two, because while it hasn't reduced the Gods to an experiential continuum, a sort of blur of divinity, it has reduced them to Roles or Functions incapable of fulfilling the complex needs of real devotees. They will, the models implicitly but confidently assert, soon be looking for a God not limited in this fashion, one at least as complex as they are. But there could only be one such God, right? Because we only have two models: the limbs or the blur.

We find Barber falling right into this logical fallacy. She begins, first, by describing—I don’t doubt accurately—the relevant phenomena:

All orisa do have, in different degrees, all these qualities, because every orisa has to be able to fulfil all the needs of the devotee. The language of all their oriki [attributive poetry] is strikingly similar. In many cases the very same attributions are applied to several orisa, one devotee borrowing from another without any feeling of incongruity to glorify her own subject. Her concern is not to draw sharp distinctions between the various orisa but to elevate and enhance her own so that it will be able to bless and protect her. (735f)

Now, aside from the sociology language which continues to insist that the Gods are simply given the attributes that fit human demands, this describes a mode of practice familiar to anyone with the slightest familiarity with, say, Egyptian or Hindu devotion. But a sensitive reader can see the trainwreck coming as soon as Barber speaks of a lack of concern for "drawing sharp distinctions"—because according to the limbs-or-blur logic, the Gods are either rigidly determined  by their functions in the articulated pantheon, and solely individuated in this fashion, or they are all one experiential smear of divinity.

Presented with this dilemma, Barber chooses both ends of the false dichotomy:

Thus the Yoruba gods are at once fragmented and fused. They are fragmented because of the intense personal nature of the orisa-devotee relationship, which makes each devotee desire her own version of the orisa imprinted with her own personality and identity. They are fused because, underlying their differences of character and ambience, all the orisa share the same qualities and do the same things for their devotees. (736)

Why should the fact that a God has intense personal relationships with their devotees, relationships that may even affect the historical dimensions of their cult, make that God 'fragmented'? What is the mode of unity, the concept of individuation, that is being applied to them to arrive at this description? It is not the mode of unity of a person, an agent, that much is clear.

On the other side, why should the fact that each God is adequate to all, or most, of the needs of their most devoted worshipers, those who experience them, so to speak, at the center, rather than the periphery, why should this fact 'fuse' them, dissolving their individuality, their personhood? Why should their individuation depend, in effect, upon their inadequacy, their incapacity?

This serves, I think, as an excellent example of the tangle of prejudice and logical confusion that marks so much scholarly writing on polytheism, and that can also lead modern polytheists who are not operating within a continuous tradition away from trusting their own experience. The significance of this double-bind, however, extends well beyond religion, as those familiar with discussions of personhood and agency in contemporary philosophy and critical theory, not to mention the history of the 'One-Many' problem in metaphysics, will readily grasp. But I ought to leave off here for now.