Many Gods, Many Pantheons: Some Exchanges on Twitter

I have anonymized my interlocutors in this exchange and edited them; their words are italicized, mine are labeled “EPB”.

 

EPB: Quote by someone in a Hellenic polytheism group on Facebook: "I believe all the gods of my religion are real distinct and individual beings. The gods of other religions I mostly view as being the same gods as my own just with a different cultural flair." Gods, that's just so dumb.

Can you elaborate please.

EPB: Well, for one thing because if the content of the other person's religion is mere "cultural flair", then the same goes for the content of your own religion. You can't hold that everybody else has wrappers and you alone have the candy. You end up holding that even the names and attributes and rites of your own Gods are mere wrapping as well. It's a rapid slide toward skepticism and relativism.

But sometimes Gods are shared by different cultures right? For example, Indra -> Zeus ->Thor. It's the same God but with different cultural embellishments?

EPB: No. For one thing, this isn't even stated coherently. Indra may resemble Zeus in some respects, but the argument of "sharing" is made on account of the etymological resemblance of Zeus and Dyaus. Thor, for his part, may resemble Zeus and Indra in certain respects, but etymologically it is rather Tyr who is supposed to be cognate to Zeus and to Dyaus respectively. But all of these comparisons are hopelessly shallow and arbitrary. Moreover, not all religions have the close linguistic relationship of the Indo-European language family. People who talk like this about all the Gods being the same usually have pitifully little familiarity with any religions outside the Indo-European sphere.

I do agree that outside the IE family, the gods don’t have much resemblance. But you are saying that though Zeus & Dyaus may be etymologically similar, that they are different deities? Unlike say Ganesha & Japanese Kangiten actually being the same deity?

EPB: I can't say I know for certain if Zeus and Dyaus are different, but I see no reason they couldn't be, despite etymological relatedness of their names. Their roles in their respective theologies are sufficiently different that it's hard to see what is gained by identifying them.

 

“Nor do we think of the Gods as different Gods among different peoples, nor as barbarian Gods and Greek Gods, nor as southern and northern Gods; but, just as the sun and the moon and the heavens and the earth and the sea are common to all, but are called by different names by different peoples, so… there have arisen among different peoples, in accordance with their customs, different honours and appellations.” —Plutarch, Isis and Osiris 67

EPB: Plutarch always had some bad metaphysics. Notice how here he allows the material to determine the spiritual. It's not unrelated to his naked dualism, a very un-Platonic position. These kinds of issues are why Plutarch had virtually no real influence on later Platonism. In the Hellenistic era, Greek thinkers were confronted with more religious diversity than they had ever encountered before. It forced them to dig deeper with their metaphysics. Some, like Plutarch, stopped at shallow solutions. Eventually, a more profound view prevailed. Plutarch dies in 127 CE. By the time Plotinus dies in 270 CE, the conceptual map of Hellenic philosophy looks quite different. We could say that Platonism's center of gravity had shifted from the Timaeus to the Parmenides, from a predominantly hylomorphic metaphysics to a henological one.

 

I'm having a discussion with somebody in the Hellenism Reddit … It's one of those threads in which I'm trying to explain to somebody that Hermes and Mercury are not the same deity and the limitations and uncertainty involved in deity correspondence lists.

EPB: It's an issue that concerns me a great deal. There is a deep theoretical background to this issue, and that's what is difficult to convey economically. A key element is the idea that there should be a proportion and continuity in the Gods' manifestations, so that the culturally-specific appearances should be relatively congruent to the divine reality, lest we introduce skepticism into the whole relationship with the Gods. This was an issue I already spoke of in my dissertation. Another element, which often comes up in connection with Assmann's "cosmotheism", is the intellectualism inherent in valuing our comparative criteria over the primary data of theophanies. Finally, there is the question of an adequate conceptualization of what a pantheon is. If it is merely an expression of material variation, then polytheism as such is just materialism. I have argued, instead, that in the later antique Platonists pantheons are expressed through the concept of noetico-noeric (or "intelligible-intellective") manifolds, ideal structures which are, however, ontologically prior to intellective classes. These intelligible-intellective manifolds are the primary expression of the Gods' experience of one another, of Their sociality, so to speak. And this is essentially what a pantheon is: a group of Gods who live and work together. Some doubtless find the idea naïve, but it is remarkably powerful, both in the Platonic system, but also in broader application, because besides illuminating theological questions, it offers an ideality for a kind of manifold irreducible to intellectual classification.

It is hard because so many people have made arguments for divine universality/cosmotheism that one has to make an enormous hedging statement to account for that baggage before acknowledging that some gods may be in multiple pantheons, but that it doesn't matter per se.

EPB: Yes, one has to distinguish in this connection between broad "cosmotheistic" statements of universality, and how syncretism actually worked historically on the ground, and still does. People try to argue that one needs the former to explain the latter, and this is clearly false. If there needs to be a global metaphysical doctrine to explain how syncretism is possible, I argue that it is both more historical and does less violence all around to posit that all Gods are in each God, and preserve the distinction of pantheons. But then this is another massive load of metaphysical baggage to bring into an argument. Sometimes it seems to me that there are just people who are worried about there being too many Gods, and people who aren't. I'm not sure that there needs to be a global theory to explain syncretism. The all-in-each doctrine is there in Platonism anyhow, and so I use it, because otherwise people will act as though there is this soft-polytheism-shaped hole in the theory, and there isn't. The force of it is essentially negative: it says that any two (or more) deities could be syncretized with one another, but that comparison has absolutely nothing to do with it, it's a completely revelatory, sui generis phenomenon each time.