polytheism, the belief in many gods. Polytheismcharacterizes virtually all religions other thanJudaism,Christianity, andIslam, which share a common tradition ofmonotheism, the belief in one God.

Sometimes above the many gods a polytheisticreligion will have a supreme creator and focus of devotion, as in certain phases ofHinduism (there is also the tendency to identify the many gods as so many aspects of the Supreme Being); sometimes the gods are considered as less important than some higher goal, state, or saviour, as inBuddhism; sometimes one god will prove more dominant than the others without attaining overall supremacy, asZeus inGreek religion. Typically, polytheisticcultures include belief in many demonic and ghostly forces in addition to the gods, and some supernatural beings will be malevolent; even in monotheistic religions there can be belief in many demons, as inNew Testament Christianity.

Polytheism can bear various relationships to other beliefs. It can be incompatible with some forms oftheism, as in the Semitic religions; it can coexist with theism, as inVaishnavism; it can exist at a lower level of understanding, ultimately to betranscended, as inMahayana Buddhism; and it can exist as a tolerated adjunct to belief in transcendental liberation, as inTheravada Buddhism.

The nature of polytheism

In the course of analyzing and recording various beliefs connected with the gods, historians of religions have used certain categories to identify different attitudes toward the gods. Thus, in the latter part of the 19th century the termshenotheism andkathenotheism were used to refer to the exalting of a particular god as exclusively the highest within the framework of a particular hymn or ritual—e.g., in the hymns of theVedas (the ancient sacred texts of India). This process often consisted in loading other gods’ attributes on the selected focus ofworship. Within the framework of another part of the sameritual tradition, another god may be selected as supreme focus. Kathenotheism literally means belief in one god at a time. The termmonolatry has a connected but different sense; it refers to the worship of one god as supreme and sole object of the worship of a group while not denying the existence of deities belonging to other groups. The termhenotheism is also used to cover this case or, more generally, to mean belief in the supremacy of a single god without denying others. This seems to have been the situation for a period in ancient Israel in regard to thecult of Yahweh.

The termanimism has been applied to a belief in manyanimae (“spirits”) and is often used rather crudely to characterize so-called primitive religions. In evolutionaryhypotheses about the development of religion that were particularly fashionable among Western scholars in the latter half of the 19th century, animism was regarded as a stage in which the forces around human beings were less personalized than in the polytheistic stage. In actual instances of religious belief, however, no such scheme is possible: personal and impersonal aspects of divine forces are interwoven; e.g.,Agni, the fire god of theRigveda (the foremost collection of Vedic hymns), not only is personified as an object of worship but also is the mysterious force within the sacrificial fire.

Belief in many divine beings, who typically have to beworshipped or, if malevolent, warded off with appropriate rituals, has been widespread in human cultures. Though a single evolutionary process cannot be postulated, there has been a drift in various traditions toward the unification of sacred forces under a single head, which, in a number of nonliterate “primal” societies, has become embedded in a supreme being. Sometimes this being is adeus otiosus (an “indifferent god”), regarded as having withdrawn from immediate concern with men and thought of sometimes as too exalted for men to petition. This observation ledWilhelm Schmidt, an Austrian anthropologist, to postulate in the early 20th century anUrmonotheismus, or “original monotheism,” which later became overlaid by polytheism. Like all other theories of religious origins, this theory is speculative and unverifiable. More promising are attempts by sociologists and social anthropologists to penetrate to the uses and significance of the gods in particular societies.

Besides the drift toward some unification, there have been other tendencies in humanculture that entail a rather sophisticated approach to mythological material—e.g., giving the gods psychological significance, as in the works of the Greek dramatistsAeschylus andEuripides and, similarly but from adiverse angle, in Buddhism. At the popular level there has been, for instance, the reinterpretation of the gods as Christian saints, as in Mexican Catholicism. A fullyarticulate theory, however, of the ways in which polytheism servessymbolic, social, and other functions in human culture requires clarification of the role ofmyth, a much-debated topic in contemporary anthropology and comparative religion.

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