Gods at the Crossroads Between the Self and the World

Abstract

When teachers offer college courses on “Polytheism,” the syllabus is most often oriented around the historiography of religion, rather than around the ways that polytheist writers attune their readers to a plurality of marginalized interpretations of reality—that is, to local worlds. On the contemporary institutional scene, pluralist religions are conceived as social rituals, available to ethnographic study, rather than as a plurality of incommensurate social norms for attuning ourselves to distinct worlds or authoritative contexts “in which we perceive, act, and think” (Dreyfus, Romanticism 265). Its academic categorization reduces plural-world spiritual practice to a form of plurality-in-the-past, beyond which Enlightenment humanity has evolved. The academic disciplinary setting is organized by the notion of a singular norm of truth, as verifiable correspondence to a singular reality, and this norm coordinates a comprehensive rational system. Within this system, the notion that polytheist, plural-world writing might serve as a creative, powerful mode of social and political activism in the present is usually ruled out in advance.¹

Monotheism, this rigid consequence of the doctrine of one normal human type—the faith in one normal god beside whom there are only pseudo-gods—was perhaps the greatest danger that has yet confronted humanity…In polytheism the free-spiriting and many-spiriting of man attained its first preliminary form—the strength to create for ourselves our own new eyes—and ever again new eyes that are even more our own: hence man alone among all animals has no eternal horizons and perspectives.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

If we believe that religion has a presence in human societies in any fundamental sense, then we can no longer speak of universal religions in the customary manner.

—Vine Deloria, God Is Red