The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

Monotheism spiritually is based on hierarchy, polytheism on equality.

I've thought about this for several minutes, and I'm not entirely sure how it's true. Would you mind explaining further or linking a source to better elaborate on how that works?

Although monotheists could hardly do anthing else cause they neglect the spiritual equality I find it unserious to replace Gods by Saints and Angels. However, as we are polytheists, how should we consider the changes from Gods to Saints and Angels? And the replacement of equality by hierarchy? What are your views?

I have two contradictory views. First, that the "insider" view from any one established religion (or culture) is uniquely irreconcilable with any other. Second, that cultural exchange happens all the time.

I also have this idea about some deities being positioned further away from devotees because they are so important, but this can consequently generate a closer bond between a devotee and the supposed intermediary whereby the intermediary becomes a larger part of the life of the devotee. That perhaps is an individual quirk, and maybe you can observe the household Lares and Olympians like you're supposed to. I've personally been raised Catholic until my family converted to a Pentecostal tradition, and maybe my initial conditioned reaction was to wonder if talking directly to God and expecting answers back would make theophany less valuable. It doesn't, by the way, but what then confers "value" in either hierarchy or diversity?

So, I don't know about Greek Orthodoxy, but I have encountered some very defensive Catholics who insist that veneration of the saints is not idolatry or polytheism. I didn't say that it was so, until they said that it certainly definitely was not so; after that, I began to wonder if it might be so just because it sounded like an interesting idea. Who wants to collect some Catholics and some polytheists and put them all in a laboratory for brain scans during prayer? Then we can compare polytheism to saint veneration.

No, I'm joking about that last part. I think this is one of those times that we ought to simply believe in what somebody else says about their own beliefs...and not believe what somebody else says about your belief (unless they are your priest/ess.) Your Apollo might be a personification of the sun, patron of prophets and musicians, and have some ex-boyfriends who are also flowers. You are not under a command to venerate Saint Elias when you worship Apollo. Must Greek Orthodox people venerate Apollo when they venerate Saint Elias? (Must you bother with wondering this if they are not converting you? Disregard this paragraph if you are converting to Greek Orthodoxy but are uncomfortable with the syncretism and is the real reason for this topic. I mean...Prometheus as Satan? Pan has been Satan for hundreds of years! I thought Hades was the next Pan-Satan. :p)

You write that this replaces equality with hierarchy, but...I think you can still have equality if you want to? How will Greek Orthodoxy stop you? Maybe it's different with Relational Polytheism versus Immersive Polytheism versus Devotional Polytheism but I haven't kept up with the labeling trends in polytheistic communities beyond the spelling of the things, or how those apply to Hellenism, or if Hellenism applies to those.

I can sort of understand the feeling of appropriation, but...is this orthodox truly such a powerful institution that you will be systemically compelled to follow it? Suppose you do emerge victorious from criticizing Greek Orthodoxy, so that no cultural exchange continues, and gods are gods where they are gods, and saints are saints where they are saints, and statues of feather-winged angels in togas are not muses at all. What next? Organize angry letter-writing to NASA for naming their space ships Apollo? Pick a millennia-old bone with Roman reconstructionists?

Yes, I'm sure Zeus was egalitarianism personified.



There is no 'Saint Elias'. The story of the Prophet Elijah and his assumption into heaven in a blazing chariot dates several centuries before Christianity.

Funny, the Archangel Michael is a lot more popular among Protestants.

Error, it is not about Elijah but about Elias in Greece!

Gabriel exists in Islam, sure. By the way, not the name counts in the first place but what the character means.

Error, it is not about Elijah but about Elias in Greece!

Elias is the Greek form of Elijah. In his icons and the churches dedicated to him he's called 'Prophet Elias', not 'Saint Elias'. Like this.

Gabriel exists in Islam, sure. By the way, not the name counts in the first place but what the character means.

I have no idea what you're going on about here.

Monotheism spiritually is based on hierarchy, polytheism on equality.

Polytheism on equality? I think that's really stretching things. Every pantheon of deities I know of has some type of hierarchy. With some it can be informal (where some deities are simply more powerful or important than others) while in some it can be quite formal with a "king" (or "queen") of the Gods and a hierarchical court around that deity.

Thus the Orthodox Greek Church transformed Gods to Saints e. g.  Helios-Apollon now is considered to be Saint Elias, Satan may be the  equivalent to Prometheus.

Even if this is true, I doubt the actual diety was transformed regardless of what some group of people decides to transform him/her into so what does it matter to people not follwing the religion with the "transformed" deities?

Zeus has always been the Chairmen who never denied any other divinity's existence. His daughter Athena is a Goddess, isn't she?

Except that's not what egalitarianism means.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/egalitarianism

Zeus was totally 'Respect my authoritay, or else', and less than subtle about stomping on anyone who posed a risk to his position.

Substantiations are existing quite a lot, the exchange of The Mother of The Gods, Kybele, others keep Isis for her, by Maria, Jahwe gaining characters of Baal, Jesua many of Horus.

Even without factoring in that the Theotokos is venerated, not worshipped, all the associations you attempt to make have more differences than similarities.

Zeus has always been the Chairmen who never denied any other divinity's existence.

Chairman is a very polite description of an absolute monarch surrounded by advisors he isn't bound to listen to, and whom he punish severely if they express dissent.

In the Iliad I.397ff, Hera, Athene and Poseidon try to rebel, and bind Zeus. Zeus is released by Thetis and Briareos, and the perpetrators punished.

Poseidon and Apollo are punished for an attempted rebellion against Zeus by building the walls of Troy in the Iliad XXI.35ff.

The difference in worldview between a late Bronze Age or early Iron Age mediterranean polytheism and an early Iron Age mediterranean monotheism is negligible: Both describe a storm god ruling the world, surrounded by a court of other entities. The court of the Olympians in the Iliad is very similar to the Iron Age Hebrew worldview in Psalms 29, 82 and 138 (Masoretic ennumeration).

The pagan philosopher Iamblichus didn't see any essential difference between a Hellenic and a Judeo-Christian world-view. In De Mysteriis Sect. II Ch. III Iamblichus view 'archangels' and 'gods' as more or less the same sort of entity.

In practice, polytheism and monotheism are very different, of course: Monotheists are limited to sing hymns in honour of angels and invoke their intercessions, but not sacrifice any material things to them, while polytheists are free to sacrifice anything to the deities in accordance to the rules of ritual purity.

That doesn't of course mean that neither polytheists nor monotheists of today have to nurture an anthropomorphic view of deities, or be adherents of an autocratic ideal. If we turn our attention away from the issue of hierarchies of power to the issue of hierarchies of modes of existence, such hierarchies were very much a part of classical religion.

During the last 500-700 years of its existence, the mediterranean religions acknowledged a stratified cosmology of several ontological levels emanating from The One (identified with Zeus or Physis by the Stoics, identified with Aion - the source of Phanes Protogonus - by others; Please, see the Protogonus Theogony, Plotinus and Proclus). Many deities were supposed to exist, but they were all viewed as caused by a common source on a higher ontological level. From the days of Pausanias, at least, Greeks (and the neighbours they influenced in Italy, Anatolia, Syria and Hellenized  Egypt) made a distinction between deities, daemons and heroes (in distinction to the way the words were used in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, when theos and daimon could be used interchangeably). In his systematization of Hellenic religion, Proclus make a distinction between encosmic deities, hypercosmic-encosmic deities, hypercosmic deities, intellective deities, intelligible-intellective deities, and intelligible deities.