"Polytheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... first considered that the Iranian dualism was derived from polytheism, and was a preliminary stage in the development of monotheism, held afterwards that a rigid monotheism had preceded this dualism. The classical writers, who knew Zoroastrianism at the height of its glory, never suggested that the two principles ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 9 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... which first led man to believe in unseen spiritual agencies, then in fetishism, polytheism, and ultimately in monotheism, would infallibly lead him, as long as his reasoning powers remained poorly developed, to various strange superstitions and customs. Many of these are terrible to think of—such as the sacrifice of ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... principle of the Jewish code was to establish the doctrine of the unity of God. Idolatry had crept into the religious system of all the other nations of the world, and a degrading polytheism was everywhere prevalent. The Israelites had not probably escaped the contagion of bad example, and the suggestions of evil powers. The most necessary truth to impress upon the nation was the God of Abraham, and Isaac, ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... upon men. So that idolatry was of some use to bear down the corruption of the world. It is therefore probable, that the horrid vices men were fallen into before the deluge, proceeded only from their not knowing nor serving a God. I am even of opinion (continues he) that the idolatry and polytheism after the deluge derived their origin from the atheism and impiety that reigned before it. Such is the temper of men, when they have been severely punished for any crime, they run into the opposite extreme. I conjecture (concludes the same author) this was the case with men after the deluge. As ...
— Memoirs of Aaron Burr, Complete • Matthew L. Davis
... remark, what the learned author of the Five Great Monarchies says of that of the primitive Chaldees: "The religion of the Chaldeans, from the very earliest times to which the monuments carry us back, was, in its outward aspect, a polytheism of a very elaborate character. It is quite possible that there may have been esoteric explanations, known to the priests and the more learned; which, resolving the personages of the Pantheon into the ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... of God:—It may not have occurred to every reader, but none will perhaps object to it, when once suggested to his consideration, that—as is the god of any nation, such will be that nation. God, however falsely conceived of by man. even though splintered into fragments by Polytheism, or disfigured by the darkest mythologies, is still the greatest of all objects offered to human contemplation. Man, when thrown upon his own delusions, may have raised himself, or may have adopted from others, the very falsest of ideals, as the true image and reflection ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... or associating gods with God; polytheism: especially levelled at the Hindu triadism, Guebre dualism and ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 1 • Richard F. Burton
... a series of works upon the Hebrew language, the interpretation of Scripture, and the like. In these he combated the prevalent idea that Hebrew was the primitive tongue, expressed the opinion that in the plural form of the word used in Genesis for God, "Elohim," there is a trace of Chaldean polytheism, and, in his discussion on the serpent who tempted Eve, curiously anticipated modern geological and zoological ideas by quietly confessing his inability to see how depriving the serpent of feet and compelling ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... world with the original forms of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity, and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to every thing: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... Babylonian mythology in the legendary lore of Phoenicia is the close relationship that exists between the traditions of Babylonia and the earlier chapters of Genesis. As is now well known, the Babylonian account of the Deluge agrees even in details with that which we find in the Bible, though the polytheism of Chaldaea is there replaced by an uncompromising monotheism, and there are little touches, like the substitution of an "ark" for the Babylonian "ship," which show that the narrative has been transported to Palestine. Equally Babylonian in origin is ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce
... doctrine somewhat like this, is found in the Meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, though apparently repugnant to the polytheism commonly admitted by the Stoics, to whom he belonged: "The world, take it all together, is but one; there is but one sort of matter to make it of, one God to govern it, and one law to guide it. For, run through the whole system of rational ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... of nature, the rocks, the earth, and the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to everything: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... operations of nature are the movement of pure spirit; or by the use of the "Word" of "Wisdom," half personified as intermediate between God and the world. While these monotheistic, pantheistic doctrines were taught in the schools, the people were left to a debased polytheism and to new superstitions imported from the Orient; the philosophers themselves were by no means unaffected by the popular beliefs. Mingled with all these were the ancient legends of gods and heroes, accepted as inspired scripture by the people, and by philosophers in ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... God need not be infinite or all-inclusive, for 'all that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our common selves.'[20] Such a conception of God, even on James's own admission, is akin to polytheism. And such polytheism implies a pluralistic view of the universe. The invisible order, in which we hope to realise our larger life, is a world which does not grow integrally in accordance with the preconceived plan of a single architect, 'but piecemeal by the contributions of its several parts.'[21] ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... with the family and social organization comes the religious life of the Negro. The religion of Africa is the universal animism or fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life. Among primitive Negroes there can be, as Miss Kingsley reminds us, no such divorce of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... have been supposed to suggest the amalgamation of two or more religious systems in consequence of a blending of races alien to one another. But such features may be due to survivals incidental to the highest form of nature religion, namely, anthropomorphic polytheism. ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... the Jewish people under the Maccabees, or the earlier under Joshua, every philosophic reader will have felt the true and transcendent spirit of mercy which resides virtually in such wars, as maintaining the unity of God against Polytheism and, by trampling on cruel idolatries, as indirectly opening the channels for benign principles of morality through endless generations of men. Here especially he will have read one justification of Wordsworth's bold doctrine upon war. Thus far he will destroy a ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... and philosophers, 5 The influence of Rome upon the provinces, ib. The languages most extensively spoken, 6 The moral condition of the Empire, ib. The influence of the philosophical sects—the Epicureans, the Stoics, the Academics, and Plato, 7 The influence of the current Polytheism, 9 The state of the Jews—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, ib. Preparations for a great Deliverer, and expectation ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... with the southern tribes in a matter most vital to Semitic societies, religious ideal and practice. The anthropomorphic monotheism, which the southern tribes brought up from Arabia, had to contend in Galilee with theriomorphic polytheism, that is, the tendency to embody the qualities of divinity in animal forms. For such beliefs as these there is ample evidence in the Judaean tradition, even during the pre-Palestinian wanderings. Both reptile and bovine incarnations manifest themselves ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... but in the better sense of the word. His search after truth was in no sneering or incredulous spirit, but in that of a reverent inquirer. We must remember, in justice to him, that an earnest-minded man in his day could hardly take higher ground than that of the sceptic. The old polytheism was dying out in everything but in name, and there was ...
— Cicero - Ancient Classics for English Readers • Rev. W. Lucas Collins
... congenital gift which good Bishop Hall would look for in a wife,—is attributed to "Nature." In fact "Nature" and "Grace," as handled by the scholastics, are nothing more nor less than two hostile Divinities in the Pantheon of post-classical polytheism. ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... his testimony in the following words: "No one ever knew of his doing or saying anything profane or unholy." Socrates believed in one Supreme Being, the intelligent Creator of the universe. He also believed in the immortality of the soul. These doctrines were altogether contrary to Greek polytheism, the prevailing religion of Athens, and they prove him to have been far in advance of the age in which he lived. While he established no school, Socrates nevertheless must ever rank as one of the world's ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... term denoting a subordinate superhuman being in monotheistic religions, e.g.. Islam, Judaism, Christianity, and in allied religions, such as Zoroastrianism. In polytheism the grades of superhuman beings are continuous; but in monotheism there is a sharp distinction of kind, as well as degree, between God on the one hand, and all other superhuman beings on the other; the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... taken for beings greater than any man, and summoning us to trim the lamp of endeavour at the shrine of heroic chiefs of mankind. In that house there are many mansions, the boisterous sanctuary of a vagabond polytheism. But each altar is individual and apart, and the reaction of this isolation upon the egotistic instincts of the worshipper has been only too evident. It is good for us to build temples to great names which recall special transfigurations ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I - Essay 2: Carlyle • John Morley
... POLYTHEISM, a belief in a plurality of gods each with a sphere of his own, and each in general a personification of some elemental power concerned in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... show that the moon has been in every age, and remains still, one of the principal objects of human worship. Even among certain nations credited with pure monotheism, it will be manifested that there was the practice of that primitive polytheism which adored the hosts of heaven. And, however humiliating or disappointing the disclosure may prove, it will be established that some of the foremost Christian peoples of the world maintain luniolatry to this day, notwithstanding that they have the reproving light ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... is hardly possible to conceive how it could enter into the conception of any one to compare the stupid polytheism of the worshippers of Budda with the Christian religion: In one thing indeed the Catholic church has contrived to establish a resemblance, by the subordinate worship of ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... and ostentations, mysterious ceremonies, and found their advantage in the superstition of the multitude,—each new divinity, each new mystery meaning a gain for them. As they had corrupted the primitive religion into polytheism, so Christianity was corrupted by conforming it to the prejudices of those to be converted, in whose eyes the simplicity of the new doctrine would have been no recommendation for it. The Jew sought in it an echo ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... immortal gods! Hence too it is that philosophers have, in different past ages, undertaken to demonstrate the verity of all religions, and according to the religion of the government under which they lived, they have either supported Polytheism, Theism, Sabinism, Judaism, Popery, or Mahomedanism. The fate of Socrates has never been forgotten by any philosopher who possessed the chief attribute of wisdom—PRUDENCE; and no benevolent man will ever seek to disturb a public faith which ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... reason allowed itself to be completely vanquished. And thus the body of Catholic dogma became a system of contradictions, more or less successfully harmonized. The Trinity was a kind of pact between monotheism and polytheism, and humanity and divinity sealed a peace in Christ, nature covenanted with grace, grace with free will, free will with the Divine prescience, and so on. And it is perhaps true, as Hermann says (loc. cit.), that "as soon as we develop religious thought to its logical conclusions, it enters into ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... not indeed be taken for veritable history; but it is a solemn hymn in which some great truths of the world's origin are sublimely set forth. It gives us the distinct idea of the unity of Creation,—sweeping away, at one mighty stroke, the whole system of naturalistic polytheism, which makes science impossible, when it declares that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In the same words it sets forth the truth by whose light science alone walks safely, that the source of all things is a spiritual cause. The God from whose power all things ...
— Who Wrote the Bible? • Washington Gladden
... evolution the same law of progress holds. The tribal homogeneous industry, when one man did work at everything, became heterogeneous, special, and complex, as society enlarged and advanced into higher integrations, and as the life of the individual became more and more advanced through Fetichism, Polytheism, Monotheism, to our modern ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... seemed bare and empty. The Law stringently bridled passions which the hideous worship of the Canaanites stimulated. No wonder that, when the first generation of the conquerors had passed away, their successors lapsed into the universal polytheism, with its attendant idolatry and immorality. Instead of thinking of the Israelites as monsters of ingratitude and backsliding, we come nearer the truth, and make a better use of the history, when ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... of the races of mankind as descended from Shem, Ham, and Japhet, and therein of the early condition of man in his antique form. He then dwelt on the pre-eminence of the Greeks in Art and Philosophy, and noticed the suitableness of polytheism to small insulated states, in which patriotism acted as a substitute for religion, in destroying or suspending self. Afterwards, in consequence of the extension of the Roman empire, some universal or common spirit became necessary for the conservation ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... best ways of feeling a genuine friendly enthusiasm for persons of the other sex, without gliding into anything with a shorter name, is to know a whole family of them. The most intellectual idolatry at one shrine is apt to lose its purely intellectual character, but a genial polytheism is always bracing and platonic. Besides, the Vivians lived in the same street or rather "gardens" as ourselves, and were amusing as bringing one within sight of what an old friend of mine, named Bentley, called with more than his usual gloom and severity ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... Church, Low Church, Broad Church, Free Church; ultramontanism[obs3]; papism, papistry; monkery[obs3]; papacy; Anglicanism, Catholicism, Romanism; popery, Scarlet Lady, Church of Rome, Greek Church. paganism, heathenism, ethicism[obs3]; mythology; polytheism, ditheism[obs3], tritheism[obs3]; dualism; heathendom[obs3]. Judaism, Gentilism[obs3], Islamism, Islam , Mohammedanism, Babism[obs3], Sufiism, Neoplatonism, Turcism[obs3], Brahminism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sabianism, Gnosticism, Hylotheism[obs3], Mormonism; Christian Science. heretic, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... never married, who worshipped the sun, whose life was an uninterrupted delight, and who, when overtaken by age, lay on a perfumed grass that produced a voluptuous death. Evhemerus, a terrible atheist, whose Sacred History the early bishops wielded against polytheism until they discovered it was double-edged, took him to Panchaia, an island where incense grew; where property was held in common; where there was but one law—Justice, yet a justice different from our own, one which Hugo must have intercepted ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... of Montezuma, the Aztec priests had engrafted upon these simple ceremonies not only a burdensome ceremonial, and a polytheism similar to that of Eastern nations, but, as we have seen, human sacrifices and even cannibalism had become prominent features in religious worship. Throughout the entire ceremonial and religious conceptions of the Aztecs may be observed a display ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... theocracy gave way to the gods and government of the Romans. Byzantium, Rome, and the Empire effected them rapidly, and as it were instinctively by themselves when, wearied with, and blushing at, polytheism, they rose at the voice of Constantine against their gods, and swept away, like an angry tempest, those temples, those ideas and forms of worship, to which the people still clung, but which the superior portion of human thought had already abandoned. The Civilisation of Constantine and Charlemagne ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine
... that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, and out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it is because the theology ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... impulse which a nation has received at its origin,—from its historical antecedents,—from its political system,—and from the peculiarities which predominate in the formation of its intelligence. The Greek polytheism did not distinguish itself from the Roman either in its theogony or its rites; but there is no doubt that the former was more poetical, more artistic, and more scrupulous than the latter. The Romans, being brought into close contact with all the nations ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... poem, deserves to be adopted, without a rigid scrutiny. Some dawnings of a philosophic spirit enlighten the general remarks on the study of history and of man. I am not displeased with the inquiry into the origin and nature of the gods of polytheism, which might deserve the illustration of a riper judgment. Upon the whole, I may apply to the first labour of my pen the speech of a far superior artist, when he surveyed the first productions of his pencil. After viewing some portraits which he had painted in his youth, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... consider its unity established by the harmonious interplay of the forces permeating it. This great fact is what led Herbert Spencer to conclude that the universe could have but one creator, one ruler, and that polytheism was untenable." ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... to which, avowed selfishness is the Rule of the World. It is indeed most important preaching—to preach that there is not one God for religion and another God for human fellowship—and another God for buying and selling—that pestilent polytheism has been largely and confidently preached in our time, and blessed are those who can detect its mendacities, and help to disenchant ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... philosophy of Greece went straight to the core of the new religion'. A century or so later, 'Greek mysteries and Greek civilization in the whole range of its development exercise their influence on the Church, but as yet not its mythology and polytheism; these were still to come'. 'Another century had to elapse before Hellenism as a whole and in every phase of its development was established in the Church.' The process which he describes began, in fact, as soon as Christian preachers used the Greek language, and was never so complete ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... the tolerating spirit of the heathens. Well! but the honorable gentleman will recollect that heathens, that polytheists, must permit a number of divinities. It is the very essence of its constitution. But was it ever heard that polytheism tolerated a dissent from a polytheistic establishment,—the belief of one God only? Never! never! Sir, they constantly carried on persecution against that doctrine. I will not give heathens the glory of a doctrine which I consider the best part of Christianity. ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... splendour of art, architecture and ceremony in its oracles, healings and theophanies in its adaptability in absorbing all cults and creeds (2) Its weakness: No deep sense of truth No association with morality Polytheism The fear of the grave (3) Its defence: Plutarch—the Stoics—Neo-Platonism—the Eclectics THE VICTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH (1) Its characteristics (2) Persecuted because it refused to compromise (3) The Christian "out-lived" the pagan ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover
... enter at present. But we may note that the local religions of the ancient pagan world had partly destroyed each other by mutual intermingling, and had lost their hold upon people from the circumstance that their ethical teaching no longer corresponded to the advanced ethical feeling of the age. Polytheism, in short, was outgrown. It was outgrown both intellectually and morally. People were ceasing to believe in its doctrines, and were ceasing to respect its precepts. The learned were taking refuge in philosophy, the ignorant in mystical superstitions imported from Asia. The ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... themselves, upon which they can form no theoretical conclusion, they fly for satisfaction to the most simple, but most ineffectual of all solutions—the agency of invisible beings, with which, in their opinion, all nature is filled. Hence the rise of Polytheism and local deities, which have overspread the face of the earth, under the different titles of guardian gods or tutelary saints. Hence magnificent temples and splendid statues have been erected to aid the imagination of votaries, and to realize objects of worship, which, though ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... Zo:ologia}, the title of a book published in 1649, makes it clear that 'zoology' was not yet in our vocabulary, as {Greek: zo:ophyton} (Jackson) proves the same for 'zoophyte', and {Greek: polytheismos} (Gell) for 'polytheism'. One precaution, let me observe, would be necessary in the collecting, or rather in the adopting of any statements about the newness of a word—for the passages themselves, even when erroneous, ought not the ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... altogether distinct—in a word, two religions: the one altogether sensible, derived from the adoration of natural phenomena, and by its forms, as well as by its literal development, reminding us of the polytheism of the Greeks; the other founded upon a material pantheism, metaphysical, mysterious, sacerdotal, and presenting the most astonishing conformity with the religions of the East. That last has received the name of druidism, from the druids who were its founders ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various
... have some point of contact with human nature. Hedonism will pass the pragmatic test as well as Stoicism. Up to a certain point every social principle that is not absolutely idiotic works: Autocracy works in Russia and Democracy in America; Atheism works in France, Polytheism in India, Monotheism throughout Islam, and Pragmatism, or No-ism, in England. Paul's fantastic conception of the damned Adam, represented by Bunyan as a pilgrim with a great burden of sins on his back, corresponded to the fundamental condition of evolution, which is, that life, including ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... ago few Hindus in the villages of the land would fail to defend polytheism and idolatry as an essential part of their faith. At present the Christian preacher, as he travels among these same people, finds universal assent to his declaration concerning the unity of God. I have hardly met one villager in the land who maintains today that there are really "gods ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... very first, everywhere and all the time, it has, and continues to be, inextricably intertwined and influenced by Theistic beliefs, even when and where such beliefs have been the crudest and most debased form of polytheism. ...
— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen
... military and priestly dominance to commercial and scientific dominance, from commercial dominance to proletarian democracy, from slavery to serfdom, from serfdom to capitalism, from monarchy to republicanism, from polytheism to monotheism, from monotheism to atheism, from atheism to pantheistic humanitarianism, from general illiteracy to general literacy, from romance to realism, from realism to mysticism, from metaphysics to physics, are all but changes from ...
— Revolutionist's Handbook and Pocket Companion • George Bernard Shaw
... had some success, though he found, like all other missionaries, that their faith, being rather a heresy than a paganism, had truth enough in it to be much harder to deal with than the Hindoo polytheism. Besides, they accepted the Persian proverb, "Every time a man argues, he loses a drop of blood from his liver." He was impeded also by the want of a Persian translation of the entire Bible, having no more than the Gospels ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... Psychological Origin of Religions.—Principles and method of the science of religion. Personal, family, and tribal religions. Ancestral worship. Doctrines of animism; fetichism; polytheism; ...
— Anthropology - As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States • Daniel Garrison Brinton
... or iron: or an artificer in any degree. Hence we must be cautious in forming ideas of the antient theology of nations from the current notions of the Greeks, and Romans; and more especially from the descriptions of their poets. Polytheism, originally vile, and unwarrantable, was rendered ten times more base by coming through their hands. To instance in one particular: among all the daemon herd what one is there of a form, and character, so odious, and contemptible as Priapus? an obscure ill-formed ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... f.) is predicted in this verse; the abolition of the latter, in the verse following. Both are in a similar way placed beside each other in Zech. xiv. 9: "In that day shall there be one Lord, and His name one;" where the first clause refers to the abolition of polytheism, and the second to the abolition of the mixing of religion—of the hidden apostasy—which, without venturing to forsake the true God entirely and openly, endeavours to mix up and identify Him with the world. To the fundamental thought there are several parallels; e.g., ...
— Christology of the Old Testament: And a Commentary on the Messianic Predictions, v. 1 • Ernst Wilhelm Hengstenberg
... relaxing creed. The inspiriting doctrines fell upon the ardent character, and so confirmed its energy. Strong beliefs win strong men, and then make them stronger. Such is no doubt one cause why Monotheism tends to prevail over Polytheism; it produces a higher, steadier character, calmed and concentrated by a great single object; it is not confused by competing rites, or distracted by miscellaneous deities. Polytheism is religion IN COMMISSION, and it is weak accordingly. But it will be said the Jews, who were monotheist, ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... which we will view more closely when we treat of Unity, that the quest for variety which led men into polytheism, or the fractioning of the Deity into false and wicked gods and goddesses, necessarily forced man to the creation of a Fate, to which Jupiter himself was subjected, more blind, more crushing, more appalling to the imagination (because while retaining his entire individuality, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... not progressive Jewish monotheism Religion of Egypt Its great antiquity Its essential features Complexity of Egyptian polytheism Egyptian deities The worship of the sun The priestly caste of Egypt Power of the priests Future rewards and punishments Morals of the Egyptians Functions of the priests Egyptian ritual of worship Transmigration of souls Animal worship Effect of Egyptian polytheism on the Jews Assyrian deities ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... Polytheism is the name given to a religion such as that of the Greeks or Romans, who believed in many gods and spirits of greater and lesser power. These supernatural beings, each in its own sphere, immediately directed the processes of nature ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... courses. We had supposed that this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... humour in narrative, adhering in the most literal manner to facts, and yet contriving to bring them out by that graphic literalness under their most ludicrous aspect, what can equal St. Luke's description of the riot at Ephesus? The picture of the narrow trade selfishness of Demetrius—of polytheism reduced into a matter of business—of the inanity of a mob tumult in an enslaved country—of the mixed coaxing and bullying of its officials, was surely never brought out with a more latter vice, indeed, ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... theology,[29] for its error is only that it supposes the existence of life wherever it finds activity—an error which can "easily be brought to the test of verification" and corrected. "We can show it to be an error, and so get rid of it." But Polytheism, seeking for greater generality, refers phenomena to beings who are not identified with them, to "indirect wills belonging to beings purely imaginary," whose "existence can no more be decisively disproved than it can be demonstrated." Further, Polytheism extended to the order ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... of an all-embracing reality. This highest cause, then, we regard as absolutely necessary, because we find it absolutely necessary to rise to it, and do not discover any reason for proceeding beyond it. Thus, among all nations, through the darkest polytheism glimmer some faint sparks of monotheism, to which these idolaters have been led, not from reflection and profound thought, but by the study and natural progress of ...
— The Critique of Pure Reason • Immanuel Kant
... between the intrusive people and those whom they thus displaced, the commingling of the ideas of the one with those of the other, arising from their commingling of blood. It is because of this that we find coexisting in the pre-Hellenic times the sorcery of the Celt and the polytheism of the Hindu. There can be no doubt that many of the philosophical lineaments displayed by the early European mythology are not due to indigenous thought, but were derived from an ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last words embodied the central ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... impressionable nature of the Hellenic character and the interest of the Egyptians,—in spite of all that tended to a fusion of Hellenism and Orientalism, it never came to a proper amalgamation. The contradiction between the free-thought philosophy of Greece, which was fast outgrowing its polytheism and Olympian worship, and the deeply rooted sacerdotal system of the Pharaonian institutions, was too great and too flagrant. Thus there never was an Egypto-Hellenic phase of thought. But there was another civilisation of great antiquity, possessing peculiar features, not less interesting for ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... Australia, p. 448. There are also traces of propitiation in Western Australia (MS. of Mrs. Bates).] Sometimes, as in many African tribes, ancestor worship is almost the whole of practical cult. Usually it accompanies polytheism, existing beside it on a lower plane. It was prevalent in the Mycenae of the shaft graves; in Attica it was uninterrupted; it is conspicuous in Greece from the ninth century onwards. But it is unknown to or ignored by the Homeric poets, though it can ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... are forced to love him only, and ignore giving him a rival (referring to Koranic denunciations of "Shirk," or attributing a partner to Allah, the religion of plurality, syntheism not polytheism): see, he walks tottering under the weight of his back parts wriggling them whilst they are rounded ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... The Gods. Polytheism.—The Greeks, like the ancient Aryans, believed in many gods. They had neither the sentiment of infinity nor that of eternity; they did not conceive of God as one for whom the heavens are only a tent and the earth a foot-stool. To the Greeks ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... is Greek. Even without foreign influence, Greek polytheism would have developed a Goddess of Love, as did the polytheism of the North (Frigga) and of the Aztecs. The rites of Adonis, the vernal year, are, even in the name of the hero, Oriental. "The name Adonis is the Phoenician Adon, 'Lord.'" {44} "The decay and revival ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... no more but perhaps a shrine! Might I not, with health and good luck to aid me, create some new 'Prometheus Unbound,' Patrick or Columbcille, Oisin or Fion, in Prometheus's stead, and, instead of Caucasus, Croagh-Patrick or Ben Bulben? Have not all races had their first unity from a polytheism that marries them to rock and hill? We had in Ireland imaginative stories, which the uneducated classes knew and even sang, and might we not make those stories current among the educated classes, re-discovering ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it is possible to see any native inspiration ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... basis of a common administrative system, and a common law—the jus gentium. It needed a common religion. The effort to supply this passes through three stages. The earliest of these is the stage of universal toleration which was made possible by polytheism. A second stage soon follows. The various religions of the Empire overflow one another's frontier-lines and a synthesis begins, leading to the Stoic idea of the universal truth expressed in many forms. But the popular ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... polytheism of the earlier type of religion was converted into pantheism. Brahma, the supreme being, is impersonal, the eternal source of all things, from which all finite beings—gods, nature, and men—emanate. It is by emanation,—an outflow analogous to that of a stream from its fountain, in distinction ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... this adoration of the stars and planets that led by degrees to what we call polytheism. Man partitioned those terrible powers of nature of which he felt himself the sport, between a vast number of agents, between crowds of genii upon whose mercies he thought himself dependent, and whom he did his best to propitiate by gifts and to compel by magic. Little by little, intelligence perfected ...
— A History of Art in Chaldaea & Assyria, v. 1 • Georges Perrot
... did not consist in worshipping a god who, not being ideal, might be unworthy of worship, but rather in recognising other gods than the one worshipped in Jerusalem. To the Greeks, on the contrary, whose philosophy was enlightened and ingenuous, monotheism and polytheism seemed perfectly innocent and compatible. To say God or the gods was only to use different expressions for the same influence, now viewed in its abstract unity and correlation with all existence, now viewed in its various manifestations in moral life, in nature, or in history. ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... porticoes, and groves, and temples of this classic city, we attempt to conceive the emotion which stirred his heart as he beheld it "wholly given to idolatry;" or whether we contrast the sublime, majestic theism proclaimed by Paul with the degrading polytheism and degenerate philosophy which then prevailed in Athens, or consider the prudent and sagacious manner in which the apostle conducts his argument in view of the religious opinions and prejudices of his audience, we can not but feel that this event is fraught with ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... have already intimated, Pantheism is the negation of the Divine Personality in order to arrive at Unity; Polytheism is the negation of the Divine Unity, which is fractioned and divided that its multitudinous action may be conceived. The light fancy was delighted with such divisions, resulting in varied gods and ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 2, August, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... errors of the copyists are insufficient to explain all the bewildering changes which disfigure many of the books of the Sacred Scriptures. The gradual evolution of the Hebrew religion from virtual polytheism to the strictest monotheism seemed peremptorily to call for a corresponding change in the writings in which the revelation underlying it was enshrined. A later stadium of the evolution—which, of course, was never felt to be such—might naturally ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... divine, the Bible is, in fact, a most dangerous book, and who would request them, in their new-born enlightenment, to be pleased to shut their eyes, and to return to a religion of ceremony quite as absurd and almost as cruel as the polytheism they have renounced. I imagine you and your little flock in the Sabbath stillness of those mountains and green valleys, of which you give me such pleasant descriptions, exhibiting a specimen of a truly primitive ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... of a Christian commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism slightly tinged ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... the contest must be aware, though the remnants of the broken host still linger on the field. It is now time to consider whether religion must perish with superstition, or whether the death of superstition may not be the new birth of religion. Religion survived the fall of Polytheism; it is surely conceivable that it may survive the fall of Anthropomorphism, and that the desperate struggle which is being waged about the formal belief in "Personality," may be merely the sloughing off of something ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... Nation held, during the Middle Ages, the first and strongest influence over the poetry and thought of Western Europe. The oldest and purest remains of the poets of German Nations are contained in the Scandinavian Edda. Its mythology is founded on Polytheism; but through it, as through the religion of all nations of the world, there is a faint gleam of the one Supreme God, of infinite power, knowledge and wisdom, whose greatness and justice could not be represented in the form of ordinary man. Such was the God of the Pagan Germans, and ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... the country to another with incredible quickness, he has visited every part of India, from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, and from Calcutta to Bombay. He preaches the One Deity and, "Vedas in hand," proves that in the ancient writings there was not a word that could justify polytheism. Thundering against idol worship, the great orator fights with all his might against caste, infant marriages, and superstitions. Chastising all the evils grafted on India by centuries of casuistry and false interpretation of the Vedas, he blames for them the Brahmans, who, as he openly says before ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... those, O Son of Kunti, who being devotees of other divinities worship with faith, worship me only, but irregularly. For I am the enjoyer as well as Lord of all sacrifices. But they know me not truly, therefore do they fall," i.e. they return to the world of mortals. This teaching may be called polytheism rather than idolatry. And yet at the time this book was written, polytheism ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones
... be meant by three gods, is, "three objects of thought, of whom each separately may be called God." To avow the last statement, as the Creed does, and yet repudiate Three Gods, is to object to the phrase, yet confess to the only meaning which the phrase can convey. Thus the Creed really teaches polytheism, but saves orthodoxy by forbidding any one to call it by its true name. Or to put the matter otherwise: it teaches three Divine Persons, and denies three Gods; and leaves us to guess what else is a Divine Person but a God, or a God ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... motion, such a line must be either straight or circular" will suffice to show how Platonic it is. Taylor certainly professed a kind of heathenism. D'lsraeli said, "Mr. T. Taylor, the Platonic philosopher and the modern Plethon,[423] consonant to that philosophy, professes polytheism." Taylor printed this in large type, in a page by itself after the dedication, without any disavowal. I have seen the following, Greek and translation both, in his handwriting: "[Greek: Pas agathos ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... Barbarian, as they met before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities. [5] The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... integration of this anthropopsychic hypothesis from its earliest and most diffused form of what we may term polypsychism (wherein the causes inferred were almost as personally numerous as the effects contemplated), through polytheism (wherein many effects of a like kind were referred to one deity, who, as it were, took special charge over that class), up to monotheism (wherein all causation is gathered up into the monopsychism of a single personality): it is enough thus briefly to show that from first ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... in what Mr. Emerson calls a "pistareen Providence" is a belief in pantheism or polytheism. There is certainly nothing ridiculous in the faith that the Being who contrived and arranged, and adjusted the infinite littlenesses of creation, and ordained their laws, and who continues their existence, maintains an intimate interest in the only intelligent creatures he ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... this pantheism branches out into animism or shamanism, fetichism and phallicism. In its higher forms, it becomes polytheism, idolatry and defective philosophy. Having centuries ago corrupted Buddhism it is the malaria which, unseen and unfelt, is ready to poison and corrupt Christianity. Indeed, it has already given over to disease and spiritual death more than one once hopeful Christian believer, teacher ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... there must be a name for the religion of the Rig-Veda, polytheism would seem at first sight the most appropriate. Polytheism, however, has assumed with us a meaning which renders it totally inapplicable ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... certain hymn of the Rig-Veda in their daily prayers.[13] Nowhere do we find stronger arguments against idolatry, nowhere has the unity of the Deity been upheld more strenuously against the errors of polytheism than by some of the ancient sages of India. Even in the oldest of their sacred books, the Rig-Veda, composed three or four thousand years ago—where we find hymns addressed to the different deities of the sky, the air, the earth, the ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Neo-Platonists (Sallustius and others,) justified their Polytheism on much the same pretext as is in fact involved in the language of this page; [Greek: polloi men en de mia theotaeti]. This indeed seems to me decisive in favour of Waterland's scheme against this of Sherlock's;—namely, that in the latter we find no sufficient reason why in the nature of ...
— Coleridge's Literary Remains, Volume 4. • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... he meanwhile had been toiling for years in the Danubian wilds, ignorant perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile convulsed the Church)—neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the infinity, the illimitability, ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... where we saw the same tokens of paganism and barbarity, or worse, than before; only as they were conquered by the Muscovites, and entirely reduced, they were not so dangerous; but for the rudeness of manners, idolatry, and polytheism, no people in the world ever went beyond them. They are clothed all in skins of beasts, and their houses are built of the same. You know not a man from a woman, neither by the ruggedness of their countenances, or their clothes; ...
— The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1808) • Daniel Defoe
... correct, the true inference would be that both doctrines are meaningless aggregations of words, and therefore not capable of being in any true sense either 'believed' or 'disbelieved.' So again the view of the external world suggests to Newman 'atheism, pantheism, or polytheism.' Almighty benevolence has created a world of intelligent beings, most of whom are doomed to eternal tortures, and having become incarnate in order to save us, has altogether failed in His purpose. The inference is, says Fitzjames, that ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen |
