The New Polytheism

 

Hermes and Athena

Many suppose that Christians do not believe in the pagan gods. I’ve heard atheists make the point that they just believe in one fewer god than monotheists.

This is a misunderstanding of the nature of the pagan gods. It ignores the Bible. It also, on a little reflection, makes no sense. The ancient Greeks, so logical and deep in their thinking, just arbitrarily believed in things that did not exist?

And the Greeks or Romans could recognize their same gods in Egypt or Mesopotamia or Germany or India or Carthage. Could they all have fixed upon the same random fantasies?

Of course the pagan gods existed. Being immortal, by definition, they continue to exist. Being a monotheist simply means you are not to worship them. They have no saving power. “You shall have no other gods before me.”

The pagan gods are disembodied spirits. We know they exist, because we find they command reverence and take over the will. They are wills that act independently of our own. We know they exist for the same reason we know other people exist: by the evidence of their independent will.

The easiest example to illustrate the point is Dionysus, as god of wine. We are aware that wine, or other drugs, take over the mind and distort the will. There is an old saying, “First the man takes a drink. Then the drink takes a drink. Then the drink takes the man.” We once spoke of absinthe as the “green fairy.” Not a metaphor. At the point of drunkenness, the man is an avatar of Dionysus. He is possessed by the daemon Dionysus. As were his traditional acolytes, the Maenads, who ran wild in the forests and tore things apart.

Dionysus is an especially crude and obvious model, but the same is true of the other well-known polytheistic gods. They are spirits that can possess and animate us.

Consider Aphrodite, with her son Eros. As any male of a certain age can attest, she is capable of driving us mad, causing us to act against our own interests. “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, are of imagination all compact.” She expresses herself in female physical beauty, the sort that, we might say in our gross materialist way, triggers hormones. Shakespeare rightly portrays erotic love in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” or “Romeo and Juliet,” as like a madness or a drug. Leonard Cohen was a prominent and rather tragic victim of this daemon.

The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid

Will make or man or woman madly dote

Upon the next live creature that it sees

More respectably, Hephaestos, Aphrodite’s sometime spouse, is the daemon of geekdom, the “weaponized autism” that keeps so many young men in their basements, fascinated by logical and practical problems. They lose themselves in this—the sure sign of demonic possession--and neglect other aspects of their lives. They become avatars of the smith god, trolls working at their forges.

Ares may be less obvious; yet we are all possessed, at times, by the spirit of Ares. We are outside ourselves, out of our right minds, in combat, in a fistfight, or in a heated argument. In such situations, it is as if we are driven by another spirit, so that we are heedless of our own safety or best interests.

Athena is more difficult to dislike. The poet Miriam Waddington laments, in her memoirs, that too few Canadians value “the aesthetic life.” The aesthetic life is the life of an acolyte of Athena. It too involves an all-consuming passion, and lack of regard to other aspects of life. Like an alcoholic, one is likely to end up starving in a garret.

Hera is the irrational drive for social status and propriety: people who surrender their selves to live their lives in the eyes of others.

Zeus is power: the spirit that possessed Mao, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin.

Apollo, as the sun god, is the god we worship as “science” today. Under his influence we see only the impressions of the physical senses as real, neglecting the larger metaphysical elements of existence.

Artemis, his sister, is the illusory drive for innocence.  She is exceptionally powerful in our times, as “the state of nature.” An idolatrous nature, she must remain forever virgin and shun men. Those who worship her, like Rousseau, believe in the “noble savage” and the idea that civilization corrupts. She is the spirit who, if she possesses you, may cause anorexia nervosa. Or, in some large part, feminism.

Ceres, her counterpoint, is the “maternal instinct.” Admirable at the proper dosage, it can easily become idolatrous. It drives some women, and fewer men, to a hysterical attitude towards their children, in which the latter can do no wrong, or can never be left alone. Acolytes can come to live through their children, possessing and being possessed by them. This too is like a drug, is a madness.

Hermes is more subtle, and perhaps for this more powerful. He is the spirit of commerce, in the sense of communication of all sorts. His spirit we know as postmodernism. To his disciples, “reality” is a matter of social consensus. To say a thing is to make it so. He makes us obsess over political correctness and pronouns. His adherents are eventually no longer in touch with reality at all.

Hestia is the spirit we call “family values.” To her the cow and apple pie are sacred. She may look harmless, but on the larger scale, she is the soul of nationalism, of racism. All for the “fatherland” or “motherland”; our race is our extended family. One can see how this often works against the interests of the individual acolyte, and against the interests of humankind.

Poseidon, god of seas and horses and hurricanes, is the spirit of change. We see a lot of him currently, too. He is the spirit of “wanderlust,” for some an addiction, pulling them out of themselves. But we also see him in those who call themselves “progressives,” or yearn for unspecified “hope and change,” or for “diversity.” Change by itself, of course, is not an intrinsic good. Necessarily, much that is good may end up being sacrificed to the idol “change.”

All of these daemons are held in decent check by the worship of the one true God, who is Truth, Good, and Beauty. They have been held in check for the past two thousand years. They fade like the stars of night when the sun appears. So too the more disreputable vices: wrath, acedia, envy, lust, gluttony, greed, pride. All the petty ambient spirits who can take over the human will.

Yet now, because the faith in the one true God is fading, we see them all reemerging in our time.

We see a rise in all sorts of strange madnesses. 

We see rough beasts now slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.