Concept
Polytheism
Overview
worship of or belief in multiple deities
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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This polytheism is supposed to have originated, at a very early age, in the impression made by the starry heavens, particularly by the great heavenly bodies, the sun and the moon. Here for the first time, it is maintained, man was confronted by a world far transcending his own realm of sense perception; because of the multiplicity of the motives that were operative, it was not the idea of one deity but the belief in…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
States what Polytheism is; opens on Polytheism.
Fetichism proper gradually becomes limited to objects possessing a marked individuality. A particular mountain or river is worshipped bodily (as it is even now by the Hindoos and the South Sea Islanders) as a divinity in itself, not the mere residence of one, long after invisible gods have been imagined as rulers of all the great classes of phaenomena, even intellectual and moral, as war, love, wisdom, beauty, &c…
John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism
Names Polytheism twice; opens on Polytheism.
The customs and beliefs, the superstitious practices and supernatural beings, of modern European folk-lore are sometimes explained as the wrecks and remnants of the Pagan polytheism which preceded Christianity. And if the Aryan peoples were from the very beginning polytheists; if the Hellenes and the Hindoos, the Teutons and the Scandinavians, brought their myths and their cults with them from the original Aryan…
Plutarch, Plutarch's Romane Questions
Names Polytheism several times; opens on Polytheism.
Philosophers who discussed Polytheism
- Auguste Comte
- Mircea Eliade
- Max Weber
- Ludwig Klages
- Swami Vivekananda
- Islam
- David Hume
- Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya
Related ideas
- Parvati
- Lakshmi
- Durga
- Hanuman
- Ātman (Hinduism)
- Epicurus
- Ritual
- History
- Aphrodite
- Athena
- Hinduism
- Heaven
- Abrahamic religions
- Animism
- Henotheism
- Ancient Greek
- Chinese folk religion
- Vedas
- Judaism
- Judeo-Christian
- Karma
- Latin
- Adi Shankara
- English people
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Outline of philosophy.
Narrower topics:
- Doctrine and Covenants
- Durga
- Ensign (LDS magazine)
- Ganesha
- Hanuman
- Marseille
- Parvati
- Revelation in Mormonism
- Church Educational System
- Creighton University
- Old Norse religion
- Etruscan religion
- Smarta tradition
- William O. Stephens
- Christianity in the ante-Nicene period
- FAIR (Mormon apologetics organization)
- Institute of Religion
- Liahona (magazine)
- Mormon cosmology
- Ulrich Libbrecht