Ascendant II: Theology for Modern Polytheists

By John Michael Greer, Brandon Hensley, John Beckett and 2 more

Are the Gods good? Are the Gods real? Is polytheism at odds with science? What is the place of personal experience in modern paganism? How do we deal with and define cultural appropriation? What roles do cross-cultural interpretation play in polytheist theology?

Theology provides a language and a tool set for studying theos, that is, the divine. Whether conducted by seasoned academics, armchair philosophers, or ordinary folks figuring out just what they believe, theology is the source of all interpretation of religious source texts, myth, and practice.

However, formal and scholarly theology has almost always focused on the monotheistic religions or very occasionally on Eastern polytheistic religions, such as Hinduism and Shinto. Western polytheism is seen in academia as a subject more suited for anthropology or history than theology. That has now begun to change. Various forms of contemporary paganism are gradually gaining an updated theological foundation for their practices and beliefs as modern polytheists themselves engage in theology. The first volume of Ascendant was Bibliotheca Alexandrina's entry into this exciting (new) field. It is our hope that the second volume of Ascendant, which you hold in your hands, will add to the foundation of modern pagan, polytheist theology — and that each successive volume in the series will further strengthen that foundation.

So what do you believe? What do you practice? And why?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebecca Buchanan
• Release date: Mar 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393759171

John Michael Greer

John Michael Greer has published 10 books about occult traditions and the unexplained. Recent books include ‘Monsters: An Investigator's Guide to Magical Beings’ (Llewellyn, 2001), which was picked up by One Spirit Book Club and has appeared in Spanish and Hungarian editions, and ‘The New Encyclopedia of the Occult’ (Llewellyn, 2003).

Book preview

Ascendant II

Theology for Modern Polytheists

Edited by Michael Hardy

Dedication

To those who continue to ask the hard questions

and those Powers who guide them

Table of Contents

Dedication

Introduction

by Michael Hardy

On the Goodness of the Gods:

An Essay in Moral Theology

by John Michael Greer

On Idols and Myths:

The Gods as Real and Sensory Objects

by Brandon Hensley

The Theology of Personal Experience

by John Beckett

The Case for Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Paganism

by Wayne Keysor

Applying Cross-Cultural Methods of Myth Interpretation to the Myth of Baldr’s Death

by Ky Greene

Modern Science and Contemporary Paganism: Uneasy Friends, Amicable Rivals

by Wayne Keysor

God Among Many Gods:

Deploying a Classical Christian Proof for Polytheistic Religion

by Brandon Hensley

Appendix A:

Moral Humans and the Immoral Gods:

An Examination of the Problem of Divine Evil in Contemporary Paganism

by Wayne Keysor

Appendix B: Images Credits

Appendix C: Our Contributors

Appendix D: About Bibliotheca Alexandrina — Current Titles — Forthcoming Titles

Introduction

The discipline of theology provides a language and a tool set for studying theos, that is, the divine. The pursuit of theology, whether conducted by seasoned academics or by armchair philosophers, or even conducted unknowingly by ordinary folks figuring out just what they believe, is the source of all interpretation of religious source texts, myth, and practice.

All practitioners of a theistic religion, whether mono-, duo-, poly- or pantheistic, are therefore also students of theology. However, formal and scholarly theology has almost always focused on the monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity, or Islam — or occasionally on Eastern polytheistic religions such as Hinduism and Shinto.

Western polytheism is seen in academia as a subject more suited for anthropology than theology. And while the work of religion scholars such Sarah Iles Johnston or Mircea Eliade, or historians such as Walter Burkert, are often helpful and useful to contemporary polytheists, they are not a substitute for ongoing work in theology.

Nor is it enough to study the ancient theologians, those philosophers of Greece and the Mediterranean who first began to ponder the whys of their religion. Their work may be useful to us, but it was developed in a different time, place, and culture. Contemporary religion demands contemporary thought.

It is true that practice may be more essential for a pagan than holding a specific set of beliefs about just what the gods are and how they interact with humans. Modern paganism has never been about orthodoxy, nor is there any ecclesiastical body that could enforce it if it were. Still, it is important to understand why we perform certain rituals at certain times, or why we make offerings of wine or incense, for example. Or more grandly, the role of gods across the entire cosmos.

With the proliferation of blogs and podcasts, and steadily growing numbers of books, various forms of contemporary paganism are gradually gaining an updated theological foundation for their practices and beliefs.

Our first volume of Ascendant was a small attempt to contribute something to this field. The effort continues here, with some of the same contributors and some new names. Here is a preview of what’s coming.

Inspired by an essay in Ascendant, John Michael Greer explores the relationship between gods, humans, and morality in On the Goodness of the Gods: An Essay in Moral Theology. The essay that sparked his contribution — Moral Humans and the Immoral Gods, by Wayne Keysor — is reprinted here as an appendix.

In On Idols and Myths: The Gods as Real and Sensory Objects, Brandon Hensley applies the philosophical idea of object-oriented ontology to questions of the nature of divine beings, arguing that they are real and individually distinct.

John Beckett, in The Theology of Personal Experience, advocates taking individual religious experiences seriously in beginning to build a theology for polytheists. While mythology and history are helpful for understanding the context, the experience of people today can inform our understanding of how the gods are operating now.

As many contemporary pagans struggle with the ethics of blending elements from multiple cultures into their own practices, Wayne Keysor presents The Case for Cultural Appropriation in Contemporary Paganism, based on the spiritual dynamics at work below the surface.

Intrigued by the fourth-century Greek philosopher Sallust’s five levels of myth interpretation, Ky Greene set out to test the applicability of Sallust’s thought to non-Hellenic religion. In Applying Cross-Cultural Methods of Myth Interpretation to the Myth of Baldr’s Death, Ky shows how the experiment turned out.

Religion often appears to be in conflict with science. In Modern Science and Contemporary Paganism: Uneasy Friends, Amicable Rivals, Wayne Keysor demonstrates how the fundamental assumptions that keep science firmly rooted in the natural world need not become a source of tension for a science-minded polytheist.

Can theology be transplanted from its original context to another? More precisely, can an argument formulated as a proof of Christianity be turned to make a case for polytheism? Brandon Hensley shows how it can in God Among Many Gods: Deploying a Classical Christian Proof for Polytheistic Religion.

It is our hope that the second volume of Ascendant will add to the foundation of modern pagan, polytheist theology — and that each new volume in the series, each new blog and podcast and book, will further strengthen that foundation.

Michael Hardy

Winter 2019

[Editorial Note: contributors make use of both Pagan/ism and pagan/ism. Bibliotheca Alexandrina respects these individual preferred spellings.]

On the Goodness of the Gods:

An Essay in Moral Theology

by John Michael Greer



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[Editor’s note: This essay responds to Moral Humans and the Immoral Gods: An Examination of the Problem of Divine Evil in Contemporary Paganism, by Wayne Keysor, published in the first volume of Ascendant. As a courtesy to readers who have not read the first volume, that essay appears here as Appendix A.]

Since classical times, the claim that gods are morally unfit to receive the reverence of human beings has been a principal argument directed against traditional polytheist religion. At the heart of that claim is the mismatch between the ways that gods behave in traditional myths, on the one hand, and the ways that human beings are expected to behave in society, on the other. The mismatch is real; nearly all traditional mythologies show gods doing things that no human community allows its members to do with impunity, or at all. Murder, rape, torture, theft, cannibalism, incest—name a social taboo and it is rarely hard to find a god violating it.

The crimes of the gods have turned into a major vulnerability for polytheist faiths in more than one period. During the Hellenic world’s age of reason, for example, the supposed moral failings of the Olympian deities were a common target for rationalist gibes. Later, Christian polemicists used similar arguments to insist that their god was superior to the gods of the religions they sought to supplant, though the Christian god turned out to be just as vulnerable to ethics charges — as the long history of the argument from evil demonstrates.

Advocates of Christianity more generally made much of the difference between the way their faith places moral goodness at the center of its religious vision, and the far less central role given to moral goodness in traditional polytheist faiths. While that distinction was shaped and wielded as a rhetorical weapon, it is real. The difference can be traced neatly enough in the very terms we use. The root of the word ethics is the ancient Greek ethike, from ethos, habit, way of life. The root of the word morals is the Latin moralia, from mos, which means the same thing as ethos. Neither word in ancient times had the primary meaning that both words’ derivatives now have in modern English: that of a set of beliefs or opinions about right and wrong behavior.

As Wayne Keysor rightly points out in his study of the problem of evil in contemporary polytheism, the prophetic religions founded in the Axial Age — Christianity very much among them — stress morality to a much greater extent than traditional polytheist faiths do. That difference has of course generally been seen — at least by believers in prophetic religions — as a deficiency in traditional polytheism, and woven into broader assaults on the supposed moral inadequacies of polytheist faiths. As I hope to show, it need not be seen that way, but such an alternative vision requires a significant rethinking of several commonplaces of ethical thought.

Two standard responses to the challenge of divine immorality have been deployed by defenders of traditional faiths over the years, with mixed success. The first found its classic expressions in Western literature in the great Greek tragedies on the one hand, and the Jewish and Christian Book of Job on the other. The argument these make is stark in its simplicity: the actions of gods are not a fit subject for human judgment because human knowledge and wisdom are hopelessly inadequate for the task of assessing divine behavior. All humans can do, from this standpoint, is to trust that the inexplicable acts of gods are good in some sense we cannot understand. This response makes logical sense, but few people find it entirely satisfying.

The second standard response, the one more often deployed by the defenders of classical polytheism in their struggles with Greek rationalism and then with Christianity, is to equate myth with allegory, and argue that the apparent meaning of myth is not its real meaning. Thus Sallust, in his primer of late classical paganism, argued that the sheer absurdity of the actions of gods as presented in myths was meant to make the intelligent reader recognize that a deeper allegorical meaning underlay the obvious one. That less morally challenging meanings can be extracted from traditional myths in this way is certain, but the argument from allegory is very clearly a defensive move, and like most defensive moves it hands the initiative over to the attacker. History records all too clearly how that game plays out.

There is, however, at least one more way to make sense of the behavior of the gods in myth from within the standpoint of polytheist faith. That way takes its starting point from a close examination of what we mean when we talk about morality.

The common