"Polytheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... fact, 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... earthly career into three Ages—infancy, growth, and maturity. The second of these falls into three periods characterised by (1) polytheism, (2) monotheism (Middle Ages), (3) scepticism and liberty, and we are now in the third of these periods. The third Age will witness the union of humanity in a single social organism, and the universal acceptance ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... the belief that the air was full of daemons. All the Eastern nations had believed in Genii (Jinns), Fairies (Peris), and Devas, Divs, or devils. The Devas of the early Hindus were beneficent beings: to the eyes of the old Persians (in their hatred of idolatry and polytheism), they appeared evil beings, Divs, or Devils. And even so the genii and daemons of the Roman Empire became, in the eyes of the early ...
— The Hermits • Charles Kingsley
... 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 powers of nature, ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... 'To look upon the face of a tyrant is a sin.' Then the third damsel retired and came for ward the fourth, who said, 'Here am I to treat of sundry traditions of pious men which suggest themselves to me. It is related that Bishr Barefoot[FN348] said, 'I once heard Khalid say, 'Beware of secret polytheism.' I asked, 'What may secret polytheism be?'; and he answered, 'When one of you in praying prolong his inclinations and prostrations till a cause of impurity[FN349] come upon him.' And one of the sages said, 'Doing works of weal expiateth what ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... 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 to give the inquirers, and these badly translated; and with Mahometans ...
— Pioneers and Founders - or, Recent Workers in the Mission field • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... rudest forms, 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 and preacher ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... Evil Spirit, who might bring mischief or loss to them, or sickness or death, unless his forbearance was purchased by some particular mark of attention. [FN: By the testimony of many of the Indians themselves, they appear to entertain a certain Polytheism in their belief. "We believed in one great wise benevolent being, Thesha-mon-e-doo, whose dwelling was in the sun. We believed also in many other lesser spirits—gods of the elements, and in one bad unappeasable ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... BRAHMINICAL PANTHEISM.—The 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... 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, my friend ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... great fundamental 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, and Jacob. Jehovah was made ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... 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; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... 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. ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... expiring creed. Between these two extremes the great majority of reasonable men had turned from the conception of many gods to that of one, and had rejected for ever the beliefs of their forefathers. But with the vices of polytheism they had also abandoned its virtues, among which toleration and religious good humour had been conspicuous. The strenuous earnestness of the Christians had compelled them to examine and define every point of their own theology; but as they had no central authority by which such definitions ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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 ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... in their stead one emperor had come. The gods also had disappeared. Considering the connection which in all ages has existed between political and religious ideas, it was then not at all strange that polytheism should manifest a tendency to pass into monotheism. Accordingly, divine honors were paid at first to the deceased and at ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... monstrous. He failed to see the folly of trying to unite the old notions 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 ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... narrative is drawn from the same source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best human sources available.... The materials which with other nations were combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become the vehicle of profound ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... by the boundless powers of imagination, or by the frauds and follies of men, in countries never connected; but when features of resemblance, too strong to have been accidental, are observable in different systems of polytheism, without fancy or prejudice to color them and improve the likeness, we can scarce help believing that some connection has immemorially subsisted between the several nations who have adopted them. It is my design in this essay to point out ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... psychical kind. I need not wait to trace the gradual 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 to last the hypothesis ...
— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes
... delirium to personify these three divine qualities, or transform them into real beings. We can readily imagine these moral attributes to be united in the same God, but it is egregious folly to fashion them into three different Gods; nor will it remedy this metaphysical polytheism to assert that these three are one. Besides, this revery never entered the head of the Hebrew legislator. The Eternal, in revealing himself to Moses, did not announce himself as triple. There is not one syllable in the Old Testament about this Trinity, although ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... however strong, between a Grecian and an alien deity. Such a resemblance may not only be formed by comparatively modern innovations, but may either be resolved to that general likeness which one polytheism will ever bear towards another, or arise from the adoption of new attributes and strange traditions;—so that the deity itself may be homesprung and indigenous, while bewildering the inquirer with considerable similitude to other gods, from whose believers the ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... 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 ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... 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 and controlled the ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... paganism—its basic immorality, or, if you like, its unmorality. Like our scientism of to-day, it was unable to lay down a system of morals. It did not even try to. What Augustin has written on this subject in The City of God, is perhaps the strongest argument ever objected to polytheism. Anyhow, pages like this are very ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... necessarily maintained 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 ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... incomprehensible dogmas 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 of the Law, the heathen longed for his festivals and his occult philosophy; ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... humanity cannot be content without the semblance of personality in God, and since everything has become divine, it was easy to regard not only natural powers, but also personal beings as gods. Polytheism was the result. Vishnu and Siva, gods of reproductive and destructive powers, came to be worshiped. Incarnation and transmigration followed. The incarnation was not the incarnation of the supreme Brahma, but of one of the subordinate ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... 'Keybearer.' And the word 'Tauropolis,' which had become obscure, was explained as a reference to the Tauri. The old rude image of Tauropolis had come from the Tauri, and the strange ritual was descended from their bloody rites. So the Taurian goddess must be Artemis too. The tendency of ancient polytheism, when it met with some alien religion, was not to treat the alien gods as entirely new persons, but assuming the real and obvious existence of their own gods, to inquire by what names and with what ritual ...
— The Iphigenia in Tauris • Euripides
... it has played in the world. Here, then, was a body of natural facts to be investigated scientifically, and the result of Hume's inquiries is embodied in the remarkable essay on the Natural History of Religion. Hume anticipated the results of modern investigation in declaring fetishism and polytheism to be the form in which savage and ignorant men naturally clothe their ideas of the unknown influences which govern their destiny; and they are polytheists rather ...
— Hume - (English Men of Letters Series) • T.H. Huxley
... 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, ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... 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 hei agathos ethnikos; kai pas christianos hei christianos kakos.] Every good man, so far ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... hordes, they could not become specific. Hence, while all other objects and their respective fetishes followed the natural evolution into a specific type, and through these into the simplest form of polytheism, the special fetish which referred to unique things or phenomena remained special, although it was modified, as we shall see, so as to harmonize with the aspect commonly ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... one another. Those who objected to the word homoousios conceived that those who approved it favored the opinion of Sabellius and Montanus; they therefore called them blasphemers, as subverting the existence of the Son of God. And again those who defended the term, charging their opponents with polytheism, inveighed against them as introducers of heathen superstitions. Eustathius, bishop of Antioch, accuses Eusebius Pamphilius of perverting the Nicene creed; Eusebius again denies that he violates ...
— A Source Book for Ancient Church History • Joseph Cullen Ayer, Jr., Ph.D.
... 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, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... deities of the Eastern Pantheon, the god representing the destroyer is embodied under the form of a man, while the preserver is symbolized under the form of a woman. This is an adaptation in Polytheism of a great and true idea. Woman is a preserver. Her's is the conservative influence of society. It is from man that the destructive forces that shake the social organization emanate. He wars on his kind and the earth shakes under the tread of his armies. ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... away in sacred classics or in the records of travellers, but as elements of existing religions, professed by men around, are illustrations of most of the types of religious thought and practice. There are the pantheism of certain Hindu ascetics, the polytheism of the masses, the animism of aboriginal races, and the varieties of theism of Christians, Mahomedans, and the new Hindus respectively. There are the curious phenomena of goddesses as well as gods, and of distinctive features in the character and worship of ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... particular, I reflect that, as a matter of fact, the theistic theory is born of highly suspicious parentage,—that Fetichism, or the crudest form of the theory of personal agency in external nature, admits of being easily traced to the laws of a primitive psychology; that the step from this to Polytheism is easy; and that the step from this to Monotheism is necessary. If it is objected to this view that it does not follow that because some theories of personal agency have proved themselves false, therefore all such theories must be so—I answer, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes |
