"Polytheistical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the gods," alias the Latin of India, it has been translated into all the Prakrit or vernacular and modern dialects of the great peninsula. The reason why it has not found favour with the Moslems is doubtless the highly polytheistic spirit which pervades it; moreover, the Faithful had already a specimen of that style of composition. This was the Hitopadesa, or Advice of a Friend, which, as a line in its introduction informs ...
— Vikram and the Vampire • Sir Richard F. Burton
... in its belief in the government of the spiritual universe, was wholly Polytheistic, believing in many gods, and, as I have said, approached nearer the idea of the form of government as existing in the spirit world, for it is a Republic ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... and pantheism go very well together. The universe being divine, there is no reason to doubt that beings of a higher order than man exist, nor any reason to refuse to bestow on them the predicate "divine"; and with this we find ourselves in principle on the standpoint of polytheistic popular belief. There is nothing surprising, then, in the tradition that Thales identified God with the mind of the universe and believed the universe to be animated, and filled with "demons." The first statement is in this form probably influenced by later ideas ...
— Atheism in Pagan Antiquity • A. B. Drachmann
... the grey cloak of a church or the green cloak of a meadow. He is always behind, His form makes the folds fall so superbly. And that is what the savage old Hebrews, alone among the nations, guessed, and why their rude tribal god has been erected on the ruins of all polytheistic civilisations. For the Greeks and Norsemen and Romans saw the superficial wars of nature and made the sun one god, the sea another, the wind a third. They were not thrilled, as some rude Israelite was, one night in the wastes, alone, ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... we gather that this fierce amorist of Beauty was not without his Philosophy. The Philosophy of Keats, as we gather up the threads of it, one by one, in those fleeting confessions, is nothing but the old polytheistic paganism, reduced to terms of modern life. He was a born "Pluralist" to use the modern phrase; and for him, in this congeries of separate and unique miracles, which we call the World, there was neither Unity, nor Progress, nor Purpose, nor Over-soul—nothing but the mystery of Beauty, and the Memory ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... monistic, and to consider the world as one unit of absolute fact; and this has been at variance with popular or practical theism, which latter has ever been more or less frankly pluralistic, not to say polytheistic, and shown itself perfectly well satisfied with a universe composed of many original principles, provided we be only allowed to believe that the divine principle remains supreme, and that the others ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... agree with revelation. Nothing could be done till the Trinity was placed inside the divine nature. But this is just what they could not for a long time see. These men were not Arians, for they recoiled in genuine horror from the polytheistic tendencies of Arianism; but they had no logical defence against Arianism, and were willing to see if some modification of it would not give them a foothold of some kind. To men who dreaded the return of Sabellian confusion, Arianism was at least ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... this temple is the most important of all the religious observances of the empire, and constitutes a most interesting remnant of the ancient monotheistic cultus which prevailed in China before the rationalism of Confucius and the polytheistic superstition of Buddhism predominated among the people. While the ceremonies of the sacrifices are very complicated, they are kept with the strictest severity. The chief of these is at the winter solstice. On December 21st the Emperor goes in a sedan chair, covered with yellow silk, and carried ...
— Court Life in China • Isaac Taylor Headland
... tradition, the earlier tragedians, Aeschylus and Sophocles, as they shaped and reshaped their material for the stage, were evolving for themselves, not in opposition to but as it were on the top of the polytheistic view, the idea of a single supreme and righteous God. The Zeus of Homer, whose superiority, as we saw, was based on physical force, grows, under the hands of Aeschylus, into something akin to the Jewish Jehovah. The inner experience of the poet drives ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... Cyclopedia, under Phallic worship, reads as follows "In early ages the sexual emblems were adored as most sacred objects, and in the several polytheistic systems the act or principle of which the phallus was the type was represented by a deity to whom it was consecrated: in Egypt by Khem, in India by Siva, in Assyria by Vul, in primitive Greece by Pan, and later by Priapus, in ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... the popular mythology, elevated and purified it. The Hebrew genius was not intellectual but ethical and emotional. The typical Hebrew guide was not a philosopher but a prophet. Through a development of many centuries the popular religion from polytheistic became monotheistic, and from worshiping the sun and fire came to worship an embodiment of righteousness and of supreme power. An ideal of character grew up—in close association with religious worship ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... Wiseman as no better at bottom than the life and death of Mr Badman: all this, expressed by Bunyan in the terms of a tinker's theology, is what Nietzsche has expressed in terms of post-Darwinian, post-Schopenhaurian philosophy; Wagner in terms of polytheistic mythology; and Ibsen in terms of mid-XIX century Parisian dramaturgy. Nothing is new in these matters except their novelties: for instance, it is a novelty to call Justification by Faith "Wille," and Justification by ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw
... grasped in order to understand its general drift and sense. On the one hand, as it admitted the existence of many divine powers, who shared between them the government of the world, it was decidedly POLYTHEISTIC—"a religion of many gods." On the other hand, a dim perception had already been arrived at, perhaps through observation of the strictly regulated movements of the stars, of the presence of One supreme ruling and directing Power. For a class of men given to the study of ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... in Europe alike for the most part tacitly assume that there is either one God or none. Yet some highly civilised nations of antiquity and of modern times, such as the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, and the modern Chinese and Hindoos, have accepted the polytheistic explanation of the world, and as no reasonable man will deny the philosophical subtlety of the Greeks and the Hindoos, to say nothing of the rest, a theory of the universe which has commended itself to them ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... is also alive to the dangers connected with that kind of asceticism which is based on theories of the impurity of the body—the typical Oriental form of world-renunciation. But he does not appear to have foreseen the unethical and polytheistic developments of sacramental institutionalism. In this particular his Judaising opponents had a little more justification than he is willing to ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... their earthly polity to the heavenly city; for monotheism is found where monarchy is unknown. "God cannot be a reflection from human kings where there are no kings; nor a president elected out of a polytheistic society of gods, where there is as yet no polytheism; nor an ideal first ancestor where men do not worship their ancestors." To the substantiating of these facts Mr. Lang then applies himself, and shows ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell |
