seen from Argentina
seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Thailand
seen from Singapore
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from China
seen from Netherlands
seen from Iraq
seen from United States
seen from Singapore
seen from Singapore
seen from Canada
seen from China
I know I've been a bit MIA but it's for good reason, aka being deep in the research rabbithole. Here's a new word I learned thanks to my current hyperfixation:
HENOTHEISM
:the worship of one god without denying the existence of other gods.
And another related one:
KATHENOTHEISM
:the worship of one god at a time as supreme, without denying the existence of other gods; including the tendency to make different gods supreme one after the other.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
islam is a monotheist religion. in the pre-islamic arab pantheon, Allah was one of the many gods (but was the highest, most powerful one). eventually, the religion said that these other gods were not real, and Allah was the only one to be worshipped.
how did they do this? I think, through mainly fear and the promise of eternal heaven. if you were to say there are other gods, you would be committing blasphemy, thus deserve eternal damnation. without the element of fear, this would have been an impossible thing to do.
thought experiment. could they, or how would they, make you believe in Allah while at the same time acknowledging the existence of other gods? surely, Allah was among the other gods in the pantheon. why would the prophet make people believe in the omnipotence of Allah? why deny the others? yes, people were praying to these other gods to help them get through to Allah (or so the islamic sources say), and the prophet basically said, these other gods can't help you, you pray directly to Allah yourself. But why would he deny the existence of the other deities? for what reason?
this type of henotheism would not have worked because different clans would've kept their patron gods, religious loyalty would've been divided, moral authority would've been weak. with the strict monotheism as islam brought, one god would mean one law would mean one moral order would mean one community. by saying there are lesser gods, they would become structural obstacles. if you deny their existence, the moral universe would've been simplified. and you would prevent the people from breaking into tribes and from fragmentalizing (is that a word?)
and simply, you can't say Allah is the highest and the strongest among other gods, this would contradict its omnipotence. lesser gods could've become strong and popular again and the system could have slid into polytheism again. thus, an ontological denial.
then again. fear would not have been sufficient. there's the societal unification and a sense of community (think shared rituals). more simplicity (think one god, one community), protection of the weaker ones (think orphans, condemning exploitation). these would have been impossible with the fragmented henotheistic structure. there is very little justice, belonging and power within polytheistic systems that islam just provided the society with.
go ahead and apply this to the other monotheistic religions. but then again, isn't there a larger, watered down henotheism today running wild? "you have your religion, I have my religion, they have their religion, you can believe in your god but mine is better." today we aren't even acknowledging the other's god, we straight out say their god doesn't exist, ours is THE god. compared to henotheist societies where people accepted the existence of other gods that other people believed in, in today's monotheist world we have no tolerance for such thing. the amount of blood shed is no surprise. and we call ourselved civilized in comparison to the past's polytheist societies.
henotheism says many gods exist and I focus my worship on one, without denying the others. so it's about preference and focus.
monolatry says many gods may exist, but I am only allowed to worship one. so it's about exclusivity and obligation.
so from the outside they look similar -- people worship one god and other gods are not actively worshipped, but the reason for this is different; in henotheism it's a choice, whereas in monolatry it's prohibition and command.
tonight I learned about Henotheism, which is "the worship of a single, supreme god that does not deny the existence or possible existence of other deities that may be worshipped." And I think it doesn't contradict with pantheism. And I have to read more about it. But. I think this might be The solution to my questions. or at least some part of it.
Energy cannot be created or destroyed. Neither can gods. Gods are a kind of predator, admittedly. They feed on sacrifice (but only worthy, willing sacrifice - if you really want to know the difference between a god and a demon, take a look at the willingness of their diet). A lifetime of devoted service is a pretty impressive sacrifice to a god! Risking eternal salvation is an even better one. And ultimately, you are what you eat.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
Hermetic Oneness: No, It's Still Not Henotheism
This is one of those posts that I had an idea for a while back, never actually took action on, and then let the idea of it languish in my drafts folder for an indefinite (and frankly shameful) amount of time before being reminded of it by something else entirely, causing it to change and adapt to not just one but several prompts into something more fleshed out. Gotta love it when it happens, I…
View On WordPress
Henotheism
Henotheism (Greek "one god") is a term coined by Max Müller, to mean devotion to a single primary god while accepting the existence or possible existence of other deities. Müller stated that henotheism means "monotheism in principle and polytheism in fact". He made the term a center of his criticism of Western theological and religious exceptionalism (relative to Eastern religions), focusing on a cultural dogma which held "monotheism" to be both fundamentally well-defined and inherently superior to differing conceptions of God.
Variations on the term have been inclusive monotheism and monarchical polytheism, designed to differentiate differing forms of the phenomenon. Related terms are monolatrism and kathenotheism, which are typically understood as sub-types of henotheism. The latter term is an extension of "henotheism", from (kath' hena theon) —"one god at a time". Henotheism is similar but less exclusive than monolatry because a monolator worships only one god, while the henotheist may worship any within the pantheon, depending on circumstances. In some belief systems, the choice of the supreme deity within a henotheistic framework may be determined by cultural, geographical, historical or political reasons.
Recently Ocean Keltoi wrote a thread about what pagans can learn from the Bible. He basically claimed that the Bible is an incredible resource for pagans with regards to magic, offerings, sacrifice, and both historical and mythological storytelling, adding that hatred of Christianity stops pagans from appreciating that and thus "blocks one's ability to grow".
I'm going to be honest, that thread was kind of an L from Ocean. But I will say that the Bible could be a resource, depending exactly on what you're looking for. Because if you're looking for "pagan practice" you're probably not going to find it. Or, if you do, it's largely going to be from the perspective of people who despised the various polytheistic cults and traditions that surrounded them at the time. I suppose if you're looking for something to base Christian magic or the like on, I think it'd be more useful to look into the systems of (again, Christian) folk magic that actually used the Bible in invocations or spell-casting.
But here's what I would prefer to gleam from the Bible, if anything, as relevant strictly to my own approach:
Henotheism in a polytheistic cosmos: Technically, the narrative of the Bible does assume a cosmos in which multiple gods besides Yahweh exist, just that the narrative of the Bible centers around the worship of Yahweh and generally insists upon the sole worship of Yahweh. Indeed, there seems to be a whole council of divine beings who Yahweh presides over, and who gradually lose their stature as Yahweh condemns them. Other gods roam the land, receive worship, and even contend against Yahweh in struggles for power and/or territory. Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge is explicitly stated as setting them on the path to joining the gods. This creates some ground for "Pagan" treatments of the Biblical landscape, not entirely unsuited to navigating our contemporary religious superstructure. It is also this exact henotheistic landscape that can, with little difficulty, reflect backwards towards the "pagan" cosmoses, often sites of divine rebellion.
Demonology: The Bible is full of demons, alongside its own distinct notion of the demonic. Granted the Apocrypha tend to have a lot more demonology going for them, but the Bible has a wide catalogue of demons that infest the popular imaginary to this day. Christian demonologists have of course frequently derived some of their demons from pagan gods that appeared in the Bible (for example Berith, Adrammelech, Astaroth, Beelzebub, to name just a few) and elsewhere. As Andrew Mark Henry (the Religion For Breakfast guy) noted recently, the demonic has its own way of conveying a sort of outer and/or inner shadow relative to the culture. To pronounce heresy in some ways vivifies that shadow, giving it form and content. The gods, even as demons, speak, even in the voices of demons, their cult, their divine content, and in this form do so in a subversive role.
For that particular point I would suggest a new video on the demonology of The Legend of Zelda. Yes, you heard that right.
Cosmic pessimism: This part may sound quite strange, but it's very easy to get a throughline of. Granted it's mostly relevant to Christianity, which as far as I can see really doesn't have the benefit of getting to argue with God that Jewish rabbinical tradition actually seems to have. But picture, for classical monotheism at least in "Western" terms, the throughline of a seemingly all-powerful singular deity, who is to be treated as the sole sovereign of the universe. That power, that intelligence, governs the whole of life and its course, and so is invariably responsible for its death. It is also possible to see a constant struggle of humanity with even the divine itself - a theme which can be found more often than you'd think in the Old Testament, but which is poorly appreciated, if at all, by Christianity at large. Whether it's Adam and Eve defying God and being exiled, arguably the story of the Tower of Babel whereby the tower itself is a struggle to connect humanity to the divine which is thwarted by God, Job demanding an explanation from God for all his turmoils before ultimately accepting God's word, or the story of Jacob wrestling with the angel or apparently God itself and being declared victorious by God itself and taking the name Israel as a result, there's actually quite a lot to work with that can furnish an admittedly rugged and darksome perspective on the universe. Not to mention exegesis around the "fall".
But all this is just what I can think of, and if anything a lot of it still assumes a counter-narrative assemblage. What Ocean has in mind to my mind seems altogether different, and the nature of that difference is in some ways the problem. Ocean thinks that the problem of the Biblical narrative is mostly that it was simply used to cultivate a supremacy narrative for Christianity, and I think that's a rather simplistic way to look at it, particularly when, if we're talking about supremacy, the proclamations of the sovereignty of a single god are right there, in the text. Even if it's about use, strictly, if you want to use it for that it's certainly not hard. But then the rest of Ocean's thread is essentially him talking about how witches and magicians invoked verses of the Psalms for example in their magic. But that's not actually in itself "Biblical insight on magic". That's Christians practicing their own variety of folk magic, in the name of the Christian God, probably centuries after the Bible was written. It's just saying that Christians have done magic with the Bible and that it's a part of history so you have to consider it as a pagan, never mind that it might not actually be relevant to your practice as a pagan, because reasons. I would have brought up the Greek Magical Papyri or The Eighth Book of Moses as better examples just because they actually seemed to involve invoking pagan gods like Horus or Helios alongside Jesus Chrestos, Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and Iao Sabaoth in some spells while ostensibly still operating around very pagan ideas about religion and magic but hey, that's just me.
