Many people worship not just one but many gods. Yet a relentless
prejudice against polytheism denies legitimacy to some of the
world's oldest and richest religious traditions. In her examination
of polytheistic cultures both ancient and contemporary--those of
Greece and Rome, the Bible and the Quran, as well as modern
India--Page duBois refutes the idea that the worship of multiple
gods naturally evolves over time into the "higher" belief in a
single deity. In A Million and One Gods, "she shows that polytheism
has endured intact for millennia even in the West, despite the many
hidden ways that monotheistic thought continues to shape Western
outlooks.
In English usage, the word "polytheism" comes from the
seventeenth-century writings of Samuel Purchas. It was pejorative
from the beginning--a word to distinguish the belief system of
backward peoples from the more theologically advanced religion of
Protestant Christians. Today, when monotheistic fundamentalisms too
often drive people to commit violent acts, polytheism remains a
scandalous presence in societies still oriented according to
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim beliefs. Even in the multicultural
milieus of twenty-first-century America and Great Britain,
polytheism finds itself marginalized. Yet it persists, perhaps
because polytheism corresponds to unconscious needs and deeply held
values of tolerance, diversity, and equality that are central to
civilized societies.
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