Populating Polytheist Pantheons: What To Do With New Gods

A little more than a decade ago, I was speaking with an older gentleman of a relatively liberal political persuasion, and the topic of Y2K came up. (Remember that?) His response to me was, "I'm not worried at all about Y2K; I'm much more worried about Y6B." No, he wasn't just being clever about letter and number combination acronyms that begin with "Y," he was referring to the immanent reality (this was in 1999) that the world would be reaching an overall population of six billion. We are more than a decade on in time from then, and world population has surpassed that number by another billion, as of estimates for March 12, 2012. I remember thinking in the late 1980s, when we were studying China in middle school, that a billion people in one country was a lot, and that the world population being five billion was something that was inconceivably huge... and in thirty years, we've got almost half again as many people living in the world. Rather than using this introduction to talk about the problems of population growth, the drain on the earth's resources that this creates, the necessity for taking birth control and family planning measures very seriously in a responsible approach to this matter, and any number of other expectable topics, I'd like instead to focus on a dimension that I'm sure many people—including many Pagans and polytheists—have likely never considered. The two most populous countries in the world today are India and China. Though both are large, China is much larger, being one of the largest countries in physical geography as well as in population. Both have cultures whose histories extend multiple thousands of years into the past. Both have had varying successes as ascendant empires, or as oppressed or client-status colonized and imperialized nations as well. And, both are religiously pluralistic (although China has been less so for much of the last century), with at least three major religions holding sway in each for the majority of the last half-millennium: Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Islam in India; Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism in China. Of course, there are also a proliferation of minority religions, and a multitude of individual sects and theological movements within each of these major religions in each place. With histories and cultures that span the combinations of so many different population groups, and which cover such vast and different geographic features, it should come as no surprise that the animistic and polytheistic elements in each culture are extremely varied, and have been open to syncretistic influence for a great deal of their histories. And yet, forms of Buddhism in China tend to de-emphasize plurality and focus instead on unity, and the major theological movements in Hinduism likewise tend toward monism in the modern period rather than polytheism. Individual deities, ancestors, and land spirits are subordinate to the oneness of Buddha-nature; and innumerable local deities have become epithets and by-names of the three major deities of modern Hindusim: Shiva, Vishnu, and Devi. Turning to another populous and diverse Asian country, though, the results have been remarkably different: Japan. While Buddhism did make major inroads into the country around 1400 years ago, Shinto still thrives to this day, and many Buddhist bodhisattvas —and for that matter, Christian saints!—simply found themselves transformed into Shinto kami with relatively little difficulty. The vast national empires of India and China seemed to demand unity, at least as far as official stances are concerned; but Japan, which engaged in just as much (if not more!) complete cultural isolation at various periods in its history over the last millennium, instead did not enforce theologies of unity in its religious practice, no matter how unified and peaceful it attempted to keep itself in social and political terms, but instead allowed for a continued flowering of diversity, even though some kami who may have been separate beings originally did combine and create composite forms. Because polytheism, therefore, tends more toward an acknowledgment of multiplicity and diversity, it is also equally well-equipped to deal with the introduction of new deities, whether these arise from religiously internal causes, or from contact with extra-religious forces (including other religions). A great deal depends upon the approach to animism involved, of course: going into a new land will always entail coming into contact with new land-spirits in the features of that new place. But, since territorial expansion is probably at an end for Japan, India, and China at this stage, the only real possibility for likely theomorphic population expansion in this regard is if Shinto shrines are set up in new locations around the world. As polytheists of European extraction, however, a great deal of modern Paganism and other forms of practical polytheism face entirely different challenges. Again, whether animism is a significant part of one's practices will definitely influence the outcomes of this question. But, apart from that important consideration, how else is this question dealt with in practice, if at all? Something that will often happen, particularly with reconstructionist-based practitioners, is that further research into a particular deity and their connections leads to "new-to-me" or various other re-discovered deities that are then taken into one's personal pantheon. Or, suddenly, a deity emerges in one's experiences that one hadn't paid attention to previously, or gets one's attention in some fashion or other; whether they are readily identified or if it takes some study to figure out who they are, such encounters often occur that expand one's personal network of divine relationships. I've been very heavily involved with re-founding modern devotion to one major deity, several minor ones, and also in reviving the cultus to a number of heroes as well, so this is a very familiar process for me, and one that is ongoing as this present article is being written (!). This kind of personal pantheonic expansion is extremely common with modern polytheists, and everyone has different ways of handling it. But, it's a rather garden-variety form of further populating one's personal polytheistic pantheon. There is also the issue of "pop culture entities," as explained in publications by Taylor Ellwood , and egregores that form around new groups and ideas, or through individual and deliberate conscious creation via magic. But those are also relatively "known" factors in this field as well. What about the less-frequent (but nonetheless possible) reality of totally new deities, though? How does one deal with this issue when it arises? I have yet to see any modern Pagan or polytheist treatment of this matter, nor any conventional training and education on when and why it can occur, nor how to handle it when it does. And, while it might not be that frequent of an occurrence, I suspect that we are going to see a lot more of it in the near future as our community expands and the world continues to change. This has been a very large part of my own spiritual preoccupations and practices for the last year, since several new deities emerged in my own experience. As a polytheist and a syncretist, I was already in a position to be able to easily deal with their emergence theologically. As a process theologian (which I've discussed briefly on Patheos.com previously ), the idea that the gods change as history proceeds is not a problem, and that new gods might emerge as a result of new situations in history is also (in theory) covered by the process theological model. The difficulty with this situation now, however, is that so many modern Pagans and polytheists, many of whom have emerged from other religious affiliations earlier in life, are used to dealing with ostensibly "closed" and "complete" religious systems, where new divine beings do not get added with any regularity. (Catholics, obviously, are an exception, with the recognition of new canonized saints.) Even those modern Pagans and polytheists who have been practicing for a long time, or who have grown up in their respective traditions, do not (to my knowledge) have a general practice or methodology in place for how to deal with newly emergent divinities. According to ancient Greek and Roman practice, the answer was always to be found in oracular pronouncements. The hero Eunostos of Tanagra, for example, was a human who was wrongfully killed in his community, and whose spirit was terrorizing the community in which this occurred. An envoy was sent on behalf of the community to the Oracle of Delphi, and the Oracle suggested that Eunostos should be reckoned as a hero and given a shrine, which was done, and everything went back to normal, so long as the rules of his cultus and the restrictions upon access to his shrine were observed. I've had several independent confirmations of the divine status of these new deities in my own practice through several oracles I've consulted. (No, this wasn't just a tarot reading or rune-casting; it was an actual oracle who goes and asks questions of a particular deity in a state of oracular trance!) So, that aspect of things seems to be in order... But, I think the major difficulty is one that has been a topic of discussion lately, particularly at Patheos' Pagan Portal: building a temple or shrine. When confirmed by the oracle, Eunostos got his sacred grove; Serapis got his temples in Egypt, and eventually elsewhere as well; Antinous got his holy city and his local societies and associations in the late antique world; and even Glykon got his oracular shrine in Ionopolis. Unfortunately, I don't have the money to build a bricks-and-mortar shrine, even of the 10' x 10' variety, to these new gods at this point. I can narrate their myths easily, and discuss them on my blog, and do rituals to them to my heart's content in my own practices and include others in doing so, and I can encourage others to give these deities form in their own creative arts; but, what else can be done, short of building them a temple? How best does a polytheist who has such experiences as these go about honoring these deities, especially when it is clear that the deities in question have a relevance that is much larger than one's own personal practices? These are questions that I am currently struggling with, and I suspect that future posts in this column will also deal with it further. In the meantime, I would be very happy to hear your own thoughts, experiences, and discussion on this matter! It is my suspicion, however, that just as we have seen a drastic growth in the rates of population over the last few decades, and likewise we've seen a significant increase in the number of modern self-identified Pagans and polytheist groups in that time, so too will we start to see an expansion of deities, not only in terms of new aspects of deities that will come into being for our own times and situations, but also of entirely new beings who have never been known in previous human history. It's an exciting prospect, certainly, but also one that needs to be approached with great seriousness and sincerity for our traditions to continue to grow, and for our ideals of pluralism and our theologies of polytheism to be true to their words.

Populating Polytheist Pantheons: What To Do With "New Gods"