The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses by David L. Miller

Newsletter,Vol. VI, No. 8, Summer 1981

The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses. By David L. Miller. (Dallas, Tex.: Spring Publications, 1981.)

In reissuing The New Polytheism at this time, Spring Publications has performed no small service. The content is essentially the same as the 1974 Harper & Row edition, with the addition of a prefatory letter from Henry Corbin, in which he equates aspects of his mundus imaginalis to David Miller’s polytheism, and a new introduction by the author, qualifying and clarifying several statements of the original. We do not act out the stories of the Gods and Goddesses, he is saying, but they articulate “our feelings or thoughts, our consciousness or sense, concerning any behavior.” Although the influence of James Hillman’s 1971 essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic,” an appendix to both editions, is never in doubt, Miller has woven a rich tapestry of philosophical speculation, poetic sensibility and of psychological and religious depth.

By clinging to our beliefs of single centres and universal values and boundaries, we are fighting a losing battle. A dying and resurrecting God within a monotheistic context cannot escape a final death and loss of meaning, which is represented in human terms by excessive abstraction, a lack of concreteness, of time and timing, of process in life.

The way out lies, not in a reassertion of a single logic, but in the acceptance of a multifaceted reality. In science, this is expressed by the principles of relativity and indeterminacy; in psychology, by the experience of multiplicity, the absence of a centred will of a single ego. Pluralism requires a pluralistic response or a polytheistic psychology and theology. Within this context what has formerly been experienced as fragmentary, anarchic and threatening offers new possibilities of freedom and creativity. The “exploded circle” brings into play a different way of seeing.

The loss of a single centre of meaning is not without its dangers, which include a readiness to grasp at superficial external value centres. One of the more satisfying ways to continue in a meaningless world is offered by depth psychology, in particular long-term psychotherapy. “If theology is two thousand years of faith seeking understanding, psychotherapy is two thousand years of understanding seeking life.”

Perhaps the most singular advantage of a polytheistic perspective is offered in the last pages: “The Gods and Goddesses may also teach us a new tolerance—even more, an acceptance of the variousness of ourselves and others.”

—Alice Johnston