Polytheist, Ph.D. in Philosophy. Justice to all beings, reverence to all Gods.
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Polytheistic Platonism: Collected Essays (2026). US orders from Kindred Star Books kindredstarbooks.com/product…; UK and elsewhere from The Prometheus Trust prometheustrust.co.uk/produc…
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Another photo from the inauguration of the new temple of Zeus and Pan in Arcadia yesterday.
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The effort to intimidate Hindus from celebrating their religion or defending it from slanders by branding every Hindu who sticks their head up, or anyone who stands as their ally, as a "fascist" is another chapter in the attempt to eradicate polytheist traditions from the world.
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China Moves to Formally Ban Missionary Activity persecution.org/2025/04/04/c…
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The future of polytheism in the world will not depend on the tiny cohort of Western polytheists, but on the large, continuous traditions, primarily Hinduism, because it alone has a friendly nation state for its home, but also crucially the Chinese and Yoruba traditions.
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1,200-year-old pagan temple to Thor and Odin unearthed in Norway livescience.com/ancient-viki…
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😂That look on your face when you realize your head has been cut off and there's nothing you can do about it.
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The stereotype of Dionysus as merely a "wine god" is a deliberate erasure of the soteriological dimension of Hellenic religion.
Even the great Walter Burkert understood that it was the Orphic/Bacchic Dionysus who set the standards on how Mediterranean religions were done.
Much more than just a “wine god”, but a god of Life itself. No god had more influence on Mediterranean culture than Dionysus.
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Beneficiary of a grant from Indic Academy, an example of why I'm so proud to be working with @IndicaOrg bbc.com/news/articles/cg3gw9…
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The Fury Over India’s Citizenship Amendment Act and The Silence About Hindu Persecution by @indumathi37 blog.usejournal.com/the-fury…
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Stop apologizing for having many Gods, and get back to bragging about it. #polytheism
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So he's "collecting" them from the people he is converting?
Nigerian Catholic priest Reverend Paul Obayi is on a mission to collect traditional artifacts, considered central to the pre-Christian religion of the Igbo people, as new Christian converts destroy them as pagan symbols reut.rs/3DdkmME
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"Proto-Indo-European" is merely a heuristic device used in comparative linguistics. As such, it barely makes sense to speak of a discrete "Proto-Indo-European" language, much less of a "Proto-Indo-European" culture, religion, ethnicity, etc., all of which is utter nonsense.
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17 Years After Being Declared Extinct in the Wild, Turtle Species is Saved by Caretakers of Hindu Temple goodnewsnetwork.org/turtle-s…
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First Hellenic Polytheist Temple in 1700 Years is Open and Encounters Aggressions wildhunt.org/2025/03/first-h…
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Polytheist and indigenous traditions are not religions "of the book", but of many books, indeed, of libraries. Their strength is their resiliency, adaptability, polymorphism. They have sustained themselves for millennia not by resisting change, but by making it their own.
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ALT Using Barbie to explain aspects of Gods: Barbie is "an astronaut, a veterinarian, and a rollerskater, but no matter which of those things she is *in the moment*, she is always still Barbie. She is Barbie *in her aspect as*."
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An interesting account of "Brahmans" in 5th c. CE Alexandria from the Philosophical History attributed to Damascius (51d). The Severus mentioned here was consul in 470, and was rumored to have a secret plan to restore Paganism.
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When I do events with Hindus, like this morning's, I feel a complex swirl of emotions. It warms my heart to be among pious worshipers belonging to a tradition that is intact, massive, and diverse. But it makes me sad, too, for our own sundered, shattered traditions.
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Regardless of how you feel about Tulsi Gabbard, it's important that the very notion of Hinduphobia, which has been suppressed in the Western media, has now been mentioned, at least, on CNN.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: "As a practicing Hindu I have been on the receiving end of Hinduphobia and bigoted attacks."
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Some in the Western pagan community do not wish to hear the voices of actual practitioners of living traditions in cultures different than their own.
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Those who say that revivalist polytheism is mere role-playing show that they themselves have no deeper conception of religion. They dismiss the reality of anything beyond performance, so that if the performance is interrupted, and the script lost, there is nothing left.
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Polytheism is, as far as I can see, the only position for theology that could be regarded as "futuristic".
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Some would appear to welcome the day when these traditions would no longer have adherents, or where their numbers were so few that they could be patronized and romanticized, rather than presenting the uncomfortable complexity of a large, living tradition.
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No tradition should think that it survived Christian and/or Muslim conversion on account of some innate virtue that those who succumbed were lacking. There are a whole lot of geographical and geopolitical reasons why a given tradition was spared.
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"It is no wonder that the most ignorant people consider statues to be wood and stone, just as illiterate people see inscriptions as stones, and writing tablets as wood, and books as woven papyrus." (Porphyry)
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People seem to think that the polytheist revival in Greece is something new. In fact, it’s in its second generation at this point, even by the most conservative measures.
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I’m excited to announce that I have been invited to present a paper at Harvard’s Center for the Study of World Religions next year, as part of a conference on Platonism as a Living Tradition.
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In 563 CE there were apparently still enough vegetarian Pagan Platonists in Athens to annoy this Christian.
ALT Quote by Paul the Silentiary, in 563 CE, 35 years after Justinian's official closing of the Academy at Athens, suggesting the continued presence of Pagan Platonists: "'Tis no bean-eating Athenian who judges these lines, but men of piety and like disposition, men in whom both God and Emperor take pleasure."
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It's far better to make offerings to the Gods however you do, than to refrain from making offerings because you are worried about doing it wrong.
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There's a good reason that the North American Indigenous myths as told to outsiders play down the cultic dimension of the Gods in them: it was illegal until 1978 for Indigenous people in the U.S. to worship those Gods. They'd have been confessing to a crime.
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Three-part series on algebra in India: myind.net/Home/viewArticle/a…; myind.net/Home/viewArticle/a…; myind.net/Home/viewArticle/a…
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Bengal elated as Durga Puja nominated for UNESCO 2020 list of cultural heritage thestatesman.com/bengal/beng…
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Thesis: that polytheism is the most effective factor in preserving linguistic diversity. A map of linguistic diversity worldwide would find that the places with the highest linguistic diversity either are now majority polytheist, or were, as recently as a century ago.
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I have seen no mention on this #IndigenousPeoplesDay of protecting indigenous religions from missionary pressure and supporting their revival if they have been disrupted. Indigenous religions are not just "culture".
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There needs to be an international polytheist movement to create alliances among surviving traditions, helping them to share their strengths and compensate for their particular vulnerabilities, as well as establishing frameworks for respectful engagement by outsiders.
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Japanese shrine bans foreign visitors following disrespectful behaviour by tourists soranews24.com/2020/01/13/ja… via @RocketNews24En
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"We're not resurrecting the Gods. They were always here. We're renewing communion with them."
Alright, so apologies for the length of this reply but you ask a fair question and a fair question deserves a thoughtful answer.
I think you can divide pagans into four groups that aren't all mutually exclusive. First you have those who acknowledge there's been a break in the tradition and those who don't. And then you have those who, assuming there is a break, view the break as a fundamental problem and those who don't.
So some pagans outright deny that there's been a true sundering and assert that those who practiced their ancestral religion just went underground and continued in secret. In the world of Greco-Roman paganism, groups like Pietas (Roman) or YSEE (Hellenic) have this approach. They can cite anti-pagan laws in Late Antiquity through the Middle Ages, trials of those found worshipping the old Gods, and so on. This is certainly evidence, but evidence of what? It could be people periodically seeking to reconnect to a lost inheritance just as well as a continuing religious practice. Scholars like Ronald Hutton usually dismiss claims of the latter. Then you have others who have a softer version of this argument, pointing to pagan survivals such as people in Scandinavia continuing to leave offerings for the elves into modern times. Or, speaking as a Romano-British polytheist, an example would be coins still being offered at the Roman baths at Bath, just as in ancient times. (Replacing offering a prayer to the deity with simply making a wish.) Then there's holidays and so on that supposedly retain many pagan elements. Me? I go with the scholarship, and am skeptical of claims of a direct pagan line of “apostolic succession”. But admit that the evidence would look the same either way.
Okay, now there's the question of whether a broken line should matter or not. For perennialists/traditionalists, then the answer is yes it does matter. I personally don't think it does. We're not resurrecting the Gods. They were always here. We're renewing communion with them. If you lose a friend's phone number, the fact that you can't call them doesn't mean they're dead, only that you are out of touch with them. For us, the old language of rituals and rites is the "phone number", the means to re-establish this line of communication. The challenge is that the evidence is spottier in some places than others. The Romans preserved more information on rituals than the Norse/Germanic peoples. Where it would matter however would be the mystery rites like the Eleusinian or Mithraic mysteries, which were initiatory and are now lost for good.
So I would say the point you raise is a challenge, but not a fatal blow to the project of renewing the Pax Deorum.
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I dislike the modern opposition between Apollo and Dionysos, which I see as fundamentally anachronistic.
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It's always interesting how corporations will invoke a pagan God when they *really* need something to work.
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I get so tired of the polytheist inferiority complex. We *invented* philosophy, and yet they expect that the devastating philosophical argument against polytheism is always just around the corner. I understand this inferiority complex, but I'm tired of dealing with it.
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It's important to remember that Prometheus smuggles divine fire to the mortal world in a fennel stalk—effectively in a thyrsus; hence the Bacchic revelation/soteriology shares a common form with technophany, ongoing technological discovery and innovation.
The merging of Prometheus & Bacchus is not a foreign idea.
The two were linked in art dated to the Classical Period. Prometheus was often depicted surrounded by Satyrs & Maenads and bearing a Thyrsus wand like Bacchus.
Innovative technological thinking & Fruitful Agriculture.
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"Others will state that Aphrodite is merely desire and Hermes eloquence and the Muses the arts and Athena wisdom. You surely perceive the abyss of atheism that engulfs us if we reduce each of the Gods to emotions, functions [dynameis], and virtues." (Plutarch, Amatorius 757b-c)
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The very fact that people are so invested in this fiction, rather than in actual cultures, is a sign of intellectual decay.
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According to the Pew Research Center, seven countries have a majority Buddhist population. But Buddhists in Asia are historically also polytheists, and many indigenous polytheisms survive in a symbiosis with Buddhism, a fact too often devalued and erased by Western Buddhists.
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Lord Anubis looks like He's telling all the little Kemetics to just calm down, He'll get to everyone in time.
This statuette of the Egyptian god Anubis is our #ArtefactOfTheDay!
Dating to c. 332 - 30 BCE, Anubis, the god of mummification, is seen raising his hands to greet and offer protection to the deceased in the afterlife.
#Classics #Egypt #Art #Anubis #Archaeology #History #Death
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I don't want to get into a fight about it, but I think it's rather tone deaf for Cherry Hill Seminary to have Michael York teaching a course on "Vedic Religion" to Neopagans. Such a course should be taught by a Hindu.
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Just blocked a missionary from following me here. We don't owe them a window into our thinking or our tactics.
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I have to say that on the whole I'd rather teach bhakts (devotees), and try to get them up to speed in philosophy, than try to get people trained in philosophy to recognize divine agency, which feels sometimes like trying to explain color to the blind, or music to the deaf.
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A friend of mine is a Wathanist, an Arabian polytheist, and where a Muslim would say insha'Allah, he says insha't Manat, referring to the Arabian Goddess Manat. How cool is that?
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Isis Navigans, Goddess of seafarers, from Images Depicting the Gods of the Ancients by Vincenzo Cartari, first published in 1556.
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Contact with India's advanced polytheistic civilization provoked an intellectual and spiritual crisis in Europe.
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The One is literally the principle of individuation; to say that things are annihilated into it is as senseless as it would be to say that Intellect makes things unintelligent.
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"In ancient Egypt … temples did not serve as places of worship but rather as locations where it is understood a deity might choose to manifest him- or herself. Rituals meant the location was always ready for the deity to become present…
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"Polycentric Polytheism," a presentation of some core aspects of my work for a popular audience: henadology.files.wordpress.c…
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People claim that we have to call something a “spirit” rather than a God because it is too minor or partial, but the Romans have a Goddess of the door’s pivot, Cardea. Augustine mocks them for such “minor” Gods.
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οὐδὲν ἄρα οὕτως βεβαίως δεδήσεται, οὐ νόσῳ, οὐκ ὀργῇ, οὐ τύχῃ οὐδεμιᾷ, ὃ μὴ οἷόν τ᾽ ἔσται λῦσαι τῷ Διονύσῳ.
"There is nothing so firmly bound—by illness, wrath or fortune—that it cannot be released by Dionysos." (Aelius Aristides, Oration II.331k)
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The nudity of Aphrodite is comparable to the frontality of depictions of Hathor, atypical for Egyptian Gods, the significance of which is likely the immediacy of Their manifestation, both being associated with beauty and pleasure.
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Interesting context on the Greek polytheist temple issue from a Greek friend: "The Orthodox church does it often [i.e., 'deny people space to worship']. The Muslim community waited about 50 years to build a mosque in Athens due to church opposition…
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“Theurgist” is a perfectly suitable alternative to the culturally-appropriated term “shaman”.
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There are smoldering embers everywhere, however, toward the revival of indigenous polytheist traditions that have been sundered or nearly so, which could burst into flame again with the slightest breath. But a catalyst is needed.
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People will literally say, “I don't like leaving food offerings because it feels like I am wasting food,” and leave half the food on their plate at a restaurant.
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It’s a deeply ingrained notion in the modern West that Gods are invented, instead of discovered. It’s not a matter here of “anthropomorphisation”, but of the normal process in any science of becoming increasingly better acquainted with the object of inquiry.
Blowing my mind:
The idea that there are a bunch of tiny gods in the body (shēnshén 身神) interceding w gods outside the body for health came AFTER impersonal versions of Daoism
They anthropomorphised the system LATER! Would have thought gods were a more ancient way of thinking
ALT Body Gods in Shàng Qīng Dà Dòng Zhēn Jīng 上清大洞真經
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Master thread of my books, newest to oldest. The Way of Being: Polytheism and the Western Knowledge System amzn.to/44Rlzbq (#advertisement)
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In honor of the Panathenaia, I've decided to make my new essay, "Hephaestus and the Theophany of the Technical", available free. open.substack.com/pub/epbutl…
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"While the churches of America are spending twenty million dollars annually in the cause of foreign missions the pagans have executed an amazing flank movement; they have sent their emissaries to us."
The title page of Mabel Potter Daggett’s 1911 essay, “The Heathen Invasion of America”
#HindooHistory
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Aboriginal elders try to stop Christians from trying to convert them mol.im/a/7903695 via @MailOnline
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Part of why Indigenous religions as such don't receive attention when people are talking about issues of Indigenous peoples is of course because there are matters of life and death at stake in these communities.
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In ancient Greece almost every town has a local Zeus, but paired with varying Goddesses. Greeks did not choose to treat all these Goddesses as one, but rather maintained their autonomy. Hence Homer says that Zeus is like an unfaithful husband to Hera. Moderns don't get the joke.
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Some Greeks Have Returned to Worshipping Gods of Ancient Greece greekreporter.com/2021/10/02… via @greekreporter
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"The Buddha statue was made from stone probably quarried from the region just south of modern Istanbul; it must have been sculpted locally at Berenike and dedicated to the temple by one or more rich merchants from India." english.ahram.org.eg/News/49…
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My Theological Encyclopedia of the Goddesses and Gods of the Ancient Egyptians, hosted on my site since 2009 and still available there, is now available in paperback and Kindle ebook form as well: amzn.to/3oVSFkw (#advertisement)
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What practicing polytheists grasp intuitively requires tedious theoretical articulation for those who, ironically, are only looking for an excuse not to believe in the Gods at all. But then the theory is intimidating to the pious whom it is meant to serve. A sad paradox.
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Only Dalit women are allowed to touch the deities in this ancient Odisha temple thehindu.com/society/only-da…
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Big news
Launch of Center for Global Polytheist & Indigenous Traditions indicacademy.org/launch-of-c… . We are pleased to welcome @EPButler on board.
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Seems like a good time to remind people that the fathers of Western science were polytheists, and yes, loved their holy icons too.
In Aristotle's will, as reported by Diogenes Laertius, we find directions for dedicating a statue to Demeter on his mother's behalf and, in fulfillment of a vow, statues "of life size" to "Zeus and Athena the Saviors".
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It was providential to see this thread resurface when I am working with these ideas again. Aphrodite, e.g., is not nude because She is the "Goddess of Love"; rather, She is that because of Her "nudity", that is, Her raw power, most immanent and therefore most transcendent.
The nudity of Aphrodite is comparable to the frontality of depictions of Hathor, atypical for Egyptian Gods, the significance of which is likely the immediacy of Their manifestation, both being associated with beauty and pleasure.
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People should learn to say “the God” instead of “God”. It makes a huge difference, particularly in understanding how ancient texts, before the era of monotheist hegemony, spoke about divinity.
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Maybe I'm weird, but it's beautiful to me to hear the Parthenon called a "mandir of Athena", because of the recognition and solidarity it expresses.
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How absurd that anyone should consider #polytheism primitive—the religion of Plato, of Aristotle, of the great Hellenic mathematicians and physicians, and of Proclus, the complexity of whose thought dazzled Aquinas.
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More photos from the ceremony
After 1,700 years, an Ancient Greek temple has risen once more in Arcadia, Greece. Dedicated to Zeus, Dionysus, and Pan, the temple was built for true worship. Hundreds gathered in liturgy, rekindling the flame of Hellenic tradition.
Hail to the Olympian Gods ⚡️
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Someone says they want a relationship with the Gods. Tell them to wander out into the desert and nearly die, or to take an entheogen that will have them puking and hallucinating for hours, and they will do it. Tell them to put a little food in front of an icon and they will not.
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"Others affirm Aphrodite to be nothing but our concupiscence; that Hermes is no more than the faculty of speech; that the Muses are only the names for the arts and sciences; and that Athena is only a fine word for prudence…
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Interfaith 101: "Some months ago I attended an Interfaith Dialogue in Delhi ... Christians praised Christianity, Muslims praised Islam, and Hindus praised Christianity and Islam."
Wished that Hindus would not only be nice but also straight forward and truthful when in dialogue with Christianity and Islam. Certain questions need to be asked. wp.me/p31khd-7O
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There's significant ideological investment in Western academia to legitimate Buddhism as a kind of custodian for indigenous traditions throughout Asia. Unsurprising, as the example would then serve to legitimate a similar status for Christianity in much of the rest of the world.
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Don't tell Athena how big your problems are, tell your problems how big your Athena is!
Note how Athena breaks the freaking plane on this vase. The boxers on the other side are big, but she is Boss big.
#sentantiqgoestoamuseum2
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