"Polytheism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... before their respective altars, easily persuaded themselves, that under various names, and with various ceremonies, they adored the same deities. [5] The elegant mythology of Homer gave a beautiful, and almost a regular form, to the polytheism of ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon
... knew nothing, set in a country of which the author had no experience, but which many of us know under wholly altered conditions. It was to carry on controversies as to the older and the later types of Christianity, as to Polytheism, Judaism, and Monotheism; it was to confute Romanism, Scepticism, and German metaphysics; it was to denounce celibacy and monasticism, to glorify muscular Christianity, to give glowing pictures of Greek sensuousness and Roman rascality, and finally to secure the apotheosis of Scandinavian ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... his doing or saying anything profane or unholy." Socrates believed in one Supreme Being, the intelligent Creator of the universe. He also believed in the immortality of the soul. These doctrines were altogether contrary to Greek polytheism, the prevailing religion of Athens, and they prove him to have been far in advance of the age in which he lived. While he established no school, Socrates nevertheless must ever rank as one of the world's greatest teachers ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... the sky. It is not the poetry of action or heroic enterprise, but of faith in a supreme Providence, and resignation to the power that governs the universe. As the idea of God was removed farther from humanity and a scattered polytheism, it became more profound and intense, as it became more universal, for the Infinite is present to everything: "If we fly into the uttermost parts of the earth, it is there also; if we turn to the east or the west, we cannot ...
— English literary criticism • Various
... next is a discussion somewhat after the manner of the Nut-Brown Maid, again paraphrased from the Diana (Book I); while the eighth, lastly, is a homily on the superiority of Christianity over Roman polytheism, in which under obsolete forms the author no doubt intended an allusion to contemporary controversies. Thus it will be seen that Googe follows Latin and Spanish traditions almost exclusively: the only point in which it ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... decay and moral corruption. But there are always natures which must possess a faith in which they can trust. These were in search of a religion, and many of them found refuge from the coarse and incredible myths of the gods of polytheism in the purity and monotheism of the Jewish creed. The fundamental ideas of this creed are also the foundations of the Christian faith. Wherever the messengers of Christianity traveled, they met with people with whom they had many religious conceptions in common. Their first ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... Bel Enlil of Nippur. Although it did not affect the religion of the masses, it serves to show that among the ancient scholars and thinkers of Babylonia religious thought had, at an early period, risen far above the crude polytheism of those who bargained with their deities and propitiated them with offerings and extravagant flattery, or exercised over them a magical influence by the performance of seasonal ceremonies, like the backsliders ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... catechumens and penitents all the higher mysteries, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Metastoicheiosis (transubstantiation), the Real Presence, the Eucharist and the Seven Sacraments; when Arnobius could ask, Quid Deo cum vino est? and when Justin, fearing the charge of Polytheism, could expressly declare the inferior nature of the Son to the Father. Hence the creed was appropriately called Symbol i.e., Sign of the Secret. This "mental reservation" lasted till the Edict of Toleration, issued by Constantine in the fourth century, held Christianity secure when divulging ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... was to appease the malice of the Evil Spirit, who might bring mischief or loss to them, or sickness or death, unless his forbearance was purchased by some particular mark of attention. [FN: By the testimony of many of the Indians themselves, they appear to entertain a certain Polytheism in their belief. "We believed in one great wise benevolent being, Thesha-mon-e-doo, whose dwelling was in the sun. We believed also in many other lesser spirits—gods of the elements, and in one bad unappeasable spirit, Mah-je-mah-ne-doo, to whom we attributed bad luck, ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... the first commandment is directed against polytheism, and the second against idolatry; and most people know that the Church of Rome differs from the Church of England in joining these two into one commandment, and dividing the tenth into two commandments, so as to make up the full number, ten. This point of difference betwixt the two ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... or circular" will suffice to show how Platonic it is. Taylor certainly professed a kind of heathenism. D'lsraeli said, "Mr. T. Taylor, the Platonic philosopher and the modern Plethon,[423] consonant to that philosophy, professes polytheism." Taylor printed this in large type, in a page by itself after the dedication, without any disavowal. I have seen the following, Greek and translation both, in his handwriting: "[Greek: Pas agathos hei agathos ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... individual is lost in the whole, and the realization of this is salvation. But humanity cannot be content without the semblance of personality in God, and since everything has become divine, it was easy to regard not only natural powers, but also personal beings as gods. Polytheism was the result. Vishnu and Siva, gods of reproductive and destructive powers, came to be worshiped. Incarnation and transmigration followed. The incarnation was not the incarnation of the supreme Brahma, but of one of the subordinate deities, Vishnu, and even this incarnation was but ...
— A Tour of the Missions - Observations and Conclusions • Augustus Hopkins Strong
... demonstrate that the FIRST CAUSE necessarily and proximately generates immortal gods! Hence too it is that philosophers have, in different past ages, undertaken to demonstrate the verity of all religions, and according to the religion of the government under which they lived, they have either supported Polytheism, Theism, Sabinism, Judaism, Popery, or Mahomedanism. The fate of Socrates has never been forgotten by any philosopher who possessed the chief attribute of wisdom—PRUDENCE; and no benevolent man will ...
— A Morning's Walk from London to Kew • Richard Phillips
... heathens. Well! but the honorable gentleman will recollect that heathens, that polytheists, must permit a number of divinities. It is the very essence of its constitution. But was it ever heard that polytheism tolerated a dissent from a polytheistic establishment,—the belief of one God only? Never! never! Sir, they constantly carried on persecution against that doctrine. I will not give heathens the glory of a doctrine ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... themselves, upon which they can form no theoretical conclusion, they fly for satisfaction to the most simple, but most ineffectual of all solutions—the agency of invisible beings, with which, in their opinion, all nature is filled. Hence the rise of Polytheism and local deities, which have overspread the face of the earth, under the different titles of guardian gods or tutelary saints. Hence magnificent temples and splendid statues have been erected to aid the imagination of votaries, and to realize ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... for yourselves. There were Jews in Italy before there were Christians in the world. Roman polytheism, which tolerated everything except the kicks administered by Polyeucte to the statue of Jupiter, gave a place to the God of Israel. Afterwards came the Christians, and they were tolerated till they conspired against the laws. They ...
— The Roman Question • Edmond About
... kind, Deacon Joash T., attended only one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,—accusing her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive Christian were well-founded, I think we ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... thought from another, though he made it his own. Plato, in The Republic, as a critic of Homer, by way of fitting Homer the better for the use of the schoolboys of the ideal city, is ready to sacrifice much of that graceful polytheism in which the Greeks anticipated the dulia of saints and angels in the catholic church. He does this to the advantage of a very abstract, and as it may seem disinterested, certainly an uninteresting, notion of deity, which is in truth:—well! one of ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... forced to love him only, and ignore giving him a rival (referring to Koranic denunciations of "Shirk," or attributing a partner to Allah, the religion of plurality, syntheism not polytheism): see, he walks tottering under the weight of his back parts wriggling them whilst they are rounded ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... chapter. Of Islamism, Bishop Boyd Carpenter testifies that it "has been, and still is, a great power in the world. There is much in it that is calculated to purify and elevate mankind at a certain stage of history. It has the power of redeeming the slaves of a degraded polytheism from their low groveling conception of God to conceptions which are higher; it has set an example of sobriety to the world and has shielded its followers from the drink plague which destroys the strength of nations. And, ...
— The Church and Modern Life • Washington Gladden
... that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion of the present differs from that of the past, it ...
— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... possible to conceive how it could enter into the conception of any one to compare the stupid polytheism of the worshippers of Budda with the Christian religion: In one thing indeed the Catholic church has contrived to establish a resemblance, by the subordinate worship ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... be no other than a piece of painted paper?... We really lament the ignorance or uncharitableness of those who confound our representative worship with the Phenician, Grecian, or Roman idolatry as represented by European writers, and then charge us with polytheism in the teeth of thousands of texts in the Puranas declaring in clear and unmistakable terms that there is but one God who manifests Himself as Brahma, Vishnu, and Rudra (Siva), in His functions of creation, preservation, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... of disbelief in what Mr. Emerson calls a "pistareen Providence" is a belief in pantheism or polytheism. There is certainly nothing ridiculous in the faith that the Being who contrived and arranged, and adjusted the infinite littlenesses of creation, and ordained their laws, and who continues their existence, maintains an intimate interest in the ...
— Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays • Timothy Titcomb
... same source as these other records. The biblical historians, it is plain, derived their materials from the best human sources available.... The materials which with other nations were combined into the crudest physical theories or associated with a grotesque polytheism were vivified and transformed by the inspired genius of the Hebrew historians, and adapted to become the vehicle ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... quarter. No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity; and was amoung the efficacious doctrines which gave it triumph over the polytheism of the ancients, sickened with the absurdities of their own theology. Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius. ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Religions.—Principles and method of the science of religion. Personal, family, and tribal religions. Ancestral worship. Doctrines of animism; fetichism; polytheism; henotheism; monotheism; universal religions. ...
— Anthropology - As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States • Daniel Garrison Brinton
... single trunk has been divided amongst a multitude of shoots. This comparison expresses well enough the opinion which tends to prevail amongst our savants on the subject of the historical development of religions. The idea of the only God is at the root,—it is primitive; polytheism is derivative. A forgotten, and as it were slumbering, monotheism exists beneath the worship of idols; it is the concealed trunk which supports them, but the idols have absorbed all the sap. The ancient God (allow me once more a comparison) ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... of the Chaldaeans, from the very earliest times to which the monuments carry us back, was, in its outward aspect, a polytheism of a very elaborate character. It is quite possible that there may have been esoteric explanations, known to the priests and the more learned, which, resolving the personages of the Pantheon into the powers of nature, reconciled the apparent multiplicity ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 1. (of 7): Chaldaea • George Rawlinson
... this pantheism branches out into animism or shamanism, fetichism and phallicism. In its higher forms, it becomes polytheism, idolatry and defective philosophy. Having centuries ago corrupted Buddhism it is the malaria which, unseen and unfelt, is ready to poison and corrupt Christianity. Indeed, it has already given over to disease and spiritual death more than one once hopeful Christian believer, teacher and preacher ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... He lacked, what the Aryan shepherd possessed, the ability for mythological invention. The defect was due to his speech, which did not lend itself to the deification of epithets. Even had it done so, it is probable that his mode of life would have rendered the paraphernalia of polytheism impossible. People constantly moving from place to place could not be cumbered with idols. The Elohim were, therefore, a convenience for travellers and an unidolatrous monotheism a necessity which the absence of vehicles imposed. On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... Statius: PRIMUS IN ORBE DEOS FECIT TIMOR, points to the relation of animism first to the belief in ghosts, thence to Polytheism, and ultimately to Monotheism. I must apologise to those of the transcendental school who, like Max Muller for instance (Introduction to the 'Science of Religion'), hold that we have 'a primitive intuition of ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the sake of my own intellectual freedom, and be the honest atheist you are pleased to say I am. As it happens, however, I cannot take this position with honesty, inasmuch as it is, and always has been, a favorite tenet, that Atheism is as absurd, logically speaking, as Polytheism." In the same paper he says, "The denying the possibility of miracles seems to me quite as unjustifiable as speculative Atheism." How this can be reconciled with the passages quoted above, ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... Christian commonwealth with what was fundamentally his own notion of a commonwealth after the ancient type. He stripped the pagan republics, which he took for his model, of their national and official polytheism, and he put on in its stead a scanty remnant of theism ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... history, thus testifying that it drew its greatness from a fountain higher than itself. It was in its early days that Egypt worshipped one only God; in the later ages this simple and sublime belief was buried under the corruptions of polytheism. The greatest pyramids were built by the Fourth Dynasty, and so universal was education at that time among the people that the stones with which they were built retain to this day the writing of the workmen. The first ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... of the Eastern Pantheon, the god representing the destroyer is embodied under the form of a man, while the preserver is symbolized under the form of a woman. This is an adaptation in Polytheism of a great and true idea. Woman is a preserver. Her's is the conservative influence of society. It is from man that the destructive forces that shake the social organization emanate. He wars on his kind and the earth shakes under the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... the sun, whose life was an uninterrupted delight, and who, when overtaken by age, lay on a perfumed grass that produced a voluptuous death. Evhemerus, a terrible atheist, whose Sacred History the early bishops wielded against polytheism until they discovered it was double-edged, took him to Panchaia, an island where incense grew; where property was held in common; where there was but one law—Justice, yet a justice different from our own, one which Hugo must have intercepted when he made an entrancing ...
— Imperial Purple • Edgar Saltus
... Then came the bodily conception and manifestation of that being, or his attributes, in the form of idols. Next, the representation of all that belongs to spirits, good and bad. And finally, the deification of every imagination of the heart of man,—a written and accredited system of polytheism, and ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... like this, is found in the Meditations of the emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, though apparently repugnant to the polytheism commonly admitted by the Stoics, to whom he belonged: "The world, take it all together, is but one; there is but one sort of matter to make it of, one God to govern it, and one law to guide it. For, run through the whole ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... were regarded by their countrymen with peculiar reverence, and considered as the first and chiefest men in the state. For this mitigated view of such dark and mysterious proceedings the ancients were in a great degree indebted to their polytheism. The Romans are computed to have acknowledged thirty thousand divinities, to all of whom was rendered a legitimate homage; and other countries in a ...
— Lives of the Necromancers • William Godwin
... paganism—its basic immorality, or, if you like, its unmorality. Like our scientism of to-day, it was unable to lay down a system of morals. It did not even try to. What Augustin has written on this subject in The City of God, is perhaps the strongest argument ever objected to polytheism. Anyhow, pages like this are very timely indeed ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand |
