God: A Human History

by Reza Aslan

In such a world order, henotheism—the belief in a High God who rules over all the other gods—makes perfect sense. As more authority is vested in a single individual on earth, more authority is given to a single god in heaven, be it Marduk in Babylon, Ashur in Assyria, An in Isin, Amun-Re in Egypt, Khumban in Elam, Khaldi in Urartu, Zeus in Greece, Jupiter in Rome, Odin among the Norse, Tian in the Zhou Dynasty of China, and so on. The problem is that the higher a deity climbs within its pantheon, displacing other, lower gods, the more it has to take upon itself the attributes traditionally ascribed to those other gods, until eventually the contradictions and inconsistencies in the High God’s character reach a tipping point. Take the Hindu god Shiva, the High God of Shaivism, who, along with Brahma and Vishnu, also forms the triumvirate of supreme gods that make up the so-called Hindu Trinity, or Trimurti. Shiva began its existence as a relatively minor deity who is not even mentioned by name in the Rig Veda. But in the post-Vedic literature, especially the Upanishads and the great Indian epic of the Mahabharata, as Shiva climbs higher and higher in the Hindu pantheon, it begins to absorb the attributes and qualities of the gods it displaces, so that today, Shiva is known as creator and destroyer, healer and afflicter, ascetic and hedonist, the god of storms and lord of the dance.