Ascendant Quotes

“For instance, Thoth existing prior to the material world highlights his choice to enter the created world and play a part in the courts of the various gods. What does this imply about the role of language and writing? What does Thoth’s principle role in the court of Osiris at the judgment of the dead say about his relation to Ra and the material world?”
― Michael Hardy, Ascendant: Modern Essays on Polytheism and Theology

“Ultimately Postmodernism (and Paganism) cannot continue endlessly reducing reality to meaningless language games (Gibbons, 2017). Reality exists regardless of one’s experience of it. Postmodern approaches to Paganism will eventually give way to more material metaphysics — the question is how will we define our own myths and ontologies to engage in these questions of faith in the present world once Postmodernism is finally usurped?”
― Michael Hardy, Ascendant: Modern Essays on Polytheism and Theology

“What was happening in the first three centuries of the common era wasn’t so much a mystery cult calling themselves the Gnostics promoting a unified, systematic theology of Jesus Christ, but a variety of groups promoting remarkably similar, yet distinct, theological systems.”
― Michael Hardy, Ascendant: Modern Essays on Polytheism and Theology

“Sallust gives a rather succinct definition of this when he defines a god as “immutable, without Generation, eternal, incorporeal, and [without] Subsistence in Place.”
― Michael Hardy, Ascendant: Modern Essays on Polytheism and Theology

“Thus, the traditional stories tell us more about ancient peoples' obsessions, fears, experiences, and expectations, than they do about the nature of the gods themselves. If the stories do provide any true sense of the gods, they do so, to borrow a biblical phrase, through a glass darkly.”
― Wayne Keysor, Ascendant: Modern Essays on Polytheism and Theology