The Way of the Gods Quotes

“To understand their theoretical conceptualization of the objects of religion it is necessary to grasp the traditional terms gui (or kuei) and shen. These terms may be translated as ‘spirit’ and as ‘God’ respectively, though the practice of contemporary Western scholars is generally to translate shen as ‘spirits’, or to treat only the greatest among the shen as ‘gods’, and hence to translate gui as something lower even than ‘spirits’, such as ‘ghosts’, in accord with the tendency to use gui to refer to the restless dead, as opposed to those who have become actualized ancestors and are more likely to be referred to as shen. In Chinese it was very common to refer generically to gui-shen, that is, to ‘spirits and Gods’ in general, and to conceive these as gradations on a continuum of power.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“The major division in traditional Chinese polytheism recognized by modern scholars is that between so-called ‘folk religion’ or ‘popular religion’, called Shén-jiào, which simply means “the teaching about the Gods,” or shen, and Daoism, or Dàojiào, which means the teaching concerning the Way, or dao, though both involve pantheons of Gods, and many of the same Gods are worshiped in both so-called ‘popular religion’ and ‘religious Daoism’. The term Daoism invites some confusion as well, inasmuch as scholars often distinguish between so-called ‘philosophical’ and ‘religious’ Daoism.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“An example of a particularly well-known yōkai is the Tanuki, depicted as a partially anthropomorphic raccoon dog, which is also called tanuki; the term bake-danuki is thus used to refer specifically to the supernatural being. Statues of Tanuki are popular adornments for homes, shops and taverns. The earliest reference to the supernatural tanuki, or a similar being, under the essentially interchangeable term mujina, which strictly refers to the Japanese badger, is in the Nihongi, which in the annals for the year 627 CE speaks of the appearance of a mujina who transformed into a man and sang, demonstrating the antiquity of Atsutane’s category of transmuted animal tengu. The bake-danuki subsequently has a long history in folklore, often as a shapeshifting trickster, occasionally malevolent, but most often as an object of humor. At the same time, bake-danuki continue to be experienced into contemporary times as the source of what in the West are termed ‘paranormal’ events, as in a story Foster recounts (190f) from the 1930s, in which no visible bake-danuki appeared, but a man’s uncanny experience of being transported far from his home in a single night on a nonexistent locomotive is attributed locally to the actions of a tanuki. In such fashion, although yōkai are regarded as occurring near the bottom of the hierarchy stretching from the kami to ordinary humans, Their ability to continually interject Themselves into mundane existence in surreal fashion appears greater, one of the paradoxes, perhaps, of the status of ‘unworshiped’ kami, if indeed that is what They are.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“There are cases, as well, in which, in very similar fashion to Daoist practice, unruly spirits of deceased humans have been domesticated into beneficent kami, such as Tenjin, a God of scholars, who is regarded as having lived a mortal life as the late 9th century scholar Sugawara no Michizane, who suffered exile and became a wrathful spirit after death, but was successfully pacified to emerge as a beneficent and widely worshiped deity”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Norinaga believes it to be necessary to consider certain kami as ‘evil’, however, in order to explain the prevalence of evil in the world. Norinaga recognizes, however, at the same time that “When provoked, a good kami may erupt in rage, while evil deities may soften their hearts when happy, and it is not entirely inconceivable that they might even bestow blessings on humans. And although people may not realize it, the actions [of a kami] which may at first be thought evil, in fact turn out good, while those first thought to be good, may in fact turn out evil,”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Norinaga argues that Magatsuhi is to be regarded as a God of evil. As Ueda Kenji explains, Norinaga asserts that “Among the kami are ‘not only good kami, but evil as well, and their minds and acts are likewise in accord with their natures,’ with the result that they are not to be treated ‘in consideration of whether they are in accord with right and wrong,’ but ‘merely to be offered fervent worship, in awe of their wrath.’”86 The issue of whether a God like Magatsuhi is ‘evil’ or not thus does not bear upon Their worship, which is necessary and appropriate in any event in order to placate Them and to attempt to avoid misfortune to the extent possible.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“By comparison, another mansin interviewed by Kendall had a far easier experience. Though she had long felt the presence of the Gods in her life, as when she escaped from some North Korean soldiers during the war after a providential dream visitation by a Sansin or mountain-dwelling God, her God-descent came when attending a kut, or shamanic ceremony. She was spontaneously possessed while dancing the mugam, in which laypersons wear the costumes of deities as a form of tribute to their personal guardian Gods, without expectation of spirit possession. She became forcefully possessed, however, by one of the Obang Sinjang, or Spirit Warriors of the Five Directions, leading to her initiation as a mansin a year later”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Koreans use the term ‘God-descended person’ (naerin saram) to refer to a person (usually female) who has been chosen by the Gods to become a mansin or mudang, insofar as the Gods are attempting to ‘descend’ into them. Someone who has been chosen in this fashion suffers illness or malaise, sometimes even temporary insanity, until their initiation is conducted.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Chief among these is the Barigongju, the Song of Abandoned Princess Bari, who is also known as Paridegi or Pari Kongju. In this myth, the seventh daughter of a royal couple is abandoned by them and raised by two mountain-dwelling Gods. When Princess Bari’s birth parents fall ill, they are told that the only cure is medicinal water or a flower of resurrection that must be retrieved from the land of the dead, a feat which can only be accomplished by their abandoned seventh daughter. Princess Bari enters the land of the dead as a savior, marries a deity there, and gives birth to a number of sons, generally seven and identified with the seven stars of the Big Dipper. By the time She is able to return to Her birth parents, they have died, but Bari is able to resurrect them.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“While Buddhism has not engaged in the kind of repression of indigenous polytheisms that has characterized Christianity and Islam, a legacy of subordination and even demonization of indigenous Gods and spirits by Buddhists can be seen throughout the region. (Tibetan Buddhist discourse about the indigenous Bon tradition would be one example.) Responsibility for historical injustices, such as imperial Japanese expansionism, or earlier Mongolian aggression, will be assigned to the native religion, which because it is not explicitly universalistic is regarded as implicitly nationalistic and xenophobic.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“In its essence, the Mother Goddess religion is a vehicle for incorporating the worship of diverse indigenous Vietnamese Goddesses into a single cosmogonic framework, thereby giving these indigenous cults something akin to the institutional structure of Daoist or Buddhist worship. Below the four principal Goddesses are ten Mandarins who are agents of the Goddesses, twelve Ladies, who are earthly incarnations of the Mothers, ten Princes who are mostly the spirits of famous historical generals (a category of spirit also popular in Chinese and Korean polytheist traditions), twelve Princesses, who are handmaidens of the Mother Goddesses, ten or twelve Young Princes, who are child spirits, and a number of animal spirits, Tiger Mandarins of the forest and Holy Snakes of the waters.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Balinese and Javanese Hinduism eventually split into two traditions, one known as Agama Dharma Hindu Indonesia, which fashioned itself into a monotheism in accord with legal strictures in Indonesia concerning what can be a legally recognized religion, while the more historically authentic tradition became known as Agama Tirtha, the religion of the holy waters, referring to the central practice in it of blessing water through the recitation of mantras or through the performance of other ceremonies. Water can also be blessed by simply placing it in a shrine. The blessed water then becomes the vehicle rendering other ceremonies effective, by being sprinkled over offerings, to purify the place of worship or the worshipers, and in specific purification rituals as well as rituals associated with cremation. The water drawn from coconuts is also used sometimes in this tradition.69 The use of water in Agama Tirtha can be compared with the ancient Greek practice of asperging, or sprinkling with holy water called khernips, often sanctified to the God Apollo by dropping a burning laurel or myrtle leaf into it, or dipping into it a sacred branch of the laurel tree. Some of these asperging practices were in turn taken up by the Greek Christian clergy.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“We can compare the role of such diagrams to those in African Diaspora religions, whereas these latter traditions have spirit possession, while the Australian Aboriginal traditions render the presence of their Gods concrete through the ground paintings done for the ceremony, reinscribing the divine formula upon the land just as the narration of the mythic events makes them real again, as well as experiencing Them in Their partial incarnation through members of the totemic clans associated with Them,”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“All ‘Fertility Mothers’… were locally-based deities who were concerned with specific areas of country and/or sites, and not with the whole of the earth per se.”61 The God of the Abrahamic faiths was of course originally such a ‘locally-based deity’ as well, and in certain respects clearly still is. Why then could not any of these ‘local’ Earth Mothers be spoken of universally, or the generic ‘Mother Earth’ be applied to any of Them in particular? The difference between the Abrahamic and Aboriginal religions in this respect is that the former have been permitted to universalize themselves, whereas the latter, in order to be perceived as ‘authentic’, are confined to their particularity, their horizons fixed firmly in place.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Aboriginal people throughout Australia tell stories of the creation of the world by totemic ancestors—marvellous beings, essentially human (yet also superhuman) in form, but often also associated with particular species of animals and plants or other phenomena. These are the kangaroo, eagle, budgerigar, and other Dreamings spoken of by Paddy Japaljarri Stewart. The totemic beings are original in every sense of the term. They were the first to exist in the world and the first to institute a global regime of cause and effect. It was the totemic ancestors who created an ongoing dynamic field relating features of the landscape, the heavenly bodies, all living things, rules of human association, and religious observances. These things are only marginally associated with dreams. Particular ancestors and their creations may well be referred to as ‘Dreamings’, but this term is a gloss on what we might otherwise call ‘totems’ or ‘stories’.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“The settlement of Australia began more than 60,000 years ago. Aboriginal Australians may indeed have the longest continuous tradition on Earth, at least that we can determine with some confidence, due to their rock art, in which continuity of forms suggest a degree of continuity of beliefs as well. Nine hundred distinct Aboriginal groups each possess distinctive myths and cosmogonies, while there are also pan-Australian theological structures and motifs.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“New Guinea is the most linguistically diverse region in the world, with as many as sixty language families and many linguistic isolates. It is thus a window onto the world before strong forces toward linguistic homogenization made themselves felt. The Marind-anim family, who live in the south-central part of the island, use the term déma to refer to their Gods, as well as in a broader adjectival sense to designate whatever is touched by the divine. Déma are known in human as well as animal forms, and are often conceived as ancestors of human clans or of animal species.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“The brother/sister unions treated in chant eleven must also be seen, at least in part, in a theological light. The child of a brother/sister union is a God, akua, because the Gods are a homogeneous set; there are no ‘exogamous’ unions among Them because there is nothing ‘outside’ Them, no ‘exterior’ to which They would bond Themselves. Chant eleven apparently concerns the emergence of this exteriority.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Two concepts belonging to the Māori people of New Zealand have had a significant influence on Western thought, so that they have become familiar terms in English, namely mana and tapu, Anglicized as ‘taboo’. Both of these concepts are broad structuring principles in Polynesian-speaking societies, and were impoverished in their transposition.52 It is interesting to reflect upon the reasons for their Western adoption. Mana is essentially spiritual power or spiritual authority, belonging to things in the natural world or to humans, and which can be broadly or narrowly drawn, while tapu is the state of something being set apart and governed by some specific ritual regulations. These concepts obviously exist in a certain reciprocity: tapu recognizes the presence of mana in something or in someone. There were analogous concepts in Western polytheistic traditions, such as numen in Latin, but of course those were as alien to Westerners by the 19th century as were the exotic peoples of the Pacific. In their appropriated form, these concepts no longer refer to the divine coordinates by which a people locate themselves in the cosmos, but to different flavors of ‘irrationality’.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“This included the use of the planchette, which had been used for centuries in China to channel entire scriptures directly from Gods either belonging to the recognized pantheon or new to it.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“An early, and quite remarkable manifestation of this deviant religiosity, and one which briefly united European revivalist polytheism and the continuous Indigenous traditions of North America, took place long before the American Revolution, when Thomas Morton arrived in New England in 1624 as a partner in a fur trading venture. Morton and thirty men indentured to the company defected and founded an independent colony that sought to live in harmony with the native Algonquian people of the region, the Wampanoag, and conduct the fur trade with them on a radically different basis than the prevailing norms. His colony began to attract further defectors from the harsh Puritan regime, and grew rapidly. In addition to intermarrying with local indigenous people, Morton’s colonists also began supplying them with guns. Morton named his colony, in what is now Quincy, Massachusetts, ‘Merry Mount’, and at its center ceremonially erected an 80-foot tall Maypole topped with deer antlers, reading before it odes he had composed to Hellenic Gods and holding dances around it. The Puritans reported that Morton, in addition to having “set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing about it many days together, inviting the Indian women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking together… and worse practices,” had explicitly “anew revived & celebrated the feasts of the Roman Goddess Flora, or the beastly practices of the mad Bacchanalians.”42 Morton was thus combining rural European folk traditions with the classical pagan culture of which he had learned in his higher education and seeking to emulate, if not wholly integrate, Indigenous practices. Morton’s synthesis thus includes all of the ingredients of later Neo-Paganism of the kind we see in Wicca, including its libertine aspects. After about two years of this, Puritan troops invaded Merry Mount, which they called ‘Mount Dagon’, in reference to the Syrian God whom the Bible speaks of as worshiped by the Israelites’ rivals, the Philistines; it’s not clear whether this was their own coinage, or that of Morton’s colonists. The Puritans apprehended Morton, destroyed the Maypole and scattered the colonists in the settlement, though some were still there and reportedly continuing to engage in pagan worship in 1629, when they were raided again.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“The high value attached to divination of diverse kinds in all of the African Diaspora traditions speaks to the importance of the regulatory function it exercises.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“People who are sympathetic to polytheism, in turn, will often overestimate the importance of icons through a tacit assumption that images are necessary to individuate the Gods, as though everything which is invisible would dissolve into an undifferentiated unity without an image to render it distinct, which is an elementary metaphysical confusion.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Ethnographic research, indeed, has shown that Santería practitioners rarely have images on their altars of the Catholic saints with whom their Orishas have supposedly been syncretized, which places into question whether the relationship between these Gods and the Catholic saints is really to be considered ‘syncretism’ at all.32 The Orishas are represented primarily in Santería practice by the fundamentos, or foundational objects, of the God, a set of items which provide a material basis for the God’s activity in the individual worshiper’s life, which are gifted to the initiate or created by them in the process of their initiation, and the objects on the altar typically function as extensions of this principle, being traditionally images of things associated with the deity, or of Their ideal worshipers. The Catholic saint, in turn, functions simply as another such possession of the Orisha, as Their property rather than an expression of Their identity.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“The bond to corporeality in these traditions is renewed as well by the deification of notable priestesses, priests and rulers, who become aspects of the Gods with whom they have a bond in life. On the other hand, there is a kind of absolute divine ancestrality without reference to historical identity as such, as in Vodou in the pantheon of the Gede (Guede), among whom we find, for example, the first mortal to die, the first to commit murder, and the first to die by violence. Ancestrality thus does not function in these traditions as a form of limitation, as we see instead for example in euhemerizing accounts of polytheist traditions by Christian authors, which reduce Gods to historical figures in order to diminish Them relative to the Christian God.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“The term Loa (Lwa), the Vodou term for their Gods, seems at once to derive from the Yoruba term oluwa, or ‘lord’, and from the French loi, law, a providential semantic convergence, because each Loa is at once a primordial lord of being, and also provides a law, or organizing principle, for the cosmos. The Loa are also ‘ancestors’, because this is how They are taken up into or appropriated by the mortal individual. That is, They are not ‘ancestors’ in the mundane sense, but rather express a sense of ancestrality inseparable from the process by which mortal beings actualize themselves. Experiencing the Gods as ancestors establishes Them within a material continuum which is local and intimate, but also renders Them fully portable, ensuring that They were brought along with the enslaved, within their very bodies, whatever other ties had been broken, and allowing the Gods to form the basis for new family and community structures in their place. Hence in Dahomey, whence the core elements of Vodou theology are derived, there is a hypostasis of the God Legba born with and dying with the individual, a personal Legba.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“All African Traditional Religions were grasped under the category of ‘Satanism’, and the discovery of their practice anywhere in the white settler states of the Americas was viciously punished. As a result, many of the African Diaspora traditions developed within a syncretic sleeve, so to speak, of outwardly Christian practice, which in some cases grew into a genuine fusion. In the Catholic settler states, this involved the identification of African Gods with Catholic saints; in some cases, a creator God from the pantheon would be identified with the Christian God. In Protestant settler states, the form of fusion was more likely to involve the pragmatic use of Christian scripture in magical workings, not unlike the practices of the British ‘cunning folk’ or traditional witches, and indeed there was some contact between these traditions especially in Appalachia. In many cases, a deep fusion also developed between African Diaspora communities and the Indigenous peoples and traditions of the Americas, as Indigenous people welcomed fugitive Africans into their communities. In addition, as these new traditions grew and changed, elements of the modern European occult tradition, as well as 19th century Spiritism, were adopted by many of them and in turn transformed by the African Diaspora traditions in profound ways. It would be no exaggeration to say that no other living traditions have influenced the contemporary Western pagan or polytheist revival more than the African Diaspora traditions, though this is often scarcely acknowledged. Many African Diaspora traditions have also successfully renewed their ties with the continental African traditions from which they originated, spiritually enriching both and helping to incentivize the preservation of both.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“This ballgame is extremely important in the Mayan tradition, and forms of it are found to the north, in the territories of the Aztec empire and in the Caribbean, as well as into North America even as far as Canada, in different forms, but with a similar sacred significance. A form of it known as chunkey was important in what is called the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex in North America, while the modern sport of lacrosse descends from a form of sacred ballgame existing among the Eastern Woodlands and Plains nations.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“There is a ‘Maker’ or ‘Modeler’, a single process or intention, but which is many-sided, as though taking into account that different traditions will accord the dominant role to the Gods they privilege. Moreover the name ‘Heart of the Sky’, designating the divinity taking in certain respects the dominant role in this process, is immediately unpacked, in the execution of this creative intention, into three Thunderbolt Gods, Thunderbolt Hurricane, Newborn Thunderbolt and Sudden Thunderbolt in Tedlock’s translation, who seem to correspond to Gods of the Classic era to whom three pyramids are dedicated at the plaza at Palenque dating from the 7th c. CE, and who are also embodied in the three stones of a traditional Mayan hearth.28 The three Thunderbolt Gods of the Popol Vuh appear to represent an entire class of important formative powers. This collective power in turn approaches the Plumed (or Feathered) Serpent, Q’uq’umatz, who is in occultation, so to speak, as a glittering light within the primordial waters, and They conceive together the desire to make manifest the Plumed Serpent’s illumination in the form of a world, with the guiding intention to bring forth beings who are capable of recognizing the Gods. The demiurgic powers known collectively as the Heart of Sky and the Plumed Serpent arrive at an agreement, with the Plumed Serpent apparently providing the paradigm or model for the cosmogonic work, if we may venture a somewhat Platonizing hermeneutic.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“In the past, their long-ago elders knew them and made them dance. They knew how to imitate their songs and build their spirit houses for the young people who wanted to become shamans. But then those who were born after them began to create the cities. Little by little they stopped hearing these spirits’ words. Then the books made them forgetful, and they finally rejected them. As I have said, Teosi [the Christian God] was jealous of the beauty of the xapiri’s words… Teosi’s words of anger spread everywhere and chased the xapiri’s song from the white elders’ thoughts. Their minds became tangled and confused… Yet the spirits of this distant land are not dead. They still live in the mountains that Omama gave them for houses and they only come down from them for the shamans who are able to see them.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World