The Deific Shuffle: Evolution from Animism to Polytheism

As promised, we are moving on with Polytheism. Polytheism is the child of Animism to say it in the simplest way possible. 

Animism focuses on the spirit(s) that reside in all things. Animism also had an understanding that all things were connected so there is usually an idea of a “greater spirit” that all individual spirits come from. You can look back at a watered-down version of this in my Foundations series. But in general, an oak tree had a spirit and it was the spirit of that specific tree. Then there was also the Spirit of the Oak which was a presiding spirit over that species of trees. That’s the basics.

In Polytheism, the “smaller” spirits made way for the “bigger” spirits. So instead of focusing on the individual tree spirits, the focus would just be on the larger Spirit of the Oak. This gave rise to spirits of a more intangible origin. Meaning the creation of deities and their duties.

I am planning a full series to discuss spirits so I won’t go too deep down the rabbit hole here. But deities are personifications of things we are trying to understand about the world around us. Yes, there are different stories and mythologies about them. Those are stories that are meant to impart a lesson like fables. The creation of deities comes from our minds. They are essentially “smaller” spirits with big roles to play. 

Pan for example is the Satyr Deity of the Forests and Nature. So it is a big role for a single being to preside over. I say “smaller” spirit because Pan would not exist if not for us creating him from an idea. But the forests and nature would still exist including a single Oak tree. None of this smaller/bigger talk is meant to denote the quality of their existence. It is about simplification and complexity. An individual tree spirit would be simpler than the oversoul of that species but still more complex because of its individuality than a human-created being designed to “shepherd” or care take the entire forest.

Polytheism is based on ideas rather than the tangible physical world. As such, Animism could incorporate polytheistic ideas into practice. Polytheistic Animism recognizes these deific beings as helpful to the betterment of mankind. In some ways, they won’t have individual names but rather classifications such as the Fae of Ireland, the Daemons of Greece, or the Hindu Devas (but this is tied to monotheism rather than polytheism explained in the next post). This is a way to say there are helping or guiding spirits and you could be visited by a Fae of Harvest and they could help you develop new farming techniques to increase the yield of crops. Or there could be a Deva of Inspiration visiting you to help with creative works. The spirits wouldn’t have individualized names but more titles. Which meant any spirit in those classes could carry those energies.

Worship, tributes, offerings, etc. were then implemented by polytheistic practices as a way to appease, negotiate, or purchase the services of spirits. This is where it started to diverge from ancient animism into its own thing. The idea of exchange always existed but the split came with the dedication of giving up one’s bounty to the spirits. Before, showing thanks was as simple as a thank you and moving on. Remember when I talked about Consciousness and the bartering that is done behind the scenes between your astral self and the astral identity of nature? Saying thank you was enough to understand that something was taken in exchange for what was needed. 

In polytheism, the symbolic physical expression became more important. It wasn’t considered by people to be enough to just understand energetically that an exchange had happened. People began to expect community members to honor agreements by physically showing a tithe of thankfulness. That mindset of tithing continued much later into the development and growth of religion. Polytheism itself was not religious though. It was a personal and communal spiritual path that emphasized personified ideas as spirits rather than the spirits of tangible things. 

What followed Polytheism was the rise of Pantheons. Pantheons would be the precursor to the birth of religion. Pantheons were an evolved branch of Polytheism where specific spirits became venerated. What I mean by that is spirits began having names and these names locked these spirits into specific roles.

I talked about Pan before. Pan is a result of Pantheons and not just because his name is in the word. 

The way it worked was that people began to have mini-shrines or altars in their homes. Even in nomadic lifestyles because all of this started before civilization began. In the privacy of their homes, people would make offerings or allegiances with spirits they believed looked out for their family and their home. To make things simpler, people would name their spirits. 

If a family with a named household spirit would experience abundance and blessings more than others in the community then they would get asked who were their spirits. Others in the community would then call out to that spirit by name and venerate them as well hoping for the same results the previous family received. If the livelihood of the new venerators improved then others would adopt that spirit into their household as well. If a spirit gained the support of a community it would be called a god or goddess. Then the entire community would dedicate something to that spirit as a kind of patron of the whole.

Again, at this time spirits were still considered the bearers of an idea. So after some time, a community could have multiple patron gods or goddesses each representing a different idea such as harvests, good health, travel, etc. The more this grew the more people started searching for the names of “bigger deities” that presided over things not a part of personal home life. Pan again is an example of this as a god of Nature. 

The popularity of deities grew and waned depending on the results. This gave rise to the stories of wars between the gods. If one god fell out of favor of the people while a new god was rising in popularity the story would say the new god fought the old and took their place. But the survival of a god depended on whether they completely fell out of favor or if there were still some who clung to them, usually the original families. The god, in this way, could always rise again to reclaim their seat of prominence in the community. It was still a very results-driven practice versus faith-based. 

This did lead to worship and piety though. And at this time civilization began to form. Pantheons would be at the center of most civilized areas. A pantheon is just a grouping of highly venerated gods. There could be one or multiple pantheons. The Norse, as I mentioned before, had many pantheons that warred with each other constantly according to the stories. Most notably the Aesir vs. the Vanir.

Pantheons gave rise to governing structures as simple settlements grew into cities. The more successful a settlement became the more popular their gods became. More people would migrate to the settlement and offer their petitions to the gods of that area. The populations would swell and a city would be built at the site. The first “governing” bodies would be the people who dedicated their lives to be intermediaries between the gods and the people, Priests and Priestesses. It was more of a loose governing authority where the priesthoods would help discern the “will of the gods” through reading signs and omens. Thus grew divinatory practices. 

Historians would count these as “religions” but I disagree. Pantheons did not have a set of rules or doctrines to follow. If anyone had those in Pantheons, it would have been the priesthoods, but those would have been specific only to them, not the common people. Common people of a Pantheon society could freely choose which gods they would go to for assistance. They would make their petition and be done with it. If they got the results they wanted they would offer thanks. If they did not they would either believe they did not have favor with that god or they had done something to anger them. They would then go to another god and seek their assistance instead. 

Most of the time, people weren’t going to the gods of the city with all of their problems though. They would go for big problems on a grand scale. They still had their household gods for more personal issues.

Religion did come into play much later after it was formed. But religion did not start with Polytheism. It started with Monotheism which is the next post. Religion in Polytheism though was used by the rise of politics and political figures. This is where history begins to get a little tricky because we like to think that kings, pharaohs, emperors, and such were hand-in-hand with the gods and pantheons. Pantheons and gods were around before kingships formed. Cities formed around the people who petitioned these gods. With the rise of religion came the idea of control. That idea led to kingdoms, empires, etc. The political leaders would then adopt a chosen god or pantheon as their patron and then expect everyone in their domain to venerate those specific gods. 

While Animism managed to survive through the ages, polytheism has waned. There are still polytheistic practices today and the use of Pantheons. It is just not as grandiose as before. It has returned to a more personal level but has crossed into an employer/employee kind of relationship for most people. Modern Pantheons also borrow from religion in the way that gods are given an air of sovereignty and spoken of as supreme beings that control all. If you go back to my Foundations series I spoke of Ego and the Shadow and how people like to shift blame from themselves to something other. Modern Pantheons exhibit unhealthy behavior a lot. 

For example, I was speaking with someone once who said they worked with Hecate. Cool, I like Hecate, I thought. They then proceeded to say, “Yeah she gifted me with her most powerful curse to use on my enemies.”

After I stopped laughing I said, “Whoa whoa whoa…Hecate doesn’t make curses. None of the gods do that.”

“YES THEY DO! WHERE DO YOU THINK WE GOT THEM FROM TO BEGIN WITH?!”

“Us. We create curses and blessings. You trying to tie it to Hecate is telling me you don’t work with her, you are “working” her. You are using her energy as a battery for your desires and slapping her name on it shifts the blame of the results from you to her.” 

It is because of examples like that that we have such fearmongering in society today around spirits and spiritual beings. Could people, at the height of Pantheons, go to a god and say, “I have an enemy please help me with the situation?” Yes, of course. But the person making such a petition would own up to it by saying they called on this god or goddess for assistance. Today’s standards are a lot more loose and part of that is because of media portrayals of gods. 

Ultimately the long and short of it is Polytheism rose from Animism as the creation and acceptance of deities emerged. From Polytheism came Pantheons and communal growth around those Pantheons. This led to cities forming with the gods at the center uniting the people of those communities. Religion formed and the gods were used for political gain. 

What Polytheism and Pantheons contributed to the development of spiritual practices was the act of Storytelling. Storytelling was used long before this but there is a major difference in the storytelling of Animism vs. the storytelling of Polytheism and Pantheons. As a tool, Animistic people would use storytelling to explain experiences and visions they would receive from their work with the spiritual realms. An Animistic leader of a community would use their connection to the spirits to receive visions that would explain how certain plants when combined could help to treat an illness that threatened the community. Usually, the stories would be elaborate and heavily symbolic but yet they held an innate sense of truth. If not we would not have survived and thrived as a species. 

Animistic communities are not faith-based but results-based. The more stories the spiritual leaders brought to the people that were viable and produced results resulted in the spiritual leader being more trusted and respected. As such, a community would or could have multiple spiritual leaders as opposed to a singular point of contact. This was because one spiritual leader would be considered more gifted in one aspect of communal life while another would be more skilled in other ways. For example, the main leader for the healing of illnesses would not be the same leader who instructed the community to pick up and move to a new location. They would fill different archetypes. A healer archetype could help treat illnesses. A traveler or adventurer archetype would be in communication with the land and know when to move for resource depletion or weather changes. The way the leaders would receive this information would be through trance-like practices and then relay the experiences in story form. Think of the dream Pocahontas has at the beginning of the Disney animated movie.

All of the stories from these times were passed down in heritage to the community as it continued to thrive. And later became some of the basis of Polytheistic and Pantheistic stories. These stories differed from Animistic because spirits were being named and then venerated. This caused stories of heroes and triumph. Victory and conquest. Explanation of the human condition. Storytelling began to move from a results-driven mentality into a type of faith basis but results were still very important. If the results stopped being positive the deity in charge of that aspect of life would fall out of favor. Also, instead of spiritual leaders being considered the ones to go to the spirits for intervention, intercessors essentially, everyone became capable of offering prayers, offerings, petitions, etc. to whichever deity they chose or venerated. The stories then became less “spirit messages” and more explanations of why a deity was in favor or why they were not. 

It began the idea of a dichotomy between different spirits and would explain why this being and that being would be enemies to each other. And the people who venerated one being would be opposed to the people who worshipped the other. Athena and Athens vs. Ares and Sparta are a prime example of how the stories of the two gods reflected in how the people of the two communities viewed each other. This started to create schisms in communities and lost the respect of individualized specialties. The heroes and conquest-style stories gave rise to the Age of Mythology. If a deity lost favor the stories told of them would be another deity stepping in to supplant their authority as a hero. But also, human heroes would begin to rise in these stories as battling with deities that had lost favor as a way for humanity to be “independent of the gods’ control.” That relates to my earlier example of Hecate and curses. Because that is a new paradigm of storytelling conventions that first started in this age. 

This type of storytelling gave rise to polarity and duality. It also began to shape societal structures and narrative norms. In a community setting every individual was responsible for the safety and security of the community through unique contributions. With the rise of Polytheism and Pantheons, community mentality shifted to societal mentality. This meant the installation of governing structures, classism, and the creation of the concept of gender. Gender is not a duality by nature but more of a broad spectrum. Yet with the storytelling of this age, men and women became more divided in what roles they were expected to fulfill to maintain the stability of their society. Societies began to rise around these stories and while war was nothing new, it began to promote violence between people with different ideals. 

Again Athens and Sparta are a prime example of this while the Africa Story Circle I previously discussed is the perfect example of the opposite. Athens and Sparta fought the Peloponnesian War because the two powers just didn’t agree on anything. They differed in ideologies, in governing, in which deities were venerated, etc. The Delian League of Athens and their control of the Mediterranean did not help and when an Athens-allied city thwarted an invasion from a Spartan ally the war was formally declared. The thing is, both sides were constantly bickering and boasting of their victories. When the scale of balance shifted in favor of one party more than the other, the latter acted out with major hostility. It could be equated to children squabbling over who gets to play the cop and who gets the play the robber in a playground game. Just much MUCH higher stakes but the conflicts between the city-states were reflected in the stories told of Athena and Ares. In this way, you can even say that the use of Storytelling began its perversion around this time becoming corrupted from something to benefit people into propaganda to inspire dissent, anger, hatred, etc. 

In stark contrast, during the African Story Circle, I attended every different person had a fair and equal voice. The participants recited their different stories, folk tales, songs, etc. without fearing judgment or rebuttal from someone of a different tribe or community. The stories were treated as something sacred and meaningful. It would be more appropriate to consider hearing the stories as something of receiving a blessing that all could benefit from despite any opposition the different groups might harbor towards each other. The stories were meant to inspire growth and creation rather than destruction and war. 

The Polytheistic and Pantheistic usage of storytelling changed much earlier than the Athens/Spartan conflict. And it gave rise to Monotheism and Religion. But that is the topic of the next post. 

Hopefully, this was a much easier post to read than the last two. The next post will go into Monotheism and the rise of religion. This will also help to understand how Animism, Polytheism, and Pantheons are not inherently Religions but slowly began to exhibit traits of Religion.

Until then, thank you for reading. I wish nothing but blessings upon you. Now go forth and bless others as well.