Some questions I have for modern polytheists
I grew up in a monotheistic tradition and have only met two polytheists in my life that I know of, a Hellenist and a Heathen. I never got to know much about their beliefs or how they came to hold them, but it's something I've become more interested in as I've learned about all of the traditional religions that were suppressed and displaced by the expansion of the empires of monotheistic religions. It has been particularly infuriating to learn about how the Spanish demolished temples all over the Central and South American civilizations and built cathedrals right on their foundations. Imagine seeing those temples! Learning about the forced Christianization of these and other cultures all over the Americas, and the struggles of those cultures to maintain their autonomy, their identity and, in various ways and to varying degrees, their own spiritual traditions, gave me a new appreciation for these modern pagan reconstructionist movements. I like knowing that these pre-Christian traditions are being continued and I think there's a lot to be learned from them. Anyway that's why I'm here. Beyond reconstructionism, I have become curious about polytheist thought in general and have some questions about it.
- How are the gods related to one another across pantheons? My understanding is that most polytheists don't hold that only the gods of a certain pantheon are real, and many worship gods from more than one. Within their respective traditions, each of these gods has some kind of canonical(ish) relationship to each other. But what kind of relationship does Loki have to, say, Fortuna? And what kind of relationship do Loki and Fortuna have to the God of Abraham?
- Where are the gods who are no longer worshiped? The Taino (exonym) people of the Greater Antilles and northern Lesser Antilles worshiped Atabey and Yucahu, the zemis (spirits) of the moon and of cassava respectively. As far as I know, while there is a movement to revive Taino culture in certain parts of Puerto Rico, there is nobody worshipping Atabey and Yucahu today. Where are they now? Are they just off doing something else?
- If you are not a henotheist (beleiving in multiple gods, but one ultimate or transcendent God), do you believe in any kind of cosmic unifying principle or creative force, like the Dao? Is it more of a Neoplatonic thing? I'm sure there are many different views on metaphysics and cosmology on this sub, I just want to get a sense of how polytheists deal with questions of unity in multiplicity.
- What are the gods like? I know that the answer is that they're like all sorts of things because there's a lot of them and they're very different from one another. What I mean by my question is, do their moods and motivations change over time? Do their relationships with one another change with those of their worshippers? Are there power struggles among them as there are among us? Growing up in a monotheist tradition, I was always taught that there was a battle going on between God and his angels and Satan and his demons, and that this battle was taking place all over the world. God was described as perfect in every way, all-powerful, all-knowing and all-loving. As I understand it most of the gods believed in by polytheists aren't like this and are in many ways more like us.
- If you believe in an afterlife or reincarnation, what, if anything, does your belief in gods have to do with it? An overlapping domain of various dieties and spirits is death. Some are said to guide souls to the next world after death, and others are said to judge souls and decide which realm they will be sent to next, though not every tradition holds such a belief. Monotheistic traditions make this easy by simply declaring every other god and every other cosmology false, but acknowleding gods from multiple traditions would sort of complicate only acknowledging one traditional explanation of the afterlife so I imagine a lot of modern polytheists probably aren't mythic literalists about this.