The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses

Polytheism Is Not Pluralism but the Recovery of Archetypal Ground Beneath Western Theology

Miller’s central argument is routinely misread as a call for cultural pluralism dressed in mythological costume. It is nothing of the sort. The book insists, with increasing force across its five chapters, that social plurality, moral relativism, and role fragmentation are symptoms of something “deeper and more fundamental” — the reemergence of the Gods and Goddesses as autonomous structures of meaning. The distinction matters enormously. Pluralism is a sociological observation; polytheism, as Miller deploys it, is an ontological claim about the psyche’s architecture. Drawing on Paul Tillich’s assertion that “polytheism is a qualitative and not a quantitative concept,” Miller argues that each God or Goddess is a potency, a structure of reality “in whose world of meaning and being I am constantly living, or rather, being lived.” This is not metaphor. It is the claim that the stories of Prometheus, Hephaestus, and Asclepius do not merely illustrate technological civilization — they are the archetypal patterns through which technology plays itself out. The monotheistic habit of reducing multiplicity to a question of the One and the Many is precisely the trap Miller wants to spring. His polytheism refuses the game entirely: the Gods contend, they do not resolve.

Western Theology Is Greek Polytheism Under Erasure

The book’s most provocative intellectual contribution is its systematic reading of Christian doctrine as repressed Greek mythology. Miller maps the correspondences with ruthless specificity: Trinitarian theology recapitulates Hesiod’s generational theogony from Ouranos to Zeus; ransom theories of the Atonement replay the negotiations between Zeus and Prometheus; sacramental theology shadows the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone; eschatology belongs to Hermes the psychopomp; soteriology is Dionysus, “the archetype of indestructible life” whose logic is always death and resurrection. Miller is explicit that this is not allegory, not typology, not genetic history. The task is to “rediscover the stories of the Gods and Goddesses, the theology of the people” — to recover the felt, polyvalent religious experience that systematic theology drained into abstraction. This operation parallels what James Hillman performs in psychology: where Hillman shows that the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not reducible to biographical data, Miller shows that the doctrines of the Church are not reducible to their monotheistic self-presentation. Both moves expose a multiplicity that monotheistic consciousness must repress in order to maintain its coherence. The radical implication is that the “death of God” announced by Nietzsche was not the death of the divine but the collapse of a repressive structure that had been holding the pantheon in bondage.

Corbin’s Preface Transforms the Book from Cultural Critique into Metaphysical Argument

The 1981 Spring Publications edition includes Henry Corbin’s prefatory letter, which elevates Miller’s argument to a plane Miller himself only gestures toward. Corbin identifies the core catastrophe: monotheism confuses the uniqueness of Divinity (Theotês) with a singular God (theos), just as metaphysics confuses Being (Esse) with a supreme being (ens supremum). This confusion is self-destroying — “monotheism perishes in its triumph” — because it erects an idol at the precise point where it claims to denounce idolatry. Corbin’s counter-formulation is devastating: Non Deus nisi Dii — “There is no God without gods.” The unity of Divinity entails and conditions the plurality of theophanic forms. Corbin’s “mystical kathenotheism,” drawn from Proclus, Sohrawardi, and Ibn ‘Arabi, converges with Miller’s polytheism while providing it with the rigorous ontological scaffolding it otherwise lacks. Where Miller argues culturally and psychologically, Corbin argues from the structure of Being itself. The convergence is startling: a Protestant theologian of culture and an Islamicist scholar of the mundus imaginalis arrive at the same conclusion from opposite directions. This convergence also illuminates why Hillman’s appendix essay — “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic?” — belongs in the volume. Hillman supplies the psychological axis: the self-archetype, when described solely through senex images of integration and wholeness, becomes a monotheistic idol within psychology, suppressing the psyche’s inherent polytheism. Together, the three voices — Miller, Corbin, Hillman — form a triangulation: cultural theology, metaphysical ontology, archetypal psychology, each exposing from its own angle the same structural failure of monotheistic consciousness.

The Book’s Form Enacts Its Thesis

Miller’s fifth chapter — “Fifty-One Theses and Some Notes” — is not a conclusion but a deliberate explosion. He names this openly: “instead of coming to a focus, the various lines of thinking in the book at this point explode, fly into many pieces, each one of which is the center of a potential world of meaning.” The theses are aphoristic, disjunctive, presented in what the Greeks called a “rag bag.” This structural choice is the book’s most honest moment. A polytheistic argument that resolved into synthesis would betray itself. Miller maps each major strand of twentieth-century theology — Barth’s theology of the word, Tillich’s theology of culture, Bloch’s theology of hope, Moltmann’s political theology, Altizer’s radical theology — onto specific divine figures, showing how each theological program is already animated by a particular God or Goddess. Barth’s word-theology operates in the manner of Hermes the trickster; Tillich’s culture-theology in the manner of Dionysus whose boundary situation is maintained through drunken ego-transcendence; feminist theology in the manner of all the Goddesses, “the thousand daughters of Oceanus and Tethys.” These are not ornamental associations. They are diagnostic claims: each theology is a monotheism that has forgotten which God possesses it.

What This Book Uniquely Illuminates

For anyone entering depth psychology through Hillman’s archetypal psychology, Miller’s New Polytheism provides what Hillman’s own work often assumes but never systematically argues: the theological and cultural genealogy of polytheistic consciousness. Hillman “polytheizes” psychology; Miller shows that the same operation must be performed on theology, philosophy, and cultural self-understanding simultaneously. Where Jung’s Answer to Job interrogates the monotheistic God-image from within the psyche, and where Corbin’s work on ta’wil reveals the hermeneutics of theophanic multiplicity in Islamic mysticism, Miller occupies the specific ground of Western Christian theology and demonstrates that it was always already polytheistic — that its abstract doctrines are the bleached bones of living mythic stories. The book’s insistence that “keeping it all apart” is not pathology but liberation remains its most therapeutically potent claim, a direct counter to every integrative ideology — psychological, political, spiritual — that insists on premature unity as the price of meaning.