"Their names were foreign to her, Vishnu and Heimdal male, Kwan Yin and Isis female."
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, p. 371.
We recognize the names, having read about mythologies. In addition, I meditate in a room with an image of Kwan Yin on the wall.
There are two routes from polytheism to monotheism:
prophetic denunciation of the many gods as false/nonexistent or even demonic;
Hindu incorporation of all gods as forms/aspects/names of a single reality - "Truth is one; sages call it by different names." See here.
We do not expect profundity when we analyze Poul Anderson but we invariably find it.
13 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I wonder why the Zacharians favored personal names taken from the names of gods. Are there really ENOUGH names of that sort for several thousand persons (or how many Zacharians there were)?
And I agree with the Jewish prophets in their attacks on the pagan gods as being either false or non-existent. And I think you "pass over" too quickly how most ordinary, every day Hindus pay little or no attention to the more philosophical arguments that all gods are merely forms/aspects/names of a single reality. I suspect such Hindus think of "gods" like Vishnu and Ganesh as the names of different gods, not "aspects" of one reality. Hinduism is actually a morphing together of several different pagan religions.
I consider Hinduism the last surviving REAL and major pagan religion. The current attempts by some neo-pagans to revive actual worship of Scandinavian or Celtic pagan gods strikes me as pitiful and unconvincing.
Sean
Sean,
I think that there are more than enough divine names to go around!
I agree that Hinduism is diverse coexisting religions and philosophies but see nothing wrong with that. A Hindu philosopher would say that the worshiper of a particular god is discerning the divine as it manifests through his particular deity and that all our concepts are inadequate.
Shinto is another surviving national polytheism.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I'm still rather dubious of the adequacy of Zacharian naming conventions!
I find philosophical attempts at rationalizing Hindu paganism unconvincing largely because I think most ordinary Hindus pay no attention to such things.
I forgot about Shintoism. But it's even more primitive than Hinduism! And "popularized" forms of Buddhism got mixed into it. And I wonder how REAL it is to most Japanese.
Sean
Sean,
But Hindus can ignore philosophy. That's alright.
Japanese can honor gods and Buddhas. No conflict.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
No, I meant I wondered how real belief in their Sun Goddess and kamis are to most Japanese.
And I continue to regard Hinduism as merely another pagan religion, never mind the attempts at fine spun theorizing by some Hindu philosophers.
Sean
"Real" means different things to different religions, and different historical periods.
I'm quite sure that until historically very recently most Japanese believed in the kami (and Great Kami) implicitly -- but this is not the same as "believing" in the Christian deity.
It's more like acknowledging the existence of atoms. You know they're there, thought usually you can't see them, but you accept them as an underlying reality and causative agent.
You can (and in some circumstances) really need to interact with the kami, but they don't demand the sort of personal -commitment- the Abrahamic system does.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I may have been overthinking the matter of how "real" Amaterasu and the kamis were to most Japanese. I was wondering if they thought of Amaterasu et al the way Jews and Christians think of God.
Sean
No, the conceptual relationship was quite different from the one in the Abrahamic religions. Amaterasu has a specific relationship with people -- more concretely, with the people of Japan through her descendants, the Yamato dynasty -- but it's not quite the same. The way you deal with the Ghost Fox would be completely different.
Kami are more like personified forces of nature; they're part of the environment. They're extremely -particular-.
Shintoism "feels" old because it -is- old. It's a hunter-gatherer/neolithic religion in origin, that got developed over the many, many centuries of its existence, but was never supplanted or completely transformed.
Even less so than Hinduism, which is a Bronze Age faith in origin -- it's a direct derivation of the religion of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, the last one standing.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I certainly bow to your superior knowledge of Shintoism! Yes, the kamis are nothing nothing like how Christian regard the angels, spiritual beings directly created by God who are not part of any kind of physical environment.
Shintoism had its origins in hunter/gatherer societies of the New Stone Age. Hinduism came largely from Bronze Age proto-Indo-Europeans. Check!
Sean
Sean,
A Jesuit I knew did not believe in angels or demons. He thought that Biblical references to "angels" just meant that God was present. God was imagined as a king, therefore with a court, therefore with courtiers.
Paul.
Paul: I've met similar attitudes, but I've always found them puzzling. If you believe in an omnipotent Creator, why not other beings (besides humans) created by that God?
It seems to be a form of intellectual Puritanism to me.
Besides which, if you reject Biblical references to angels (which are quite unambiguous), why accept those to God or the nature of the Trinity?
It's swallowing a camel and straining at a gnat, frankly.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Here, regretfully, your Jesuit friend is making an astonishing error for a Catholic. It is DEFINED Catholic doctrine, based on Scripture and Tradition, that the angels are real non corporeal beings.
Mr. Stirling, I agree and I share your puzzlement over why some who believe in God object to the angels. If God is omnipotent He certainly could create angels! And some of those angels fell and became demons.
Sean
Sean,
Was this doctrine defined by an Ecumenical Council or by a Pope ex cathedra?
Paul.
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