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course, religion as many people in our society know it. It is a visionary style of knowledge, not a theological one; its proper language is myth and ritual; its foundation is rapture, not faith and doctrine; and its experience of nature is one of living communion. 9
    Our idea of idolatry is therefore a kind of racist perception grounded in ignorance. For Roszak, if there is any idolatry, it exists in our society, where artificiality is extolled and religion viewed as something apart from nature, supernatural. Roszak has called the modern view “the religion of the single vision.”
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    Much of the theoretical basis for a modern defense of polytheism comes from Jungian psychologists, who have long argued that the gods and goddesses of myth, legend, and fairy tale represent archetypes, real potencies and potentialities deep within the psyche, which, when allowed to flower, permit us to be more fully human. These archetypes must be approached and ultimately reckoned with if we are to experience the riches we have repressed. Most Jungians argue that the task is to unite these potentialities into a symphonic whole. One unorthodox Jungian, James Hillman, has argued for a “polytheistic psychology” that gives reign to various parts of the self, not always leading to integration and wholeness.
    In theological circles an early champion of a new polytheism in the 1970s was David Miller. Miller relies heavily on Jungian ideas. For him, polytheism is the rediscovery of gods and goddesses as archetypal forces in our lives. Miller’s arguments, set forth in The New Polytheism, are similar to the views of many Neo-Pagans. Yet at the time of publication Miller was apparently unaware of the widespread emergence of Neo-Pagan groups. At the time he was a professor of religion at Syracuse University and reported that his students had become deeply drawn to the Greek myths, at the same time that theologians and psychologists were reappraising the idea of polytheism. Theologian William Hamilton, for one, had said at a conference that students are now seeking access to all the gods, “eastern and western, primitive and modern, heretical and orthodox, mad and sane.” These gods are “not to be believed in or trusted, but to be used to give shape to an increasingly complex and variegated experience of life.” Hamilton added, “The revolution does not look like monotheism, Christian or post-Christian. What it looks like is polytheism.” This remark was the beginning of Miller’s journey.
    By the end of it Miller had come to believe that the much talked of “death of God” was really the death of the one-dimensional “monotheistic” thinking that had dominated Western culture from top to bottom, influencing not only its religion but its psychology and politics as well. Polytheism, by contrast, was a view that allowed multiple dimensions of reality.
    Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation . . . characterized by plurality. . . . Socially understood, polytheism is eternally in unresolvable conflict with social monotheism, which in its worst form is fascism and in its less destructive forms is imperialism, capitalism, feudalism and monarchy. . . . Polytheism is not only a social reality ; it is also a philosophical condition. It is that reality experienced by men and women when Truth with a capital “T” cannot be articulated reflectively according to a single grammar, a single logic, or a single symbol system. 10
    Far from being merely a religious belief, polytheism, for Miller, is an attitude that allows one to affirm “the radical plurality of the self.” In psychology, for example, it would allow one to discover the various sides of one’s personality. Beyond that, it becomes a world view that allows for complexity, multiple meanings, and ambiguities. Like Roszak’s “Old Gnosis,” it is at home with metaphors and myths. Yet this