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new polytheism is “not simply a matter of pluralism in the social order, anarchy in politics, polyphonic meaning in language”; the gods, for Miller, are informing powers, psychic realities that give shape to social, intellectual, and personal existence.
    Miller disagrees with a number of theologians who espouse monotheism—in particular, H. Richard Niebuhr, who says that the central problem of modern society is that it is polytheistic. Niebuhr, defining gods as value centers, sees modern polytheism as the worship of social gods such as money, power, and sex. Against this social polytheism Niebuhr opposes a radical monotheism that worships only the principle of being.
    Miller’s reply calls for a deeper polytheism. He sees the gods not as value centers but as potencies within the psyche that play out their mythic stories in our daily lives.
    Miller believes that we can experience multiplicity without jeopardizing integration and wholeness. He observes that polytheism includes monotheism, but the reverse does not hold true. For most people, religious practice comes down to a series of consecutive monotheisms, all within a larger polytheistic framework.
    Here Miller is close to the modern Neo-Pagans who devote themselves to one of a number of gods and goddesses or one of a number of traditions, without denying the validity of other gods or traditions. 11
    Miller relies heavily on James Hillman’s essay “Psychology: Monotheistic or Polytheistic.” Hillman said that psychology had long been colored by a theology of monotheism, especially in its view that unity, integration, wholeness, is always the proper goal of psychological development and that fragmentation is always a sign of pathology. Hillman argued that the images of Artemis, Persephone, and Athena collectively formed a richer picture of the feminine than the Virgin Mary. Carrying this idea to the extreme, Hillman suggested that the multitude of tongues in Babel, traditionally interpreted as a “decline,” could also be seen as a true picture of psychic reality. He then argued that some individuals might benefit from a therapy that, at times, led to fragmentation.
    In the end Hillman advocated a “polytheistic psychology” that would allow many possible voices:
    By providing a divine background of personages and powers for each complex, it would find a place for each spark. . . . It would accept the multiplicity of voices, the Babel of anima and animus, without insisting upon unifying them into one figure. . . . 12
    Hillman’s contention that Jung always stressed the self as primary and considered all exploration of archetypes as preliminary to something higher is open to dispute. His views have not been accepted by most Jungians. Still, his question, “If there is only one model of individuation, can there be true individuality?” is close to the Neo-Pagan religious and social critique.
    Miller’s and Hillman’s ideas about polytheism at times seem too much like the liberal notion of pluralism, a kind of competition of factions. Most Neo-Pagans that I know see polytheism not as competitive factions but as facets of a jewel, harmonious but differing. Many Neo-Pagans do, however, see the gods in Jungian terms. The late Gwydion Pendderwen, one of the best-known bards in the Craft, told me, “The gods are really the components of our psyches. We are the gods, in the sense that we, as the sum total of human beings, are the sum of the gods. And Pagans do not wish to be pinned down to a specific act of consciousness. They keep an open ticket.”
    Miller writes that the task at hand is to incarnate the gods, to “become aware of their presence, acknowledge and celebrate their forms.” 13 These gods, he observes, are worlds of meaning; they are the comings and goings, the births and deaths within our lives. They are generally unrecognized because our culture is not in harmony with them.
    He notes that