Shout Out: Practical Polytheism

I don't write much about religion because like magic I think that the more you try to clearly define everything the less interesting it becomes. There should be ambiguity and unfamiliarity about it in order to keep it somewhat mysterious. Only the priests and religious leaders understand all the intricate rituals necessary to appease or ask favours from the gods, and even they don't always get it right.

But I found this series of articles about Polytheistic religions really interesting. It mostly explains things through examples of the ancient Roman and Greek religions but I'm sure a lot of it could apply to religions from other eras. Personally I like to make Astrology an important aspect of the religion because ancient peoples were fascinated with the motions of the planets and stars and according to writers like Graham Hancock monuments like the Pyramids or Ankor Watt were built on top of even older sites that were intended to mirror or help track what could be seen in the night sky.

Practical Polytheism 1: Knowledge

Practical Polytheism 3: Practice

Practical Polytheism 2: Polling the Gods

Practical Polytheism 4: Little Gods and Big People

The articles go into quite a bit of depth and I highly recommend you read them if you want inspiration for adding realistic Polytheism to your setting.

But if you want a quick overview of the writer's conclusions he provides the summary which I'm quoting here:

• Polytheistic religion is less about ethics or worldview and more about achieving practical results, by venerating, pleasing or appeasing the right gods.
• Because many gods can produce practical results for you – both good and bad! – you cannot pick and choose, but must venerate many of the relevant gods.
• A society learns how to do this by doing: successful practices are codified into tradition and repeated, creating a body of knowledge about the gods which is carried on through generations by tradition.

• Rituals, including sacrifices, vows and offerings, in polytheistic religions are intended to produce concrete, specific, and usually earthly results for the participants or their broader community.
• They do this through the mechanism of do ut des, whereby the individual or community offers something (sacrifice, votive, etc) to the god in exchange for the given result.
• The god can either accept that bargain (the ritual succeeds) or refuse it (the ritual fails). The humans may impose qualifications and legalism on the bargain, but of course, the god may also just refuse.
• Finally, the rituals are performed with exactness, focusing on orthopraxy – correct ritual practice. Failure to perform any element of the ritual correctly will likely cause the ritual to fail.

• Gods in a polytheistic system are often immanent and present in human society; they are (powerful, mysterious and sometimes difficult) members of the community.
• Consequently, they expect to be consulted for their opinion on important matters, but they can also be a source of good information on matters both large and important, or small and personal.
• This process is an act of communication, not passive observation: the gods can refuse to answer, or send conflicting signals or even lie, if it suits their ends, although for the most part, so long as the traditional forms are followed, the god consulted will render their advice faithfully.
• There is a fantastic diversity of methods in consulting the gods. We’ve left out entire categories here – mostly oracular statements – but each culture has its own systems.
• Because these systems of religious practice are based on knowledge and on repeating what works, they are readily capable of borrowing gods and rituals from foreign cultures which seem to work, including (but certainly not limited to) divination practices.

And that finally gets us to the biggest take-away of this series, which is that these systems make a very real sort of sense. The common temptation as moderns reading history is to assume that everyone in the past was just stupid (as if we don’t believe similarly ridiculous things!) or that all of the ‘smart’ ones (and so often ‘smart’ is unthinkingly equated with ‘rich elites’) viewed this all cynically. As I have said before, and I will say again, it is generally safe to assume that people in the past believed their own religion.