A question asked in my group, the Asatru Facebook Forum: Which gods are the actual gods and which ones were just made up over the years?
My answer:
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I have heard hard polytheists come up with all sorts of words to distinguish their gods from Jungian archetypes. The gods, they say, are "real", "literal", "individual", "distinct", and "separate"; they are "persons", "beings", "entities", or "agents". The archetypes, it is implied, are none of these things.
I think much of this is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the archetypes. In the next four posts, I want to talk about four terms that polytheists use to distinguish gods from archetypes: "real", "literal", "separate", and "agents".
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