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 Some Thoughts on a Pagan Catechism by Ezra Pound

“Think what god it may be.”

According to American poet and critic Ezra Pound (1885-1972), this is what you should do when encountering a god.

Published at the very end of the First World War, in 1918, Religio, or the Child's Guide to Knowledge is a curious work, a kind of pagan catechism: variously flippant, obtuse, and profound.

Do we know the number of the gods? he asks, and answers: It would be rash to say that we do. [One] should be content with a reasonable number.

Pagan for more than five decades now myself, I would still be hard put to come up with a better answer.

One phrase from Religio has haunted me for years.

How should one perceive a god, by his name?

It is better to perceive a god by form, or by the sense of knowledge, and after perceiving him thus, to consider his name or to “think what god it may be.”

“Think what god it may be.” For all its sense of playfulness, Pound here touches upon the warm, beating heart of polytheist experience. When encountering the divine, the monotheist has no need to wonder Who; but the pagan—the thinking pagan, at least—always must. Which god, among all the Many, might this one be?

“Think what god it may be.” Pound cites the phrase in quotation marks: is it really a quotation, or just meant to present as one? Certainly, it bears the hallmark of being the words of some venerable Greek or Roman author, wise in the ways of the gods: Cicero, perhaps, or Homer. Certainly it evinces a depth of understanding beyond what we would expect from irascible old Ezra Pound, Fascist sympathizer and anti-Semite that he was.

“The disunity of the monotheisms is proof of polytheism.”

Bruner Soderberg

It's a Golden Age of polytheist theology, and I'm very much looking forward to reading Gus diZerega's God Is Dead, Long Live the Gods: A Case for Polytheism. If what I've seen of his work in the past is anything to go by, I'm expecting a crisply-expressed, thought-provoking argument.

But first I've got a question: In order to make a credible intellectual case for polytheism, do we really need to start with a deconstruction of monotheism? In order to prove polytheism coherent, must one first prove monotheism incoherent?

Here's the Table of Contents:

Introduction 1

Polytheistic “Monotheism” 9

How “Monotheism” Dissolved into Polytheism 31

The Incoherence of Monotheism 51

Science, Monotheism, and the Death of the World 75

Polytheistic Experiences 99

Science and the Spirit 123

The Living World: From the Many, One 147

The Living World: Mind and Culture 167

The Case for Polytheism 189

Bibliography 211

If my math is accurate (never a good assumption), to judge from what we see here, nearly half of the book—half!—is devoted to discussing monotheism, and—as I gather from the “See inside” extracts—Abrahamic monotheism in particular. (There are, of course, other kinds.)

OK, well. The sons (I use the term advisedly) of Abraham have been a major force in Western religion for the last 1500+ years or so, and most modern pagans (in the West, anyway) have grown up in an intellectual environment shaped by, in particular, the Christianities.

Still, it would seem to me that if polytheist modalities of thought have any validity, they should surely be able to stand on their own two (or however many) hooves. On current evidence (such as it is), polytheist worldviews would seem to have got along just fine on their own recognizance for oh, say about fifty thousand years or so. Historically speaking—for all their latter-day success—the Abraham religions are an aberration, a blip. Given this fact, do we really need to set about proving polytheism by first disproving monotheism? Why must monotheism be our point of departure? Aren't we tired of talking about monotheism yet? I, for one, sure am tired of hearing about it.

So, the cat died.

Me, I'm not an Afterlife person. I think that when the breath is gone, we go back into the grand dance of everything, the eternal sabbat of the atoms. And this seems to me both beautiful and good.

But as I move through a house newly filled with absences, stillnesses where I expect movement, it somehow consoles me to think of the Antlered sitting cross-legged with all the animals around Him, and old Mr. Rudycat snugged up in His lap. Or, more likely, draped around His neck and across His shoulders like a black-and-white fur collar, but with a pink nose. And probably switching Him in the face with a long, black tail from time to time.

Yep, that's the Rude all right.

Emily was the first kid to grow up in the local pagan community, and you couldn't help but feel a sense of investment in her. Smart, talented, charismatic, it was evident to everyone that she was going to be High Priestess of Minnesota some day, if not the first pagan president. When she died unexpectedly at 21, her death shook us all.