DICTIONARY ONE.COM • More 'Polytheism' Quotes from Famous Books

... vast but barren desert of polytheism—dark and dreary as were its gloomy domains—there were still, however, to be found some few oases of truth. The philosophers and sages of antiquity had, in the course of their learned researches, aided by the light of nature, discovered ...

— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey

... Eastern Pantheon, the god representing the destroyer is embodied under the form of a man, while the preserver is symbolized under the form of a woman. This is an adaptation in Polytheism of a great and true idea. Woman is a preserver. Her's is the conservative influence of society. It is from man that the destructive forces that shake the social organization emanate. He wars on his kind and the earth shakes under the tread of his ...

— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler

... catechumens and penitents all the higher mysteries, like the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Metastoicheiosis (transubstantiation), the Real Presence, the Eucharist and the Seven Sacraments; when Arnobius could ask, Quid Deo cum vino est? and when Justin, fearing the charge of Polytheism, could expressly declare the inferior nature of the Son to the Father. Hence the creed was appropriately called Symbol i.e., Sign of the Secret. This "mental reservation" lasted till the Edict of Toleration, issued ...

— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... criticism and negation, in which mankind lose their old convictions without acquiring any new ones, of a general or authoritative character, except the conviction that the old are false. The period of Greek and Roman polytheism, so long as really believed in by instructed Greeks and Romans, was an organic period, succeeded by the critical or sceptical period of the Greek philosophers. Another organic period came in with Christianity. The corresponding critical period began with ...

— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill

... effort, is born with the dramatic means to wholly represent the part. And it is more pathetic and perhaps more instructive to consider the small dog in his conscientious and imperfect efforts to outdo Sir Philip Sidney. For the ideal of the dog is feudal and religious; the ever-present polytheism, the whip-bearing Olympus of mankind, rules them on the one hand; on the other, their singular difference of size and strength among themselves effectually prevents the appearance of the democratic notion. Or we might more exactly compare their society to the curious spectacle presented by ...

— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson

... reality of the physical universe, let us examine its constituents. First, let us consider its unity established by the harmonious interplay of the forces permeating it. This great fact is what led Herbert Spencer to conclude that the universe could have but one creator, one ruler, and that polytheism was untenable." ...

— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... Joash T., attended only one of my lectures. In a day or two the symptoms of eruption were most encouraging. She has already quarrelled with all her family,—accusing her father of bigamy, her uncle Benoni of polytheism, her brother Zeno C. of aneurism, and her sister Eudoxy Trithemia of the variation of the magnetic needle. If ever hopes of seeing a perfect case of Primitive Christian were well-founded, I think ...

— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell

... mischief or loss to them, or sickness or death, unless his forbearance was purchased by some particular mark of attention. [FN: By the testimony of many of the Indians themselves, they appear to entertain a certain Polytheism in their belief. "We believed in one great wise benevolent being, Thesha-mon-e-doo, whose dwelling was in the sun. We believed also in many other lesser spirits—gods of the elements, and in one bad unappeasable spirit, Mah-je-mah-ne-doo, to whom we attributed bad luck, evil ...

— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill

... that any other fate has awaited the germ of Religion. Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism. With these, and their relative merits and demerits, I have nothing to do; but this it is needful for my purpose to say, that if the religion ...

— Autobiography and Selected Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... &c High Church, Low Church, Broad Church, Free Church; ultramontanism^; papism, papistry; monkery^; papacy; Anglicanism, Catholicism, Romanism; popery, Scarlet Lady, Church of Rome, Greek Church. paganism, heathenism, ethicism^; mythology; polytheism, ditheism^, tritheism^; dualism; heathendom^. Judaism, Gentilism^, Islamism, Islam, Mohammedanism, Babism^, Sufiism, Neoplatonism, Turcism^, Brahminism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sabianism, Gnosticism, Hylotheism^, Mormonism; Christian Science. ...

— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... Different Modes of Action. Preaching. Questions, Objections, and Replies. Polytheism and ...

— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... industry, when one man did work at everything, became heterogeneous, special, and complex, as society enlarged and advanced into higher integrations, and as the life of the individual became more and more advanced through Fetichism, Polytheism, Monotheism, to our ...

— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various

... had supposed that this was anthropomorphism. In truth, this would-be scientific mode of speech is as anthropomorphic as is the cosmogony of Hesiod, only on a smaller scale. Primitive religion ascribed life to everything of which it talked. Polytheism in religion and independent forces and self-existent laws in science are thus upon a par. The gods many and lords many, so amenable to concrete presentation in poetry and art, have given place to one Supreme Being. So also light, heat, and other natural agencies, palpable and ready ...

— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore

... the days of Montezuma, the Aztec priests had engrafted upon these simple ceremonies not only a burdensome ceremonial, and a polytheism similar to that of Eastern nations, but, as we have seen, human sacrifices and even cannibalism had become prominent features in religious worship. Throughout the entire ceremonial and religious conceptions of the Aztecs may be observed a display of the savage and brutal elements in human nature, ...

— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... long ages of darkness, devil-worship, and polytheism (in its grossest forms all around), the Jew stood up in unfaltering protest against all. Persecutions, proscriptions, tortures in every form, were of no avail. On the gibbet, on the rack, amid the flames, his last ...

— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown

... other hand, who within certain limits were no less his opponents than the orthodox, derived the strength of their opposition to the systems of dogma, as the Apologists of the second century had already done with regard to polytheism, from their religious belief and their inability to estimate these systems historically. That, however, is only the first impression which one gets here from the history, and it is everywhere modified by other impressions. In the ...

— History of Dogma, Volume 1 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack

... appearance was of a higher order than at any subsequent period of its history, thus testifying that it drew its greatness from a fountain higher than itself. It was in its early days that Egypt worshipped one only God; in the later ages this simple and sublime belief was buried under the corruptions of polytheism. The greatest pyramids were built by the Fourth Dynasty, and so universal was education at that time among the people that the stones with which they were built retain to this day the writing of the workmen. The first king ...

— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... enemies of their nation. All other nations, tongues, and peoples, bowed to pagan deities, and their worship comprized nought but the sensual rites of heathen idolatry. Paganism was a religion of form and ceremony, based on polytheism—a belief in the existence of a multitude of gods, which deities were subject to all the vices and passions of humanity, while distinguished by immunity from death. Morality and virtue were unknown as elements of heathen service; and the dominant idea in pagan worship was that of ...

— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... invariable laws, with which no volitions, either natural or supernatural, interfere. This general theorem is completed by the addition, that the theological mode of thought has three stages, Fetichism, Polytheism, and Monotheism: the successive transitions being prepared, and indeed caused, by the gradual uprising of the two rival modes of thought, the metaphysical and the positive, and in their turn preparing the way for the ascendancy of these; ...

— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... doctrine of the Logos which bulks so largely in the writings of the apologists of the 2nd century came to the front, the trinitarian problem became acute. The necessity of a constant protest against polytheism led to a tenacious insistence on the divine unity, and the task was to reconcile this unity with the deity of Jesus Christ. Some thinkers fell back on the "modalistic'' solution which regards "Father'' and "Son'' as two aspects of the same subject, but a simpler and ...

— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... everywhere and all the time, it has, and continues to be, inextricably intertwined and influenced by Theistic beliefs, even when and where such beliefs have been the crudest and most debased form of polytheism. ...

— Theism or Atheism - The Great Alternative • Chapman Cohen

... a violation of decency to describe, is selected as the object of homage. As the object of insult is selected a religion which has borrowed much of its theology and much of its morality from Christianity, a religion which in the midst of Polytheism teaches the unity of God, and, in the midst of idolatry, strictly proscribes the worship of images. The duty of our Government is, as I said, to take no part in the disputes between Mahometans and idolaters. But, if ...

— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 4 (of 4) - Lord Macaulay's Speeches • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... one quotation from this portion of the work, and then we must leave M. Comte. In reviewing the theological progress of mankind, he signalizes three epochs, that of Fetishism, of Polytheism, and of Monotheism. Our extract shall relate to the first of these, to that primitive state of religion, or idolatry, in which things themselves were worshipped; the human being transferring to them immediately a life, or power, ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various

... particularly attractive field. Not hidden away in sacred classics or in the records of travellers, but as elements of existing religions, professed by men around, are illustrations of most of the types of religious thought and practice. There are the pantheism of certain Hindu ascetics, the polytheism of the masses, the animism of aboriginal races, and the varieties of theism of Christians, Mahomedans, and the new Hindus respectively. There are the curious phenomena of goddesses as well as gods, and of distinctive features in the ...

— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison

... length below this worship of Vishnu and Siva and here will merely point out that it differs from the polytheism of the Smartas. In their higher phases all Hindu religions agree in teaching some form of pantheism, some laying more and some less stress on the personal aspect which the deity can assume. But whereas the pantheism of the Smartas grew out of the feeling that the many gods of tradition ...

— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... their chariot drawn by tigers! What a character would he paint of that Flora who gave her gardens to the Roman people! It would draw tears to your eyes. No man was ever so learned in the female manners of the last centuries of polytheism as Sidonia. You would have supposed that he had devoted his studies peculiarly to that period if you had not chanced to draw him to the Italian middle ages. And even these startling revelations were almost eclipsed by his anecdotes of the Court of Henry III. of France, ...

— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli

... There are also traces of propitiation in Western Australia (MS. of Mrs. Bates).] Sometimes, as in many African tribes, ancestor worship is almost the whole of practical cult. Usually it accompanies polytheism, existing beside it on a lower plane. It was prevalent in the Mycenae of the shaft graves; in Attica it was uninterrupted; it is conspicuous in Greece from the ninth century onwards. But it is unknown to or ignored by the Homeric poets, though ...

— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang

... earnestness, the essential condition of morals and religion. The faith of humanity, however, could not come from thence, because these ancient forms of worships had great difficulty in detaching themselves from Polytheism, and could not attain to a very clear symbol. Brahminism has only survived to the present day by virtue of the astonishing faculty of conservation which India seems to possess. Buddhism failed in all its approaches ...

— The Life of Jesus • Ernest Renan

... need not wait to trace the gradual integration of this anthropopsychic hypothesis from its earliest and most diffused form of what we may term polypsychism (wherein the causes inferred were almost as personally numerous as the effects contemplated), through polytheism (wherein many effects of a like kind were referred to one deity, who, as it were, took special charge over that class), up to monotheism (wherein all causation is gathered up into the monopsychism of a single personality): it is enough thus briefly to show that from first to last the hypothesis ...

— Thoughts on Religion • George John Romanes