Edward P. Butler > Quotes

“The passions of the Gods are thus in themselves actions: the wrath of Apollo is the pestilence that begins the Iliad, the seeing of mortal suffering by Hera is the action she inspires.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“In this regard, a Stoic pun on the name of Hekate may be instructive: ‘Hekate’ is so called dia to hekastou pronoeisthai, “on account of foreknowledge of each [hekastos].”[39]”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“By causing ‘madness’ in Herakles, Hera leads him to the performance of labors resulting in new possibilities for humanity, the cause of which is symbolized as madness because ‘sanity’ for souls lies in turning back toward the sources of reason in them rather than pressing forward into new creations.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“​The activities of the Chaldean Hekate can be understood as an intensive meditation upon and elaboration of Hekate’s actions in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which fall into three stages: ​1. (HHD 22-5): Hekate, described as “Perses’ daughter still innocent of heart [atala phroneousa],” hears Persephone’s cries “from her cave [ex antrou],” as does Helios. ​Here, Hekate is quiescent, but responds to the “voice” of the soul descending to embodiment, to which compare the “lifegiving whir” or “hum” (rhoizêma) with which Damascius associates Hekate (In Parm. III 42.18). ​2. (51-61): On the tenth day [dekatê] of her search, Demeter meets Hekate “with a light in her hand [selas en cheiressin echousa]” and tells her what she heard. Demeter runs with her “with burning torches in her hands” to Helios, who saw the events. ​The numbers ten and four (the ten being the expansion of four, 1+2+3+4) are spoken of as “key-bearers”, kleidouchoi in the pseudo-Iamblichean Theology of Arithmetic (28.13, 81.14 de Falco), this being an epithet of Hekate’s as well. The text refers first to Hekate’s single light at first, but then to Demeter’s twin torches, as they run back to Helios to retrieve the vision. Thus, at the furthest limits of the centrifugal motion, the centripetal motion of “virtue” (keys) comes into play. ​3. (438-440): Hekate, described as at 25 as “of the glossy veil [liparokrêdemnos]”, embraces Persephone on her return, and “the mistress [anassa]” becomes Persephone’s attendant and servant [propolos kai opaôn]. ​At the beginning and the end of the sequence, Hekate is veiled, as when the world is rendered flat or “membrane-like [humenôdês]” (frag. 68). In embracing Persephone on her return, that is, the soul upon its liberation from self-imposed bondage, Hekate is acknowledged as Mistress, and assumes a role of guide and helper to the soul in its future transformations (“ascents” and “descents”).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“In later Platonists like Iamblichus, Proclus and Damascius, there is a set of prime units, called ‘henads’—a term that originates in the Philebus—who are unique, proper-named entities, namely the Gods themselves. These henads are ‘in’ the First Hypothesis of the Parmenides insofar as they are each a perfectly unique individual, while the classifications of them according to their properties yield the primary common terms for all of Being, which lies for its part in the Second Hypothesis.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Plato does not identify his demiurge by name, for “to find [heurein] the maker and father of this universe is a work, and having found him, it is impossible to speak of him to all,” (Tim. 28c, trans. mine). This need not mean that the demiurge is other than some known God. It may rather mean, in accord with the passage discussed above from the Phaedrus, that the demiurge is each of the Gods, insofar as they shape [142] the cosmos through shaping the desire of living beings.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“​With respect to Gods, however, as I have argued elsewhere,[81] the situation is different. The ‘space’ in such a system that is accorded to some particular deity does not, in the ultimate sense, come at the expense of another. This is on account of the essentially polycentric nature of genuine polytheism, a condition which is demanded by the very nature of divine individuality.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“Indeed, in Proclus’ own interpretation of the Hellenic pantheon, the source of life for souls is seen more directly in Rhea, while the soul in its personal emergence is grasped through Persephone, who for Platonists embodies the soul’s descent, not into death, but embodied life.[19] Hekate’s special role in this process, I shall argue, is revelatory; and this is prefigured in her iconography, in which she typically bears twin torches.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“The fundamental principle of polycentric polytheism is that all the Gods are in each God; and therefore, to the degree that a worshiper of some God finds in the nature, iconography, symbolism, or mythology of some other God something resonant for them, though it may be a new appropriation historically, may be regarded metaphysically as a new encounter for the worshiper of an attribute which has always belonged to the God in question, because the latter is, in him/herself, all Gods and all things.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“In Plato’s account, it becomes clear that souls and cities mutually condition one another to the point that statecraft is as much the art of forming souls, and of forming a soul, as of forming a state, these activities being inseparable. Beyond this, the soul is a citizen in the cosmos – even the souls of other animals, which are also, like us, part of the cosmic animal discussed in the Timaeus, the dialogue following on the Republic’s heels. For what is an animal composed of animals (Timaeus 30c–d) but a polity?”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“The Gods, on the other hand, recover their wholeness or autarchy from within the problematic justice of the narrative “state” through the art of esoteric exegesis. In the city of guardians as framed by Socrates, the place of exegete is held by Delphic Apollo, “who, seated at the centre and upon the navel of the earth, delivers his interpretation”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“The first is what is known as the Corpus Hermeticum, named for Hermes, under whose name many of the treatises were circulated, due to His syncretic association with the Egyptian God Djehuty, or ‘Thoth’, as His name was transliterated in Greek. Plato had already known this God, and refers to Him in the Phaedrus (274c) not as Hermes, but under His Egyptian name, as best he can sound it out: ‘Theuth’.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“Giving something a proper name is how we express its uniqueness, something we emphasize further by the categorical distinction we draw between ‘what’ and ‘who’. If I ask what something is, I expect to be answered with a term that expresses its real or potential commonality with some number of other entities, whereas if I ask who someone or somebody is, I expect to be answered with something designating this entity alone.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“Note the Veda’s emphasis upon the unstable, shifting nature of the sea, the very same logic which leads the Platonists to identify Poseidon, likewise associated with horses as well as the sea, as the demiurge of the middle, psychical plane”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“In the Phaedrus beauty and love act as the triggers to elicit the recollection of a host of different ideas; in the Symposium the nature of love itself is analyzed. Love is explained by Diotima as an intermediate nature connecting humans to the Gods, a daimôn conceived during the celebration among the Gods of the birth of Aphrodite (Symp. 203b ff.).”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“In the Platonic interpretation of the Iliad, the city of Ilios is the material (hylikos) site where the struggle over the status of embodied beauty is staged, and in this respect Homer’s epic already suggests a symbolic identification of the City with the work of art.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“While Buddhism has not engaged in the kind of repression of indigenous polytheisms that has characterized Christianity and Islam, a legacy of subordination and even demonization of indigenous Gods and spirits by Buddhists can be seen throughout the region. (Tibetan Buddhist discourse about the indigenous Bon tradition would be one example.) Responsibility for historical injustices, such as imperial Japanese expansionism, or earlier Mongolian aggression, will be assigned to the native religion, which because it is not explicitly universalistic is regarded as implicitly nationalistic and xenophobic.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“According to Curd, Parmenides’ doctrine is not numerical monism, which “asserts that there exists only one thing,” so that “a complete list of entities in the universe would have only one entry,” but rather predicational monism, which is “the claim that each thing that is can be only one thing … a being of a single kind … with a single account of what it is; but it need not be the case that there exists only one such thing.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Plato

“​Zeus is for the Stoics both the form-giver and the form itself, both the whole cosmos and an individual in the cosmos;”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“Chief among these is the Barigongju, the Song of Abandoned Princess Bari, who is also known as Paridegi or Pari Kongju. In this myth, the seventh daughter of a royal couple is abandoned by them and raised by two mountain-dwelling Gods. When Princess Bari’s birth parents fall ill, they are told that the only cure is medicinal water or a flower of resurrection that must be retrieved from the land of the dead, a feat which can only be accomplished by their abandoned seventh daughter. Princess Bari enters the land of the dead as a savior, marries a deity there, and gives birth to a number of sons, generally seven and identified with the seven stars of the Big Dipper. By the time She is able to return to Her birth parents, they have died, but Bari is able to resurrect them.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“And so when Gods move from realm to realm, They are also creating the possibility of linkage between these realms, and hence of the simultaneous existence of things in different states.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“There is no doubt that there are institutions present in some traditions and not, or only minimally present in others. Among the Yanomami, for example, the dead are not spoken of, let alone the objects of cult after the ceremony by which they are laid to rest, while West African traditions attach great importance to ongoing ritual engagement with the Ancestors. The practice of sacrifice in some traditions is virtually absent, while in others it is ubiquitous. In the most general terms, there is more space, and more diversity of spaces, in some traditions than in others.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“All ‘Fertility Mothers’… were locally-based deities who were concerned with specific areas of country and/or sites, and not with the whole of the earth per se.”61 The God of the Abrahamic faiths was of course originally such a ‘locally-based deity’ as well, and in certain respects clearly still is. Why then could not any of these ‘local’ Earth Mothers be spoken of universally, or the generic ‘Mother Earth’ be applied to any of Them in particular? The difference between the Abrahamic and Aboriginal religions in this respect is that the former have been permitted to universalize themselves, whereas the latter, in order to be perceived as ‘authentic’, are confined to their particularity, their horizons fixed firmly in place.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“This ballgame is extremely important in the Mayan tradition, and forms of it are found to the north, in the territories of the Aztec empire and in the Caribbean, as well as into North America even as far as Canada, in different forms, but with a similar sacred significance. A form of it known as chunkey was important in what is called the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex in North America, while the modern sport of lacrosse descends from a form of sacred ballgame existing among the Eastern Woodlands and Plains nations.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“In Africa, as in Asia, Europeans encountered in many cases highly organized states with complex religions and worldviews that bore no reference to their own whatsoever—worldviews not inimical to theirs, but simply autonomous, which was in a way worse. The very independence of these worldviews led Christians to process them defensively as ‘primitive’, that is, as existing in a state prior to their own civilization, rather than parallel to it.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“And as, under the influence of diverse deities, creatures striving after beauty in their diverse ways will recognize different kinds of order or beauty in the universe, so will the universe come to be ordered, not in one way for all, but in diverse ways; and thus it is impossible to speak of the maker of the cosmos to everyone, because everyone must find that maker for themselves and speak of him/her for themselves.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“The ‘source of sources’ (pêgê tôn pêgôn, IT I 451), however, is Animal Itself, the form of animality, for a ‘source’ is a force shaping life. Proclus mentions ‘sources’ of goodness, of truth, of difference, of science, of temperance, of justice, of the virtues in general, of reason (phronein), of nature (phusis), of the ideas, and, importantly, of soul, for Hera operates as the ‘source’ of soul.”
― Edward P. Butler, Essays on Hellenic Theology

“To dwell a little longer on this moment of the Renaissance, we may see Bruno, Marsilio Ficino, and Pico della Mirandola as exhibiting three different responses to the challenge to Christian supremacy fostered by the contact with ancient texts, new (and old) science, and indigenous civilizations outside Europe. Bruno becomes a polytheist; Pico appropriates the Kabbalah in order to expand the intellectual territory of Christendom, attempting to solidify its supersession of Judaism; while Ficino attempts to integrate pagan religion as a body of symbols into a psychological framework, relegating it to a sub-theological plane and anticipating the Jungian archetypal psychology of the 20th century. It is only Bruno, thus, who permits himself to be genuinely transformed by the encounter with ‘pagan’ thought, and who engages with it as his equal and contemporary. The others are engaged rather in the attempt to maintain Christian hegemony under new, unstable conditions, and in many ways this continues to be our intellectual moment.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“There is a ‘Maker’ or ‘Modeler’, a single process or intention, but which is many-sided, as though taking into account that different traditions will accord the dominant role to the Gods they privilege. Moreover the name ‘Heart of the Sky’, designating the divinity taking in certain respects the dominant role in this process, is immediately unpacked, in the execution of this creative intention, into three Thunderbolt Gods, Thunderbolt Hurricane, Newborn Thunderbolt and Sudden Thunderbolt in Tedlock’s translation, who seem to correspond to Gods of the Classic era to whom three pyramids are dedicated at the plaza at Palenque dating from the 7th c. CE, and who are also embodied in the three stones of a traditional Mayan hearth.28 The three Thunderbolt Gods of the Popol Vuh appear to represent an entire class of important formative powers. This collective power in turn approaches the Plumed (or Feathered) Serpent, Q’uq’umatz, who is in occultation, so to speak, as a glittering light within the primordial waters, and They conceive together the desire to make manifest the Plumed Serpent’s illumination in the form of a world, with the guiding intention to bring forth beings who are capable of recognizing the Gods. The demiurgic powers known collectively as the Heart of Sky and the Plumed Serpent arrive at an agreement, with the Plumed Serpent apparently providing the paradigm or model for the cosmogonic work, if we may venture a somewhat Platonizing hermeneutic.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World

“It must be said, as well, that Islam, like Judaism, is in some sense an indigenous tradition on the Arabian peninsula, if not elsewhere, although of course one that set itself against the other indigenous religions around it and eliminated them, to the degree that Christianity had not already done so. Islam’s appropriation of Judaism, as well, and its accompanying claim to supersession of it, are not characteristic of indigenous traditions. There is one way, however, in which it resembles certain other indigenous traditions we are discussing, namely in its refusal to regard translations of its scripture into other languages as entirely valid, due to the sanctity of the language in which it was revealed. This resembles the consensus which began to emerge in the late antique Mediterranean against the unnecessary translation of divine names, which was promoted in a fragment of the text known as the Chaldean Oracles, which urges one, in Greek, not to translate the ‘foreign names’ in sacred texts. This doctrine received philosophical articulation from the influential Platonic philosopher Iamblichus, himself a Syrian, in the early 4th century CE. This counter-translation movement likely played a significant role in the polytheist resistance to Christian hegemony, which makes it ironic that we see a form of it manifest in Islam. The fact that it emerged in the same region, broadly speaking, is intriguing, but as far as I can tell has no direct significance. We can see, however, that an expansionist religion operating on such principles promotes a different kind of universality than Christianity.”
― Edward P. Butler, The Way of the Gods : Polytheism(s) Around the World