Thread by @Heliotrophy

The attraction of monotheism is understandable in the face of the the experience that the Gods, despite their uniqueness, participate fully in wholeness and oneness.

The procession of darkening ages trends strongly towards simplistic things surviving best, and monotheism is easy to explain and defend. Especially when there are built-in justifications for removing the competition.

Monotheism necessarily de-personalizes God, though, and this is the main reason the human soul chafes against it in the form of saints, heroes, etc.

We do have to concede that even though christianity gained its station through nepotism, corruption, forgery, and appropriation, for a period it was simply one player in a sort of religious "market" and even then it was successful.

Its success here was basically for the same reasons that make any modern marketer successful.

Simplicity (one god one son) -> accessibility

Dramatic Mythos -> Emotional Investment (esp with one's soul on the line)

Evangelization -> literally like chain emails/viral marketing

Once people were in the door the charity and damnation policies made further growth super easy bc wealth was being taken from cultists and reinvested, and customer retention was super high because once a person has any belief in hell they very much want to avoid it.

All it really needed was a mythos that justified fanaticism and ways to retain a herd large enough to sustain the inevitable sizeable minority of zealots, the whales.

Anyway, my overall point is ultimately that monotheism appeals to people for basically downwards-facing reasons. It's "good enough", easy enough, just show up and give tithes and if you actually want to save your soul then they'll give you some dollar store Plato.

At the same time, if we want to get people back into Temples then there are things we can learn and techniques we can adapt to the reestablishment and PROLIFERATION of ways of worship that allow normal, non-scholarly people to regain connection with the Gods.

These include focuses on:

Community (esp generational)

Duty/investment

Material support for monk/zealot types

Clear lines of strong identity

Reason to proliferate (reestablish covenants, save souls by reattaching them to their series)

Practices and institutions designed around these (and other) guidelines will be most able to disseminate the message and practice of polytheism as we enter into another age of "spiritual markets."

Our truth is primordial, but it wont to most people any good without reaching them