The Indo-European Roots of Henotheism

The belief in a supreme, governing Día accompanied by a lesser pantheon of gods is not without precedence. There is a rich tradition of henotheism accounted for in multiple Indo-European branches and attested to in the oldest strata of myth, but it was always one among many views. Much to the chagrin of reconstructionists, the Aryan religious landscape was varied. There were atheists, polytheists, materialists, monists, skeptics, and henotheists existing side-by-side for centuries. There was no single Indo-European catechism that was uniformly professed and practiced throughout its territories. Specific trends did dominate, however, and henotheism ranks among the strongest.

Alongside henotheism and polytheism existed a spirit of inquiry, debate, and contestation — a fact evinced by the varied voices and visions reaching us from the depths of recorded history. It was, in part, this competition and pursuit of truth that sparked the explosion of the Aryans out of the Pontic-Caspian Steppes and brought them to dominate much of Europe and Asia.

In that spirit, to cling to a relic of the past because it was what our ancestors once believed is anathema. What distinguished the Aryans from other cultures was their single-minded pursuit of excellence and truth. That and horses, chariots, and their bellicose natures. These two aspects are linked. A culture of struggle is one of immense intellectual, artistic, and militaristic accomplishment. The Greeks and Italian City States shared these qualities. The diversity and contention preserved in early Indo-European religious life should be no surprise.

Paradoxically, this yearning was tempered by extreme religious conservativism in praxis. As Walter Burkert stated in his classic Greek Religions, the doing aspect of Greek religion changed little from the Dark Ages until Christianization. What changed among the aristocrats (the commoners would not have bothered with such lofty questions) was how they conceptualized their rites and festivals. The practices themselves underwent little transformation despite the intellectual ferment over centuries. Even Socrates, an apparent skeptic, was celebrated as being among the most pious of Athenians. At his death, the sage famously remarked to his friend, “Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius. See to it, and don’t forget.”¹

In the previous article, we looked at the question of God and gods from a more direct, philosophical view. Now, we shall examine the genealogy of this idea among various Indo-European traditions — a nod to the fierce conservatism of our predecessors. Looking to non-Celtic Indo-European traditions is necessary here. A dearth of Celtic material has survived into modern times. Much of what has come down to us has been corrupted through the quills of Christian scribes recording it. On top of that, the actual religious practices and beliefs of the druids are completely lost to us, save for a few off-hand comments by Classical authors. The archaeological record offers hints, but any conclusions drawn therefrom are contentious.

To understand what the religious life of the Celts was like, we must examine Indo-European cultures that survived the vagaries of history more intact. There are faults with this approach, but it is justified by the commonalities shared in religious iconography, language, artifacts, funerary rites, and a host of other practices that attest to their common ancestry.

In this theological excavation, we will begin by digging up the fragments of Celtic thought, followed by a look at Greek and Indic theology to flesh out the lineage of henotheism.

Celtic Henotheism

The precise views of the Celts on Día and the gods remain shrouded in mystery. The evidence is tragically scant. The corruption by scribes inserting Christian messages into earlier pagan material intensifies the challenge. All is not hopeless, though. We can say with certainty that the Celts worshipped a variety of gods, sacrificed animals and weapons to them, undertook pilgrimages to popular shrines throughout the Celtic world (pointing to a pan-Celtic identity), and had a more porous attitude to man, nature, and the divine. Beyond these basic features, things get fuzzy.

Whether or not the Celts believed in a unitary principle akin to Día is unclear. The arabesque patterns that adorn their pottery and artifacts suggest yes. So, too, do their open-air temples that turn the firmament and oaks into their cathedrals. Aesthetically and architecturally, these designs signal the divine emerging organically from the vast, seamless tapestry of existence. Celtic groves were demarcated with ditches, walls, or other features, but it is not as sharp of a divide as compared with Classical Greece, where worship moved indoors following the Archaic period. Set behind thick walls and rooves, the Greeks worshipped gods precisely articulated in bronze and marble. For the Celts, the temple merged seamlessly with the broader landscape, and their beliefs likely were similarly contoured. A sea of oneness in which individuals arise and pass away like summer grasses.

Remarks about the Celtic beliefs by Roman and Greek writers add little. A few scraps of Celtic theology survive, such as Strabo’s claim that “both the Druids and others say that the human soul and the universe as well are indestructible, but that at some time both fire and water will prevail.”² The philosophy sounds similar to what we've looked at in the previous article. The soul and universe are eternal and unchanging, yet the world also cycles through periods of birth and destruction.

The shared qualities of the soul and universe could also imply that they are essentially the same. Since that essence is eternal and identical, it could be singular and simple, bringing us back to the One. However, this is but one of many possibilities that we can extrapolate from Strabo’s remark. Other options include a set of eternal properties, like the elements of earth, fire, water, and wind (Empedocles), matter and consciousness (Samkhaya), or soul, matter, motion, rest, space, and time (Jainism). In Strabo, then, we find no clear support of henotheism.

This analysis suffers from another problem: it's based on one observation by Strabo who was quoting another writer, Posidonian, now lost to time. Other classical writers agree that the Celts believed the soul was immortal, adding that this was the mechanism that explained their belief in reincarnation, but this does little to further the present discussion.

At this point, relevant evidence stops. Yes, it is indeed this paltry. How tragic that all that has survived is tatters, but push on we must. For guidance, we cast our eyes to two Indo-European traditions: the Hellenic and the Indic.

Hellenic Henotheism

The Hellenic tradition’s theological tradition is vast and diverse. There were atheists, materialists, skeptics, theists, monists, and more. Much of their philosophy is lost to us, but what remains indicates a far less unified and cohesive theology than is projected onto Celtic paganism. At least this diversity lived amongst the aristocrats and priests. As today, theological discussions have little impact on the religious life of the average Catholic, Jew, or Hindu — and even less for the working-class one. Religion is a pleasant story that functions as the ideological wallpaper of plebians' lives and a resource to be drawn upon in times of crisis. Amidst the elites and their fractious beliefs, however, henotheism existed.

The first example of henotheism comes from one of the oldest surviving Greek texts — The Hermetica. The book records a series of conversations between Hermes and various interlocutors. Its pithy sayings point to a Día similar to the one expounded earlier. In one section, Hermes proclaims that “[God] is One, He is not made nor generated; but is apparent and unmanifest.”³ Later, Hermes elaborates further, adding that "by making all things appear, He appeareth in all and by all; but especially is He manifested to or in those wherein He willeth." And "the Essence of all is One." According to Hermes, God is both one and many; God is eternal and unchanging yet manifests all changing phenomena; finally, God wills the cosmos into existence. It's an almost perfect reiteration of the qualities I described Día with.

The Hermetica unambiguously upholds the division between God and the gods. There is a supreme God who reigns over creation, and subordinate to him are lesser gods of various ranks that aid him in ordering the world. Multiple passages express this idea, but I shall quote one longer passage that should banish any doubts as to where The Hermetica stands on the God/gods question:

Thus God spake, quoth Hermes, and all obeyed His decree. "Look upon the earth," He said to them, "and upon all things beneath."

Straightway they looked, and understood the will of the Lord. And when He spoke to them of the creation of Man, asking of each what he could bestow upon the race about to be born, the Sun first replied:--"I will illumine mankind." Then the Moon promised enlightenment in her turn, adding that already she had created Fear, Silence, Sleep, and Memory. Kronos announced that he had begotten Justice and Necessity. Zeus said, "In order to spare the future race perpetual wars, I have generated Fortune, Hope, and Peace." Ares declared himself already father of Conflict, impetuous Zeal, and Emulation, Aphrodite did not wait to be called upon: "As for me, O Master," she said, "I will bestow upon mankind Desire, with voluptuous Joy and Laughter, that the penalty, to which our sister Souls are destined may not weigh on them too hardly." These words of Aphrodite, O my Son, were welcomed gladly. "And I," said Hermes, "will endow human nature with Wisdom, Temperance, Persuasion, and Truth; nor will I cease to ally myself with Invention. I will ever protect the mortal life of such men as are born under my signs, seeing that to me the Creator and Father has attributed in the Zodiac, signs of Knowledge and Intelligence; above all, when the movement which draws thereto the stars is in harmony with the physical forces of each."⁴

The above passage is the clearest articulation of henotheism that can be found among the ancient Greeks. Here, gods are intelligent, powerful forces that animate the universe but are subservient to God calling shots on high. Notably, this God is not named. Hermes reveals these truths to his listeners, but he exempts himself from the role of the highest. That role is the domain of an intelligence ultimately beyond name and description.

Later philosophers, working from theological foundations that contained elements of The Hermetica, continued in this vein but added a naturalist twist. Some philosophers sought to replace God with impersonal matter and logos⁵, as in the case of Anaximander and Democritus. Both viewed the universe as originating out of a single substance governed by natural laws. Anaximander writes:

Whence things have their origin,
Thence also their destruction happens,
According to necessity;
For they give to each other justice and recompense
For their injustice
In conformity with the ordinance of Time.⁶

For Anaximander, the origin and end of all things referenced in the first two lines was the apeiron, a mysterious, infinite substance from which all other elements derive their substance. Alongside Democritus, the first atomist, God as architect of the universe was rejected. Rather, the cosmos arose and passed away depending on natural laws.

God was not so readily jettisoned by other philosophers. Heraclitus stated that guiding all appearances was the unitary principles of fire and logos. He called this force Zeus, enigmatically writing that “Wisdom alone is whole, and is both willing and unwilling to be named Zeus.”⁷ Heraclitus’ Zeus was not the bearded god who rains lightning upon the wicked. Such worshippers he ridiculed as fools. Rather, Heraclitus pointed out the kernel of truth in folk polytheism: the logos is not merely a natural process arising from material laws, as Anaximander believed, but a reflection of the will of God.

Plato and the Neoplatonists embraced a supreme Día, although Being and the One were terms more popular in their parlance. To a degree, my henotheism would sit comfortably in their ranks. For Plato, the One was whole, complete, and perfect, and this superintelligence spontaneously created the universe via degrees of degraded refraction of the perfect One. Each layer of existence adhered strictly to the One’s logos, a primordial intelligence that formed and governed creation.

Plato's treatment of the gods led him in unusual directions. He relegated the gods to benevolent planets rotating around the earth, unmoved by the prayers of devotees. At other times, as in the case of Eros, he reduced the gods to quasi-metaphors describing man's relationship to the cosmos. His god-as-planets theory was inspired by astronomical discoveries of the time. Keen observers of nature, the Greeks noticed that planets in the firmament perfectly orbited the earth (at least to their measurements). In the ordered courses and unchanging presences of these celestial bodies, Plato located an eternal force that was naturalistic and visible. Shaping this belief was also an undercurrent of astrology, which located the fate of men and nations in the course of the heavens. The two concepts neatly aligned for the Athenian philosopher. The gods dwelled in the distant firmament while dictating man's life by dint of their mysterious pull.

Since the gods were impersonal forces or quasi-metaphors for natural impulses, Plato rejected the efficacy of prayers. The gods could not be bribed through supplication. The universe is ordered by necessity, and our only role in this world is to align our actions and the polis with the good as much as possible. A life of virtue and beauty fulfills the wishes of the gods, secures our fortunes in the present, and promises a sublime afterlife. Nothing else is necessary nor possible.

In seeming contradiction to this, Plato preserved traditional Greek religious life in his model polis, with sacrifices, religious festivities, and the retelling of ancient myths all continuing largely unchanged (another example of the extreme conservativism of praxis as opposed to theory). The sage of Aegina was touchy about what type of stories should be told — definitely no Zeus raping women or Hera sending snakes to murder Hercules out of spite. These myths would lead men to believe that the gods are not righteous and, in turn, lead them towards vice. The gods were to stand as paragons of virtue in their respective fields. Rituals, games, and festivities reinforced devotion to the gods as icons of goodness and beauty.

Another point of differentiation between Plato and other philosophers, including me and my henotheism, was his rejection of the world of multiplicity. To him, the world of fleeting phenomena is illusory. Objects only find their true reality in Being, and anything short of that is illusory or deceptive to some degree. On the chain of being, starting with matter as the lowest link up to soul to forms to intellect to the One, each successive level exists more fully and truly than the prior. Matter is the least existent while Being is unalloyed existence, inseparable from Beauty and Goodness. What lies beneath Being is an imperfect and illusory reflection of truth.

Plato himself did not outright state the lower levels on the chain of being are illusory. He would phrase lesser links in the chain as being less real and more deceptive, but following the thread of his thought to its logical conclusion leads to the rejection of diversity as a lie. The only truth and existent is Being. Neither Thales, Heraclitus, nor Anaximander went so far. They argued for a unitary element but did not imply that composites didn’t exist.

Among the Greeks, henotheism is in good company. No one philosophy perfectly reflects my own brand of henotheism, but this is a natural consequence of thousands of years of distance and one's own working through these knotty theological issues. Anaximander's impersonal apeiron governed by necessity is too unfeeling; Heraclitus' rejection of the ritual is too extreme; and Plato's dismissal of diversity and his moralistic gods too world-denying. Differences aside, they generally share common features: the one and the many, the still and the changing, and will and matter as organizing and constituting creation.

Indic Henotheism

The Indo-European DNA of henotheism finds another vigorous exponent in the Hindu tradition. Before discussing the content, a brief digression into history is necessary. Indian culture has its roots in an Indo-European culture that reaches as far back as the Pontic-Caspian Steppe 4500 years ago. The Indic branch divided from proto-Indo-European roughly 4000 years ago, and the Rig Veda was composed around 1500 BC in modern-day Iraq. By comparison, the Halstatt Culture (1200-500 BC) in Switzerland is believed to be the first Celtic culture and emerged from the same proto-Indo-European culture of Eurasia. Given the similar sources, the relative closeness in time, and the shared linguistic, social, and technological features, it is no stretch to believe that Indic theology reflects Celtic theology to a degree.⁸

With that out of the way, let's get to the star of the Aryans: the Rig Veda. This text is among the earliest surviving records of Indo-European spirituality and, thus, functions as a window into its theological roots. It is also a layered text composed over centuries. Within its sundry hymns, divers viewpoints are preserved, hinting that the philosophical foment of their Mediterannean brothers was a feature of Aryan religious life rather than a particular feature of the geniuses of Attica. The Aryan hymns court skepticism, polytheism, and, yes, henotheism.

The strongest evidence of henotheism in the text differs from my own brand. In an oft (mis)quoted line, the worshipper declares all gods as being equal aspects of the eternal One. “They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni, and he is heavenly nobly-winged Garutman. / To what is One, sages give many a title they call it Agni, Yama, Matarisvan.”⁹ Indra, Mitra, Varuna, and Agni are all gods in the Hindu pantheon. Indra is the lord of the gods and a thunderer. Agni is the god of fire. Varuna the god of wind. According to these verses, Día has sundry names, but all names point to the One. Much has been made of these two lines, but they are just that: two lines in a multi-generational text composed of 1,028 hymns.

Another song from the same collection strikes a more skeptical tone with hints of Anaximander and Thales:

Darkness there was at first, by darkness hidden;
Without distinctive marks, this all was water;
That which, becoming, by the void was covered;
That One by force of heat came into being;

Who really knows? Who will here proclaim it?
Whence was it produced? Whence is this creation?
Gods came afterwards, with the creation of this universe.
Who then knows whence it has arisen?

Whether God's will created it, or whether He was mute;
Perhaps it formed itself, or perhaps it did not;
Only He who is its overseer in highest heaven knows,
Only He knows, or perhaps He does not know.¹⁰

This and the previous hymns, with their philosophical musings, are the exception. Most are traditional pleas to the gods, praising their virtues, recounting their accomplishments, and requesting that the lords on high support the devotee’s aspirations. The henotheism of the text is overplayed, basing the theology of the Rig Veda on .3% of the poems. Not exactly convincing numbers. The lack of volume underlines their obscurity and insignificance.

The Rig Veda conserves classical polytheism, with gods reigning over various domains and various gods claiming supremacy over all others. There are whiffs of henotheism and an underlying Oneness beyond the divers gods, but it isn’t until the later Hindu texts that this idea crystallizes.

The responsibility of developing these latent ideas fell to later yogis. The Upanishads (compiled beginning in 800 BC) saw a more explicit embrace of henotheism. In the Isha Upanishad, the anon sage pronounces:

One, unmoving, swifter than mind,
The gods cannot catch it, as it goes before:
Standing still, it outruns others that are running.
Mātariśvan sets the waters in it.

It moves, it does not move;
It is far and near likewise.
It is inside all this:
It is outside all this.

Whoever sees
All beings in the self (ātman)
And the self in all beings
Does not shrink away from it.

For the one who knows,
In whom all beings have become self,
How can there be delusion or grief
When he sees oneness?¹¹

Here, Brahman, oneness, the true self, the eternal, the all-pervading presence in creation, is contrasted against the gods that "cannot catch it." This is one of many examples where a sharp line is drawn between the supreme principle, Brahman, and his celestial counterparts. Brahman is both those gods yet distinct. Brahman exists in all creation as the underlying oneness and is the world of variety. As oneness, Brahman is still, as variety, eternally fluctuating. The great god also compels creation ever onward – yet goes nowhere at all. A later Upanishad clarifies Brahman's role as the master of creation when he's described as the "inner controller."¹² Sound familiar?

In the Kena Upanishad, the distinction between Brahman and the Vedic gods is brought into sharp relief. Brahman and the other gods emerge victorious from their battle against the demons, but the lesser gods believe their own power secured the victory. To humble them, Brahman challenges each of them to move a single blade of grass. The god of fire rises to the challenge but fails to incinerate it. The god of wind accepts the challenge but fails to move it. Only the god of storms, Indra, manages a semblance of success, receiving a lecture by Brahman about the latter's supremacy. The story demonstrates the superiority of the unifying divinity over and above the various gods.

Later forms of Hinduism sidelined this God/gods henotheism and opted for the "all Gods are One God" version. The latter theology differs slightly from my own, but it nevertheless demonstrates the familial relationship between the ideas. God/gods emerged naturally from the Aryan traditions of the Vedas, articulated in such Upanishads as the Isha and Kena, and today it continues in a modified form. The great gods, like Shiva, Krishna, and Vishnu, are seen as the faces of the singular divine being, but lesser gods exist and are subject to the will of those on high. Amidst the constellation, the Indic tradition verifies the Aryan DNA of henotheism. Henotheism is Aryan.

Celtic Paganism: Tradition and Nature

Given that Celtic paganism shares roots with Hinduism and Hellenism, it is likely that the teachings of the druids once uttered in the groves before ancient flames and the heads of slaughtered foes would find fellowship in the cryptic sayings of Heraclitus or the utterances of the Upanishads. And in the privacy of druidic colleges or in the halls of kings with a penchant for metaphysics, a range of beliefs were voiced and debated. Monists. Materialists. Polytheists. And, yes, henotheists.

Care must be taken not to project onto the haze of druidic thought our own theological commitments. If other Indo-European cultures are anything to go by, the question of the gods was by no means settled. Perhaps among the plebians, who had little care for such naval-gazing debates, these religious questions had no relevance. But among the aristocrats and priests, contention reigned. The prevailing ideology changed according to the vicissitudes of political power, scientific discovery, and the host of random factors that inscrutably drive history.

Some beliefs were fringe. The Greek atheists landed in hot water more than a few times for their dismissal of religious mores and customs, but most were left alone to follow their idiosyncratic philosophy so long as they weren't insufferable finger-waggers about it. Plato's monism was the object of devotion for a few adherents who hung out with him at his academy. His ideas quickly expired after his passing, replaced by skeptics and Stoics — both of which had almost no relevance in the lives of ordinary Greeks. It was among the intellectual circles that these ideas gained purchase. Could we travel back in time, it is not difficult to imagine that the court of a powerful Irish warlord would contain such sundry views as well.

Whether henotheism was mainstream or not is not of critical importance. It existed. It was prominent. The exact role will probably elude us. Historical popularity is insufficient grounds for belief, just as popular support is a poor indicator of the quality of an idea today. Tracing the genealogy of the concept does add gravitas to it. Somehow, the proclamations of a New Age visionary inspired by a few heavy doses of acid lack the credibility of ideas that have endured in Aryan religion for thousands of years. Were it not for the Christianization of Europe and Islamification of the Middle East, henotheism would have continued into the present.

Amidst the proclamations of Hermes, the fragments of Heraclitus, and the songs of the Rig Veda, we can trace in the shadows of Celtic history some semblance of what our ancestors once believed. God is one and many, still and changing, and willful and material. Henotheism is in the Aryan DNA. It doesn't stop there. We can verify the genius of our ancestors today, thousands of years later and cultures apart, through a close, direct examination of the world before us. Nature is our greatest teacher. Ulimately, it is to her precincts that we must sojourn and contemplate, more so than books and tales, to discover for ourselves the truth of things.

Notes

Plato, The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 128.
Philip Freeman, War, Women, and Druids: Eyewitness Reports and Early Accounts of the Ancient Celts (Auston: University of Texas Press, 2002), 39.
A. Kingsford, trans., The Hermetica by Hermes Trismegistus (New York: Blurb, 2019), 31.
Kingsford, The Hermetica, 52.
Logos is a complex word, and any single translation fails to do it justice. It can mean: law, order, reason, intelligence, word, and animating force. For some, like the Stoics, all those meanings could be bundled up into those five letters. Therefore, I leave it untranslated
Patricia Curd, ed., A Presocratics Reader: Selected Fragments and Testimonia (New York: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 12.
Guy Davenport, trans. 7 Greeks (New York: New Directions, 1995), 65.
For more information on the origins of the Indo-European language and culture, I suggest The Wheel, the Horse, and the Chariot by David W. Anthony. For the Rig Veda itself, read The Ṛgveda: A Historical Analysis by Shrikant G. Talageri.
Ralph T. H. Griffith, trans. The Hymns of the Rigveda, 2nd ed. (Benares: E. J. Lazarus & Co., 1897), 90.
GJ Larson, RS Bhattacharya and K Potter, The Encyclopedia of Indian Philosophies, Vol. 4 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 109.
Valerie J. Roebuck, trans. The Upanishads (New York: Penguin, 2004), 55.
Roebuck, The Upanishads, 94.