There is a Thirst for What India Alone Can Offer, the Overwhelming, Living Presence of Her Gods

CSP speaks to Polytheist and Platonist Edward P. Butler. He is an associate editor at Walking the Worlds: A Biannual Journal of Polytheism and Spirit work and the journal Socrates.

How did your interest in religion and divinity begin? What were the first Indian resources you encountered in this journey?

I was raised without any religion, and hence discovered the religious literatures of the world in an unprejudiced fashion. As a child, I was introduced to religion through reading mythology from everywhere I could find it, and by staring at pictures in books of the ineffable icons of ancient polytheist civilizations. It was all captivating to me.

With respect to India in particular, my first introduction was through a close friend of the family who had travelled there extensively, and who, while not a Hindu herself, had a deep love and respect for Indian religion and culture. From the stories she told, I gained a vision of India as a place where a curtain had not been drawn between the Gods and humans, as it had before the Gods of Greece or Egypt.

When I got a bit older, all of these influences from my childhood coalesced into my present polytheistic religious identity as I began to have direct experience of the Gods.

You have studied Gods and Goddesses of different civilisations. How are Indian deities different?

That is a difficult question. Every God is unique, and every pantheon of Gods is different; indeed, in Platonic thought the essential characteristic of divinity is uniqueness. I think that the first thing that comes to mind for me with respect to the Gods and Goddesses of India is the great good fortune of the Indian people to have their ancient traditions present for them intact, continuous and thriving. Most of the world’s other great polytheisms have been sundered or all but succumbed to the attempts to exterminate them, and hence exist today either in greatly reduced circumstances, or only through the efforts of revivalists. Clearly Hindu theology had already in antiquity reached the pinnacle of sophistication achieved by only a small number of others; ancient Egypt particularly comes to mind as an apt comparison. But so many of the works of the geniuses of piety in every nation are lost to us due to the violence perpetrated upon them, that it is to India above all others that we must look to see what a thriving polytheism looks like in its full flower, in all its complex richness.

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