Baal was the sun-god among the polytheistic Canaanites, as Bel was among the Assyrians.
He was a priest of a grossly polytheistic religion, but acknowledged only the One Supreme God, whose instrument he felt himself to be.
The term properly implies a clear polytheistic conception of gods in contrast with men, while it recognizes that some men cross the dividing line.
In the time of Abraham a polytheistic religion already existed in Ur, for we are told that his father "served other gods.
He frequently uses the word God both in the singular and the plural, and seems to slip with remarkable ease from the monotheistic to the polytheistic manner of speaking.
He argues, too, against the polytheistic notion of a plurality of gods.
But a despotic administration which undertakes to control and circumscribe all forms and manifestations of superstition in a vast polytheistic multitude of its subjects, is inevitably driven to repressive measures of the utmost severity.
What is novel in it is that it represents the fading of pure polytheism and the engrafting, upon a polytheistic stock, of a speculative homoiousian tendency soon to bud out as philosophic pantheism.
Historically these sectaries served a purpose as early protestants against ritualistic and polytheistic Brahmanism; but their real affinity with the latter faith is so great that at heart they soon became Brahmanic again.
Side-note: Early Greek mind, satisfied with the belief in polytheistic personal agents as the real producing causes of phenomena.
So far we have met with nothing to suggest that the Roman idea of divinity had passed much beyond an advanced type of animism; we have found little or no trace of personal deities of a polytheistic cast.
Saturnus, Volcanus, Neptunus were indeed identified later on with Greek gods of a ripe polytheistic system, and have thus become quite familiar to us, far too familiar for a right understanding of early Roman ideas.
The old polytheisticsystem can now be called religio Deorum by the Christian, while his own creed is religio Dei.
Thus we find in the Book of Genesis that beside the existence of Jahveh, the creative power, we have evidences of a polytheistic pantheon called Elohim.
This form is for the most part not the original one, but a conversion out of a polytheistic form.
The substance, which is looked at in the myth, is very various, and by no means bound to a polytheistic system.
The latter: ‘Polytheistic ideas have always been held in repute by the southern European races; the Semitic have maintained the unity of God.
This tendency paves the way for the approach of Monotheism; for this it is to which the polytheistic stages of religion tend in their further development.
No feature of the Solar hero has suffered a more characteristic conversion than his end, as is seen by a comparison with the corresponding polytheistic legends.
But, by way of illustration, I will refer to a comparison of the political condition of the Negro tribes which incline to a monotheistic view of religion with those of the polytheistic Polynesians.
Such expressions, created by polytheistic imagination, were retained at the monotheistic stages.
There is, therefore, no trace of polytheisticinfluence in the whole narrative.
As we have seen in the last chapter, the course of political affairs had detached the power of the state from the philosophical and polytheistic parties.
We have thus far drawn our proofs of man's polytheistic tendencies from the history of the non-Christian religions.
He doubtless worshipped God amid the surroundings of polytheistic heathenism.
Footnote 152: Professor Tiele, of Leyden, asserts that "It is altogether erroneous to regard the Egyptian religion as the polytheistic degeneration of a prehistoric monotheism.
The various tribes of Arabia were mostly given to a form of polytheistic idolatry in which, however, the conception of a monotheistic supremacy was still recognized.
According to their own traditions, Israel had been in touch with all manner of races much more advanced than themselves in material culture, and steeped in highly developed polytheistic Animism.
He arranges the probable germs of the savage idea of a Supreme Being thus: A god of the polytheistic crowd is simply raised to the primacy, which, of course, cannot occur where there is no polytheism.
Ghosts and spirits the Australians knew, but not polytheistic gods, nor departmental deities, as of war, agriculture, art.
He may accumulate all powers of all polytheistic gods, or he may 'loom vast, shadowy, and calm .
Australia escaped polytheistic degeneracy by having no aristocracy, as in Polynesia, where aristocracy, as in early Greece, had developed polytheism.
Nor do we learn out of what polytheistic deities Jehovah was selected, nor for what reason.
It is too often forgotten by those who believe that a polytheistic worship was the most natural unfolding of religious life, that polytheism must everywhere have been preceded by a more or less conscious theism.
Renan had looked with equal zeal for the scattered vestiges both of a monotheistic and of a polytheistic worship, he would have drawn, perhaps, a less striking, but we believe a more faithful, portrait of the Semitic man.
Unlike the Biblical Psalms these are polytheistic and their authors call upon other deities to intercede for them with the goddess, to whom the prayer is addressed and whom, for the time being, they regard as supreme.
While Marduk appears as supreme in the Babylonian poem, the gods and Anunaki, or spirits of earth, are recognized, so that the polytheistic view is not entirely absent.
I know not how it is so, but it seems to me that Porphyry blushed for his friends the theurgists; for he knew all that I have adduced, but did not frankly condemn polytheistic worship.
Of these, the first five refute those who fancy that the polytheistic worship is necessary in order to secure worldly prosperity, and that all these overwhelming calamities have befallen us in consequence of its prohibition.
That it is effrontery to impute the present troubles to Christ and the prohibition of polytheistic worship, since even when the gods were worshipped such calamities befell the people.
Then, when it was carried seven times round the first hostile and polytheistic city they came to, its walls suddenly fell down, though assaulted by no hand, struck by no battering-ram.
The higher minds of the nation struggled now and again towards the conception of one supreme God and of a purer form of faith, but the dead weight of polytheistic beliefs and practices prevented them from ever really reaching it.
Apart from the profound difference caused by the polytheistic character of the Chaldean account, and the monotheism of the Scriptural narrative, it is only in details that the two accounts vary from one another.
But petitions may be put up, not only to polytheistic gods, or to fetishes, but even to the one god of the monotheist, which never should be put up.
Thus, the light which mythology may be expected to throw on the idea of God is one, which, however it may illumine the polytheistic idea of God, will not be found to shine far beyond the area of polytheism.
The idea of god thus gradually developed in polytheistic myths, the accumulated reflections of savage, barbarous and semi-barbarous ancestors, tends eventually to provoke reaction.
Petitions, then, put up topolytheistic gods, or even to fetishes, may still be prayers.
Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to the ulterior and polytheistic form.
We find the same order and manner of thought in Æschylus, although he remained faithful to the polytheistic creed, which indeed confirms the truth of our theory.
The types which were first fetishes and then polytheistic were transformed into the physical and intellectual principles of the world, divested of all mythical and extrinsic form as far as their material organization was concerned.
From the polytheistic point of view, nothing can be æsthetically more perfect than the myths of Apollo and the Muses, which personify harmony in general, and whatever is peculiar to the arts.
Prometheus is, in fact, the ravisher of celestial fire (a phase of the polytheistic myth in a perfectly human form); he is a divine pramantha.
The first polytheistic Olympus consisted of natural types, and at a much later period they became moral or abstract, in accordance with the spontaneous evolution of the intelligence itself.
And the uneducated believers in a polytheistic religion regularly take the image for the deity himself, at first scarcely conceiving of the one apart from the other.
Except for this ceremonial strictness Hinduism should have been favourable to the development of both painting and sculpture, as being a polytheistic religion.
The question therefore is first whether the difference is so great, and next whether it is the real difference between fetichism and religion in the polytheistic stage.
The polytheistic theory is, as a rule, connected with the further contention that god-ideas are directly due to celestial phenomena.
Though this development was not without influence on the theological speculation which was dominated by traditional doctrines, it was never able to uproot the polytheistic tendency involved in the god-idea from the very beginning.
Monotheism is held to be a refined religious product of earlier polytheistic conceptions.
Religion threw off all lingering polytheistic notions and soared to the vision of One God.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "polytheistic" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word. Other words: heathen; pagan; pantheistic; religious; theistic
