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some form among all primitive peoples. Ethnologists must admit, he said, that “the possibility of interpreting monotheism as a part of a general intellectual and ethical progress must be abandoned. . . .” He showed that monotheism often existed side by side with polytheism, animism, and pantheism. Radin regarded monotheism and polytheism merely as indicators of those differences in philosophical temperament that exist among all groups of people.
    As for monotheism in our society, Radin observed, “The factors concerned in the complete credal triumph of monotheism in Judaism, Christianity and Mohammedanism have never been satisfactorily explained, but they are emphatically of an individual historical and psychological nature.” He added that no progress in solving this riddle will be made “until scholars rid themselves, once and for all, of the curious notion that everything possesses an evolutionary history,” and that the great mistake lies in applying Darwinian thinking to analyses of culture. Radin considered primitive societies to be as logical as modern ones, often having a truer, more concrete sense of reality. Most primitive societies exhibit all types of temperaments and abilities: “The idealist and the materialist, the dreamer and the realist, have always been with us.” 7
    Harold Moss, a Neo-Pagan writer and priest of the Church of the Eternal Source, once wrote that monotheism existed in many tribal societies ; many later societies developed a polytheistic theology as they became more complex and sophisticated. “Today,” he said, “in place of a single Christianity with multiple Gods, we see a shattered Christianity, each sect worshipping a slightly different God.” 8
    Another problem confronts us when we attempt to look at old and new Pagan religions with fresh eyes: the notion of “idolatry” and the image of dull natives abasing themselves before a stone idol. I remember seeing this image often in books I read as a child— The Story of Chanukah is one that I recall vividly. It was easy to feel pity for the poor heathens, as well as a patronizing superiority. Monotheistic religions have long assumed that the worshipper who stands before a statue or a grove of trees can see no further than that statue or grove, that such a worshipper invests divinity in those things and nothing more, and, contrarily, that other people’s worship of neutral, omnipotent, and unknowable deities is necessarily pure and sublime.
    The best refutation of these notions is in Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends . The statue and sacred grove were transparent windows to experience, Roszak says—means by which the witness was escorted through to sacred ground beyond and participated in the divine. The rejection of animism, first by the Jews and later, most dogmatically, by certain Christian groups, resulted in a war on art and all imaginative activities. Roszak finds no evidence that the animist world view is false. He notes that none of us has entered the animist world sufficiently to judge it existentially.
    Prejudice and ethnocentrism aside, what we know for a fact is that, outside our narrow cultural experience, in religious rites both sophisticated and primitive, human beings have been able to achieve a sacramental vision of being, and that this may well be the wellspring of human spiritual consciousness. From that rich source there flow countless religious and philosophical traditions. The differences between these traditions—between Eskimo shamanism and medieval alchemy, between Celtic druidism and Buddhist Tantra—are many; but an essentially magical worldview is common to them all. . . . This diverse family of religions and philosophies [represents] the Old Gnosis—the old way of knowing, which delighted in finding the sacred in the profane. . . . I regard it as the essential and supreme impulse of the religious life. This is not, of