Reflection N° 8 - Polytheism

Numerous Teachings refer to polytheism and monotheism, and as religious literature has diversified original meanings throughout centuries bringing confusion and mistake, and even falseness, we feel that certain reflections are necessary about this matters, taking as a guide Master Bovisio’s accurate remarks in his works. We’ll start by concepts, not by names; many controversies came into being from multiple titles produced in History to name an unitary thing.
Always we are told about the source of the universal in the singular, and this singularity has been called One, Unique, Absolute, God, Unknown, He, It, Eternal, and so on, according to traditions and language of peoples. Oneness of principle lies on the collective unconscious, spontaneously applied to all above-mentioned names; it is an evidence previous to reasoning and dogmas. Monotheistic, polytheistic and pantheistic religions and beliefs are sustained by oneness of the creative principle. If the reader wants to consider in depth this part of the matter, should meditate about first Teachings in Book “Cosmogony”.
Different names are pronounced and written on human language. The single name is secret and unknown for some religions, and its diversity is infinite for others. Some religions say certain name is real and true, and the rest is false. Other religions admit several names, and mix up, confound and create chaotic forms. At present, this matter is quite mixed up, including living persons who say to be avatars, divine emanations, with his own rituals and multitudinous followers. Typically as an ending Age, God of men is liquefied in a big social beater of disordered masses without destination. We would wish to clarify in some way, now that a great Christian crusade confronts a holy war on the other side, killing, smashing and inflicting horror to all peoples of Earth.
We live in multiplicity; more than 6,000 millions of persons, who are Humanity, are globalized in world communication net, trips, business, finance, tourism, readings, Internet; in fact, everything. And on this global village there are many gods intercommunicated and conversing, as if they stayed in the old Olympus. Recently, in Assisi, Leaders of several religions –Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Protestants, Orthodox– went together to pray for the world peace, as an exemplary and fraternal spirit of religious tolerance. It was a response to the global war of George W. Bush’s Christian crusade, confronting the Islamic Holy War. By all this we need to expound foundations of monotheism and polytheism.

a. War of Two Suns

Master Santiago clearly explains the source of this religious discrepancy in Ancient Egypt, because he was one of the protagonists, as High Priest in the Temple of Amon, Thebes, during the kingdom of Amenophis IV, later named Akhnaton (Aton, name of the solar disk –physical, single, monotheistic; and Amon, name of the spirit of the Sun, also Michael, First Ruler of the Planetary System –polytheistic). We recommend to see Books “Planetary System”, “Comparative Religions”, and “History of Esoteric Orders”.
During first Root Races, certain supra-physical powers of men were so significant that they did not need temples and religions because of their direct and permanent contact with Great Initiates leading them. Religions gradually begin with the Aryan Race as men are losing the astral sight, a blindness increased after the 1,500 Years War, with the last Atlanteans smashed. So the Great Order of Fire is founded on Mount Kaor, which preserved the ancient wisdom and psychic powers that reached the historic Egypt, by secret transmission from Masters to Disciples. A homogeneous and single divine concept prevailed everywhere, but monotheistic and polytheistic discrepancies begin in the wake of certain actions of the heretic Pharaoh Amenophis IV, 1375-1357 b. C., influenced by his Semitic wife Nefertiti, born in Mitanni, North of present Iraq.
In the antiquity, each city, each region or province had a local protective god, such as now cities have a Patron Saint (in Mendoza, Argentina, Santiago; in Buenos Aires city, Saint Martin of Tours, and so on). But in Ancient Egypt, the great single God was Ra, the Sun. Moreover, each nome or province had its local God. In Thebes, capital of the Egyptian Kingdom, Amon was its local God. But Amenophis IV decided to abolish all Gods and different temples along with their clergy, and to devote to a single personal God –Aton– being He the only High Priest. All temples were closed, priests persecuted cruelly, and the Pharaoh built to himself a new capital with treasures stolen from other temples. This new religion was materialistic, sensorial and exclusive. When this epileptic Pharaoh died, his whole reformation expired; Thebes was again capital, eliminated worships were restored, inscriptions with Pharaoh’s name deleted, and his memory was dishonored. But the seed of a monotheistic, exclusive and dualistic religion (matter and spirit) persisted in Semitic religions taken by Moses and the Hebrew to Palestine, and from there to new religions to arise as the time went by: Christianity and its branches, and Islam and its different currents. These religions conquered all nations of the world, with the exception of some Asiatic cultural regions: the planet is of them.
Master Santiago, in Teaching 10, Book “History of Esoteric Orders”, says, Jesus “Is a true forerunner of what still remains a hope: union of polytheism and monotheism; that is, purity of polytheistic conception with accessibility of all men to a monotheistic concept. In short, Redemption of all men”. We feel that this will be one of the capital tasks of the Great Solar Initiate Maitreya.

b. Monotheism and Polytheism

There is a popular belief according to which monotheistic religions worship the unique and true God, and that polytheistic religions are fetishistic and adore many idols –black people in Africa, islanders in Polynesia, and so on–; this belief becomes general during first centuries of Christianity, from Alexandria, when Christian multitudes, pushed by fanatic monks, fought believers of the Greek pagan religion; when Christianity became official religion of State, under Constantine, ancient beliefs disappeared. When Islam appeared, these monotheistic religions fought one another in order to make prevail their personal God. When Spaniards conquered America, they destroyed all temples and “idols” of quite ancient regional civilizations. In the antiquity, religions were a decisive factor of power, and rulers used them to dominate the people and other nations, under flags of their personal gods. Today factors of power lie in political ideologies, capitalism, communism, socialism, and so on, and in armies and money. Today, a controversy between monotheism and polytheism means nothing politically or spiritually. But we can understand the structure and intimate meaning of this conceptions by applying to Santiago Bovisio’s Teachings, who has expounded them in above-recommended Books.
Polytheism is the way of harmonious knowledge about all spiritual and material things, and its effect is wisdom. Monotheism is the way of feeling, and its result is compassion. In Teaching “Esoteric Arabian Wisdom and the Veiled Woman”, of the above-mentioned Book, Master Santiago expounds quite clearly these two conceptions linked to an ideal that still is unattainable: “Love with Wisdom”
Doubtlessly, monotheistic religions have confronted one another during the Christian age, and now, at the end of Pisces, hatred moves them and became savage and uncontrollable. See what occurs right now in Palestine to understand more properly that any text: three dominating monotheistic religions want to possess exclusively their holy place, Jerusalem, where the Savior was crucified, eliminating other competitors, such as they did formerly. The monotheistic dialectical cycle ends with the destruction of this region, and begins a new space for Humanity. The karmic cycle ends by paying the debt. The American Sub-Race cannot begin while interests of the ancient Sub-Race persist; it must die definitely like it occurs with humans. The Teutonic Sub-Race, which started along with the 1,500 Years War, previous to the whole disappearance of the previous Celtic Race, began with very primitive and savage individuals, like cavemen living by hunting and fishing, and upon this foundations, as millennia went by, present technological civilization is erected. After a mass destruction and annihilation, when this planet is again deprived of radioactivity and pollution, and rivers and woods are restored and reforested, and survivors come back to innocence, how to start the new age with spiritualized materialism, harmony between monotheism and polytheism, and Wisdom with Love? Nobody has prophesied this, but the Teachings suggest likely guidelines of Maitreya’s work.
Master Bovisio lived from 1904 to 1962, and as we said, in his former incarnation he was High Priest in the Temple of Amon, Egypt, where polytheism flourished during the Two Suns’ War. More than thirty centuries passed between a life and another, a long time only experienced by great beings, and polytheism disappeared totally. As he incarnated in the first half of twentieth century, he gave men the most complete and deepest study about polytheism, formerly preserved by Secret Orders under strict secret, and even meditation and contemplation techniques, poses, hymns and occult prayers, and physical and astral knowledge, which only a Master of Wisdom belonging to Amon’s School can transmit, according to a cosmic polytheism vision. He left all this by writing, and handed over to his disciples of the Order founded to disseminating the Renunciation Message. When the Order disappeared with its intrinsic compromises in last decades of the past century, Teachings remained free and disseminated on the world by communication media. During the first dissemination year, more than 554,000 messages have been downloaded by particular individuals in more than 35 countries of all continents.
What did Santiago Bovisio’s presence mean, –an exceptional witness and one of the protagonists in the fight between polytheism and monotheism, when the sign of Pisces ends with the millenary period of Jewish, Christian and Moslem monotheism? Master Santiago emphatically exclaimed in the face of many witnesses, during a ceremonial presided by him in Buenos Aires, 1959, “Three thousand years of obscurantism!”. A clear and touching expression uttered by an ancient priest of Amon, who claimed for a place for the whole knowledge of the truth.
Modern nations and ideological systems furthered by them are collapsing by economic crises, injustice and extermination wars, and by their irreconcilable contradictions. Monotheism is exhausted. Science breakthroughs and planetary development are on the brink of crisis, and there is a hope for humanity: renewed polytheism, open material and supraphysical knowledge, with a man wholly realized, in harmony and synthesis with the monotheistic feeling. Perhaps this is Maitreya’s mission in the beginning of Aquarius –a new way to live for all: Wisdom in Love.

c. Toward Unity

Monotheists are sunk in a trouble, that is, duality –God on the one hand, and matter on the other. They never could solve this dilemma. Sometimes they became fanatical and cruel, like in Christian Middle Ages, a period with exaggerated pair of opposites, with a quite high and inaccessible God, and the world with a hell full of sins; and being unable to solve this contradiction in a doctrinaire way, they increased the number of processions, Mendicant Orders, Inquisition stakes, and extermination of rebels. Now we are in another similar and opposite age, with materialistic omnipotence: genetic laboratories commit frightful abuses, a cold impiety covers African fields with corpses, money power smashes weak nations from the International Monetary Fund, crudest sensuality became general behavior, and quite above, invisible and mute in the dark, the lonely God of monotheistic religions looks at the void and says nothing.
But we are at the end of Pisces, two fish looking at opposite directions, and solutions operated by elementary collapse of compounds –dissolution. When a biologic organism dies, its compounds disintegrate in a regressive and deeper and deeper way, and eventually reach an elementary formless substance, like in the beginning, when its activity started. In a human organism, this separation continues on supraphysical planes for very long time, and eventually only a synthesis of the entity remains, memory of what this entity lived, and the seed-atom that will enable to realize another life. Also Races dissolve and transmute to open a new cycle. An hermetic axiom says, “As above, so below. As below, so above. So that the miracle of Unity be accomplished”.
These two conceptions guiding the progress of Humanity for centuries –separate monotheism and polytheism– are incomplete, like mind and heart when the two act independently. Man has been created as indissoluble unity: only in cultures and personal religions they are divorced to conquer some parts of the reality. Now a new cycle begins, it is wide as the former, and will last 24,000 years. Here is a prophesied mission for this immediate future –re-union of pair of opposites. The Great Solar Initiate Maitreya’s work will be like that, nothing more nor less.