There is a THIRST for "What India Alone Can Offer", the Overwhelming Living Presence of Gods - Edward Butler

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

Aparna Sridhar

March 31, 2020

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 traveled 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.

Many westerners have come to India and been influenced by Indian notions
of spirituality and Bhakti. What is the uniqueness of the Indian
tradition which attracts non-Indians, according to you?

People coming from cultures whose indigenous polytheisms and wisdom
traditions were extinguished, or from which only a trickle has been
allowed to flow, cannot but thirst for what India alone can offer,
namely the overwhelming, living presence of her Gods. There are other
living traditions, particularly of an initiatory kind, but it is only in
India that the entire interdependent ecosystem of devotion is present,
ritual and contemplation mutually informing one another. Outsiders,
however, may not fully appreciate the extent to which all of the
elements of this ecosystem are essential to one another and to the
whole. And yet it is from this organic totality that they derived what
nourishment they took for themselves.

Rituals are always comforting… what is the role of ritual in
understanding a philosophy? Especially Indian philosophy?

Ritual is more than merely comforting; it is a vital connection between
us and the Gods, and a way for us to participate in the mode of being
which belongs to Them. Plato, in his Timaeus, states through the title
character that if we intend to inquire concerning the universe, we must
invoke the Gods and Goddesses, praying that all we say may be acceptable
to Them, in the first place, and secondly to ourselves (Tim. 27c). The
great Platonic philosopher Proclus, in the first chapter of his Platonic
Theology, says similarly that everyone possessing any degree of
intelligence begins their undertakings from the Gods, and especially in
works concerning the Gods, for we cannot expect to understand that which
is divine other than by being illuminated by the Gods, nor convey it to
others without being guided by Them. And philosophy concerns the Gods
even where it does not explicitly treat of Them, for it concerns the
characteristics of divine being, that way of being that the Gods most of
all possess, but in which we too share insofar as we are blessed by Them
either directly or indirectly. Hence Aristotle recognizes in his
Metaphysics (983a6-10) that the goal of philosophy must be either to
know the nature of the Gods, or to know what it knows in the way that it
would befit the Gods Themselves to know.

And so ritual, as action directed toward the Gods and Their way of
being, is essential to philosophy. This is especially clear, of course,
in the case of Indian philosophy, a dominant strain of which is rooted
in direct reflection upon ritual action. A tree does not, once grown,
pull its roots up after it; and what has nourished philosophy in its
infancy remains its source of vitality.

Philosophers often speak of the intuition or insight which grounds
thought; I would say that this philosophical intuition of truth is
itself theophany, a perception of the Gods Themselves, as is attested by
its beauty and the indelible impression it leaves upon the soul. To this
extent, we ought perhaps to regard philosophy, when it is practiced
correctly, to be a sacred rite as well, one which honors the Gods
through the kind of thought it practices.

If you had to recommend one book to understand Sanathana Dharma, which
would you choose?

I would most recommend the Ṛgveda and the Mahābhārata. In any tradition,
what is most important is to engage with the sacred texts and let them
speak to one as they will. Beyond that, I personally have found the
works of Sri Aurobindo helpful.

Does the concept of Brahman have parallels elsewhere in the world?

Not precise one-to-one correspondences, but I think that Brahman bears
comparison to being (einai, on) or substance (ousia) in Greek thinkers,
in certain respects to Aristotle’s prime unmoved mover, in Chinese
thought to the notion of dao, and probably to ideas in many other
indigenous wisdom traditions. The point of such a comparison is never,
in any case, to arrive at complete substitutability, but rather to open
a dialogue.

Do you think Hinduism is understood by the world? Why is there so much
intolerance to values it holds dear?

Hinduism is not understood by the world, unless we should say that in
the very intolerance toward it, there is a certain unconscious
understanding of it that motivates hostility, because of the repressions
that exposure to it threatens to undermine.

The intolerance toward Hinduism is rooted in fear and loathing of
polytheism. Polytheism was not simply left behind in the West, it did
not die of natural causes; in fact, it didn’t die at all, because the
Gods are still here. Christendom has been fighting its war against Them
for two millennia now, and it grows tired. This is why when Europeans
came into contact with actually existing polytheisms in Asia, Africa,
the Americas and Oceania in the early modern era, it set off a frenzy of
destruction, subjugation and inhumanity. The old enemy was back.

Religion in India permeates every walk of life… are people comfortable
with the whole package?

This is an excellent question. As I indicated above, I think that many
outsiders seek enlightenment from India’s wisdom traditions while
regarding India’s Gods as mere wrapping paper for some “message”. This
is the commodification of spirituality, the idea that there is an
essence, on the one hand, and something merely external, on the other.
But an essence derived in this fashion is not universal in the true
sense, which is simply about openness, about the possibility of
engagement, but instead is universal in the sense that all manner of
things can be reduced to their cash value. That is what is going on when
the “universal” is opposed to the “particularistic” or the “sectarian”;
it is about ease of appropriation.

There is another kind of universality, in which we are only ever dealing
with the whole package. We cannot separate out the parts because it is
only as living wholes, and not as dismembered limbs, that traditions
communicate with one another. This is true universality, the
universality of a pluralistic and polycentric world with traditions,
whole and integral in themselves, entering into dialogue.

What are your thoughts on Western Indology today? There are many
fundamental problematic areas. Do you have any ideas on how we can fix them?

Until Western Indology recognizes its complicity in the colonial
enterprise, and particularly in the cultural genocide that is Christian
conversion, it cannot be redeemed.

But we must recognize, further, that the entire academic study of
religion is fatally flawed insofar as it is divided into so-called
Theology, which is methodologically monotheistic, and Religious Studies,
which is methodologically atheistic. The only way forward for the study
of religion is methodological polytheism, because there can be no honest
study of religions without granting immediately and transparently the
existence of the Gods religions posit, the theophanies at their heart.
One cannot simply treat the objects of religious regard in diverse
traditions as either confused representations of some reality beyond
them, on the one hand, or as mere patterns of human behaviour, on the
other, and claim to be pursuing knowledge. This is rather the pursuit of
power, and an example, moreover, of the functional identity of
monotheism and atheism, which is obscured by the conflict between them.
They have a common goal in the suppression of the primary experience of
Gods, which is theism itself. Polytheism just is theism. This is why the
existence of other people’s Gods wasn’t and isn’t, generally speaking, a
problem for polytheists. It’s not because they think all Gods are the
same; you don’t get to tolerance by annihilating difference, but by
recognizing it. And this is the basis of all knowledge, as well.