One of the biggest, and often most heated, discussions happening in Polytheistic circles is that of ”hard” versus ”soft” Polytheism; whether the Deities are all unique Individuals or whether They are aspects of a single Ultimate Deity. I’ve written a post in the past about how I believe the two are not inherently contradictory. To give you the TL;DR version: An all-emcompassing, omnipresent Consciousness doesn’t necessarily negate the existence of unique and separate consciousnesses which exist within the larger One.
But then comes another question: What exactly is the One? If you believe that it is synonymous with the universe itself then that is called Pantheism. If you believe the universe is within the One/God(dess) but that the One is greater than the universe then you are a Panentheist. Both Polytheistic Pantheism and Polytheistic Panentheism exist but as the latter is the one I’m leaning more towards, it’s the one I’ve been thinking more about how to explain. And while meditating on the subject, a helpful image came to my mind and which I just had to put on paper:
Here the all-encompassing Consciousness is the red circle and everything within it, the created material world/universe is in orange and the individual Deities’ consciousnesses exist each within Their own blue lines. In this model, the Deities are all omniscient within the created world. This is not something all Panentheistic Polytheists believe and if they had to draw their own illustration of their belief system, it would look different. One’s personal belief about how much consciousness is shared between individual Deities might also affect where the blue lines intersect.
Son Of Freya 