Explanatory essays - The Power of Knowle: Essays That Explain the Important Things in Life - Sykalo Eugene 2025

Monotheism, Polytheism, and Pantheism: Exploring Different Theological Frameworks
World religions and religious studies

There’s a church down the street where the stained glass is cracked and the hymnals are out of tune. Every Sunday morning, the bell rings anyway. I don’t go in. But I pause. There’s something about the broken music that makes me ache like I’m remembering something I never lived.

That’s where this starts, I guess—me, standing outside a sanctuary, eavesdropping on the sacred.

Because when we talk about faith—not the starched-collar kind but the tangled, messy human kind—we’re also talking about hunger. For meaning, for connection, for someone (or something) to whisper back when we scream into the void.

And when that hunger gets language, it turns into systems. Myths, prayers, theology textbooks heavy enough to kill a man. Enter: monotheism, polytheism, pantheism. Three ways humans have tried to answer the same unbearable question: Who’s out there, if anyone?

Monotheism: The One, the Only, the Unknowable

Let me start with a confession: I have always been drawn to monotheism the way a moth flings itself at a lightbulb. There’s something intoxicating about the idea of One God—not just a god among gods, but the God. Singular. Supreme. The Alpha and Omega with a capital Everything.

Christianity, Islam, Judaism—these are the big three, the ones you meet first in a world religions class. And yeah, I’ve read the books. The stories that swirl around Abraham and Isaac, the desert prophets, the quiet carpenter with splinters in his hands. The God who speaks in burning bushes and thunder, who demands obedience but also mercy, who floods the Earth and then promises never again.

There’s order here. A moral architecture. One divine will, one ultimate justice, even if it’s slow and obscure and sometimes cruel.

But also: silence. Deafening, holy silence.

Monotheism, at its core, feels like loving a mountain. Majestic, unmoving, above you in every sense. You can cry at its feet, scratch prayers into its rockface, but it will not bend to you. If it loves you back, it does so in riddles.

And yet—there’s power in that, too. In knowing, or at least believing, that you are seen by someone who isn’t just a projection of your own needs. That your suffering might matter in a story that stretches far beyond you.

Still, I wonder: why do so many monotheistic traditions also seem obsessed with control? With heresy, obedience, fear dressed up as faith?

Maybe it’s the price of absolutes. When God is One, there’s no room for shadows.

Polytheism: The Party of the Gods (and Also the Wars)

Now imagine the opposite. Not one God, but many. Not a monolith, but a mosaic. Hinduism, Shinto, ancient Greek and Norse traditions, the living practices of indigenous cultures that Westerners still dare to call "mythology"—polytheism is messy, loud, teeming with contradictions.

I love it.

I love the way polytheistic faiths let their deities bicker and seduce and destroy and heal. I love that there’s a god of doorways (hi, Janus), and a god of wine (Dionysus, you beautiful disaster), and that the divine can show up as a mischievous fox spirit or a weeping goddess or a literal thunder-wielding beefcake.

In polytheism, gods are close. Fallible. Funny, even. They reflect back the chaos of human life instead of pretending to tame it.

There’s comfort in that—like looking at a starry sky and realizing it’s not a singular eye watching you, but a chorus of voices, each one bearing witness to a different part of you. Your rage. Your lust. Your need to build, to break, to belong.

Of course, this too has its shadows. Divine jealousy, cosmic soap operas, rituals that sometimes demand blood. Power struggles don’t vanish just because you spread them across a council of gods.

But still—polytheism feels like a wild garden compared to monotheism’s cathedral. You can wander. You can get lost and still be seen.

And maybe that’s the point: you’re not expected to be whole in the presence of many gods. Just real.

Pantheism: When God Is Everything (and Nothing Makes Sense)

Okay—wait. Let me start again.

There was a night in college when I laid on the roof after a thunderstorm, soaked to the bone, and thought: Maybe God isn’t a person. Maybe God is the rain. The wet shingles. The static in the air. The pulse behind the stars.

That’s pantheism. The idea that everything is divine. That God isn’t in the universe, God is the universe. No hierarchy. No temple. Just… all of it. All the time.

There’s a poetic arrogance in that. Or maybe it’s humility dressed as madness. I don’t know. Spinoza called it “God or Nature,” and people excommunicated him for it. But pantheism keeps showing up, like a weed through concrete. In mystic poetry. In quantum physics. In the kid who drops acid and says, “We’re all one, man,” and maybe he’s not wrong.

But if pantheism is beautiful, it’s also slippery. Try praying to a tree and see how fast the wind forgets your name. Try finding justice in a worldview where everything just is.

Still—there’s something in me that wants this to be true. That wants to believe the divine is woven into dirt and ash and dog hair and decay. That holiness isn’t somewhere else. It’s here. And here. And here.

Interlude: What If We’re All Wrong?

I keep circling back to the same question: what if no one’s right? Or—what if everyone is?

What if theology is just anthropology in drag? Us dressing up our deepest needs in robes and incense?

Or what if it’s more than that? What if every system—monotheism’s moral gravity, polytheism’s vibrant plurality, pantheism’s cosmic intimacy—is one perspective on the same ungraspable thing? Like blindfolded poets touching different parts of the same elephant god.

Sometimes I think belief isn’t about answers at all. It’s about framing the silence in ways we can live with.

Faith as Fragment

Let me tell you about the boy I loved who lit candles even though he didn’t believe in anything. “Just in case,” he said, smiling like it wasn’t breaking his heart. He used to quote the Bhagavad Gita on late walks: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

He meant it ironically, I think. Or maybe not.

Faith is weird like that. It leaks into people. Even the ones who claim they’re beyond it. Especially them.

I think we’re all stitched together from sacred fragments: a grandmother’s rosary, a Quran verse half-remembered, a forest that felt holy when we were kids.

We pretend we’ve evolved past the gods, but on bad nights, we still bargain with the ceiling.

So What Do I Believe?

Hell if I know.

I believe in a God I argue with. I believe in ghosts and gods I don’t pray to. I believe in kindness as sacrament and silence as punishment. I believe in singing off-key and lighting candles for no reason.

I believe the divine is both love and absence. A fever dream. A gut instinct. A question mark etched into the soft part of your ribs.

I believe all theology is poetry, and all poetry is blasphemy, and that maybe that’s okay.

Maybe that’s the point.

Ending: No Benediction

There’s no neat bow here. Just this: on some days, I miss God like you miss an old song. On others, I think the whole thing’s a con, a smoke show, a beautiful illusion we built so we wouldn’t lose our minds in the dark.

But then I hear the church bell again. Off-key, cracked. Still ringing.

And I pause.

Not to be dramatic, but—I think that counts.