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Root severence

Source: TW

People who speculate about rudra and shiva or for that matter kumAra and murukkan being different deities or the product of some imagined syncretism should be simply seen as too dim-witted and ignorant for any consideration at all.

This sort of atomization is endemic in the modern academic reception of polytheist traditions, both ancient and continuous, but is especially popular in order to sever contemporary traditions from deeper roots that might be used to demand respect or protection.

Notice that despite the ambient skeptical historicism in academia, this sort of critique will never do the sort of harm to “religions of the book” that it does to those, because whatever their historical construction, their intentionality is fixed by the text itself.

Moreover, the critique from historical construction will never do the harm to monotheisms in general that it does to polytheisms, because the very lack of determination of the former’s “God”, and its withdrawal from concrete presence, aligns its ideology with the historicism.

Polytheisms can evade this trap to a large degree by not taking the bait that invites them to dissolve their Gods into immanence, by making the transcendence that in fact these traditions have always claimed for their Gods somehow ideologically suspect.

One often finds a knee-jerk reaction against any determinations of “transcendence” among those otherwise well-meaning toward polytheisms, due to an assumption that transcendence entails monotheism, which is by no means the case if we consult actual historical polytheisms.