Chapter 168. One, Two, Three or None: Dualism, Monotheism, Trinities and Nondualism Across the Traditions

Counting the ultimate principles is one of the oldest ways to classify religions, and also one of the most contested. Issitt and Main warn that the categories leak: “Within all polytheistic religions, there is still a belief in an ultimate god or force that is the source of all creation and divinity … On the other side of the proverbial coin, all monotheistic faiths have semidivine beings or other objects that bridge the divide” [Issitt & Main, Hidden Religion, #66220]. This chapter follows the God-concepts of the study across that spectrum: two (Iranian and Manichaean dualism), one (Israel, Islam), three-in-one (Christianity, the Hindu Trimurti), the One beyond number (Advaita, Hermetism, Kabbalah, Masonry), and none (early Buddhism, Confucius, the Dao). It then sets the two large comparative theories in the library against each other, Pike’s universal triad and Armstrong’s Axial Age, and ends with two post-religious redefinitions.

1. Two: Iranian dualism and the “monotheism” dispute

Chapter 11 set out the competing labels for Zoroastrianism: Haug’s and Dhalla’s monotheism, Boyce’s “dualistic monotheism”, and Duchesne-Guillemin’s “monotheism tempered by polytheism and dualism”. Issitt and Main’s Hidden Religion comes down on the monotheist side: “Zoroastrianism is one of the world’s oldest monotheistic religions, and many of the concepts found in the world’s Abrahamic traditions have been influenced by Zoroastrian cosmology. Zoroastrians believe in a single God, Ahura Mazda, who is an ‘impersonal’ God, meaning that Ahura Mazda is not thought of as a humanlike being but rather as an impenetrably complex, infinite entity” [Issitt & Main, #66220, “Zoroastrianism”]. Moulton puts the emphasis on the prophet himself: Zarathushtra “most desired the uniqueness of the Creator as the central feature of the faith”, whereas the framers of the Haptanghaiti “compromised monotheism seriously” [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, “The Prophet and the Reform”]. Classical observers already saw the ambiguity. Plutarch, in Geden’s selection, records that “by some it is maintained that there are two gods, rivals as it were, authors the one of good and the other of evil. Others confine the name of god to the good power, the other they term demon, as was done by Zoroaster the Magian” [Geden, Select Passages Illustrating Mithraism, #38272, Plutarch, De Iside 46].

Mithra sits in the middle of this structure. Plutarch continues: “To Mithra therefore the Persians give the name of the mediator” [Geden, #38272]. The Statius scholiast removes the Iranian frame altogether: “different nations give to Apollo different names. The Achaemenians call him Titan, the Egyptians Osiris, the Persians Mithra and worship him in a cave” [Geden, #38272, Statius, Thebaid I scholia]. One figure is thus a yazata under Ahura Mazda, the “mediator” between two powers, and a solar god in a Graeco-Roman syncretism (chs. 20, 22).

The radical form of dualism, in which two principles are equally uncreated, belongs to Mani (ch. 27) and passes through the Paulicians and Bogomils to the Cathars (ch. 61). Culianu’s structural analysis of the Western dualist gnoses is discussed in chs. 40 and 46. Pike sums up the dualist symbol: “Two, or the Duad, is the symbol of Antagonism; of Good and Evil, Light and Darkness. It is Cain and Abel, Eve and Lilith, Jachin and Boaz, Ormuzd and Ahriman, Osiris and Typhon” [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717].

The older layers covered in Part 1 show where these pairs came from, and they are not dualist in the Manichaean sense. Before Zarathushtra, in Boyce’s reconstruction, the Indo-Iranians had no rival god of evil. They had a “great triad of ethical divinities, the Lords, Av. ‘Ahura’, Skt. ‘Asura'” guarding asha, an amoral warrior Indra, and evil attributed “mainly to earth-bound devils, sorcerers and the like” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116, “1.2.3 The Old Iranian gods”]. What later looks like cosmic opposition began as a split in vocabulary. Sanskrit asura and Avestan ahura both mean “lord”. The Vedic asuras became “enemy of the gods”, while the Avestan daēvas, cognate with deva, became demons, and Indra was listed “sometimes second only to Angra Mainyu himself” [Wikipedia: Asura; Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-Iranian religion] (chs. 6–7). Boyce ties this inversion to the rise of chariot-warriors devoted to Indra [#55116, “1.2.7”]. Krishna reports competing explanations from Haug, Hale and a Mitanni-Assyrian hypothesis [Krishna, The Book of Demons, #50894]. The sovereign pair Mitra-Varuna was explicitly not a dualism. Dumézil, as Ries reports him, calls their relation “contrast but not opposition”, “neither hostility nor rivalry” [Ries, Il culto di Mithra, #38276, “Mitra e Varuṇa, dei sovrani”]. Eliade holds that “the Avestan Mithra-Ahura thus answers to the Vedic binomial Mitra-Varuna” [Eliade, Morfologia religiilor, #46394], which makes the later “mediator” Mithra the heir of a co-sovereign. Egypt’s corresponding pair was order and chaos, not two gods: Maat was set “in place of isfet”, and the king had to keep her there [Wikipedia: Maat] (ch. 4). Pike’s “Typhon” is the Greek name for Set found in Plutarch, whose account Hancock calls the most detailed version of the Osiris myth [Hancock, Amprentele Zeilor, #14120]. In the Egyptian material reported in ch. 4, Horus and Set contest the throne as a lawsuit in which Thoth insists “we must follow what is just” [Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology, #72968, “Horus”].

2. One: from El’s council to exclusive monotheism, and tawhid

The road to the One begins in the polytheisms of Part 1. Mesopotamian religion was polytheistic and henotheistic: each city exalted its own patron, Tallqvist counted about 2,400 divine names, and the gods were “high-up masters who had to be obeyed and feared, as opposed to loved and adored”, in Bottéro’s phrase [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Supremacy followed the ruling city. Marduk became king of the gods with Babylon, and from about 1300 BC the Assyrians tried to identify Ashur with Enlil, “an effort to cast him as the chief of gods” [Black and Green, Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia, #70458, “Assur”] (ch. 3). Egypt produced Atenism, often called the first monotheism (ch. 4). For about twenty years Akhenaten’s Aten was the state god, and “the worship of other gods” was met “with persecution”. Its classification is disputed between “monotheistic or monolatristic”, and some Egyptologists call it henotheistic [Wikipedia: Atenism]. Assmann distinguishes Akhenaten’s monotheism, which “remained rooted within the cosmos”, from the transcendent “counter-religion” of Moses and its “Mosaic distinction” [Wikipedia: Moses the Egyptian]. Redford found “little or no evidence” that Akhenaten was a progenitor of biblical monotheism [Wikipedia: Moses and Monotheism] (ch. 4). At Ugarit, Smith describes a four-tier divine household in which “El and Athirat are the divine royal parents of the pantheon” [Smith, The Origins of Biblical Monotheism, #64008] (ch. 5).

Day presents Israelite monotheism as the end-point of a long process. Yahweh was equated with El and took over his “heavenly court, the sons of God”. “Originally, these were gods, but as monotheism became absolute, so these were demoted to the status of angels”. The inscription “Yahweh and his Asherah” at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud reflects a time when Asherah, the consort of El, stood beside Yahweh [Day, Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan, #86469, chs. 1-2; see ch. 28]. The Deuteronomic revolution (ch. 30) and the Persian-period hardening of the theology (ch. 31) complete the course. Day holds, against Cross and de Moor, that “El and Yahweh were originally distinct deities that became amalgamated”, with Yahweh coming from the south, and that absolute monotheism “was first given explicit expression by the prophet Deutero-Isaiah” [Day, #86469, chs. 1, 8] (ch. 5). Armstrong stresses that the resulting exclusivism was something new: “Today we have become so familiar with the intolerance that has unfortunately been a characteristic of monotheism, that we may not appreciate that this hostility towards other gods was a new religious attitude. Paganism was an essentially tolerant faith” [Armstrong, A History of God, #68999]. Hidden Religion calls Judaism “the oldest surviving monotheistic religion and the first of the Abrahamic faiths” [Issitt & Main, #66220, “Judaism”]. The phrasing implicitly sets the “oldest” Zoroastrian claim against the “oldest surviving” Abrahamic one.

Islam pushes the oneness to its strictest form: “Islam rejects the Christian concept of the Trinity and believes instead that Allah is indivisible”, and the first shahada represents “Islam’s rejection” of “the worship of intermediary spirits, which may be minor gods or prophets” [Issitt & Main, #66220, “Islam”]. The internal Muslim debate over whether the Quran is created, which concerns whether anything can be co-eternal with God, is covered in ch. 76.

3. Three: Christian Trinity, Hindu Trimurti and Pike’s universal triad

The Christian solution, worked out at Nicaea (325) with the homoousios and at Constantinople (381) against the Arian subordination of the Son, is treated in ch. 55. The Christological splits of Ephesus and Chalcedon are covered in ch. 57. The Hindu “trinity” is less central than its fame suggests. Issitt and Main write: “Some Hindus have developed a trinity of gods, called the ‘Trimurti,’ which consists of the creator god Brahma, the preserver god Vishnu and the transformer or destroyer god Shiva. More commonly, Hindus tend to fall into three major sects, each distinguished by the worship of a separate manifestation of the supreme God or Brahman principle” [Issitt & Main, #66220, “Hinduism”].

Groups of three are older than either doctrine. At the head of the early Mesopotamian pantheon stood An, Enlil and Enki, with sky, rule of the world and the fresh-water abyss as their domains [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion; Black and Green, #70458] (ch. 3). Boyce’s reconstructed Indo-Iranian pantheon was itself headed by a “great triad” of Ahuras: Ahura Mazda, “the divine counterpart of the wise high priest”, with Varuna and Mithra as “guardians respectively of the oath and covenant” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.3”]. The reference survey treats the Ahura Mazda-Varuna equation as partial only [Wikipedia: Proto-Indo-Iranian religion] (ch. 6). Egypt worked more often in nines and eights than in threes. Heliopolis had its Ennead, from Atum to Nephthys, and Hermopolis its Ogdoad of four male-female pairs [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths]. The Osiris-Isis-Horus family that Pike takes as the model triad comes out of the Heliopolitan Ennead [Weaver, Egyptian Mythology, #66942] (ch. 4).

Pike makes the triad universal. In the Knight Commander lectures he lists triune deities, among them “Brahma-Vishnu-Siva” in India and in Egypt “OSIRIS, ISIS, and HORUS”, and he holds that “the mysteries of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, seem to have been the model of all other ceremonies of initiation” [Pike, #378717, “Comparative Theology and the Knight Commander Degree”]. In his account the Persian dualism is itself a triad reworked: “The Persians received from the Indians the doctrine of the three principles, and changed it to that of a principle of Life … and a principle of Death” [Pike, #378717]. He even reads the sky as a confession of trinity. Denebola, Arcturus and Spica “form an equilateral triangle, universal emblem of Perfection, and the Deity with His Trinity of Infinite Attributes, Wisdom, Power, and Harmony” [Pike, #378717]. Masonry’s own position, however, is not trinitarian. It “reverences all the great reformers. It sees in Moses … in Confucius and Zoroaster, in Jesus of Nazareth, and in the Arabian Iconoclast, Great Teachers of Morality, and Eminent Reformers, if no more: and allows every brother of the Order to assign to each such higher and even Divine Character as his Creed and Truth require” [Pike, #378717, “Masonry’s Universal Religion and the Example of Christ”; ch. 111].

4. The One beyond number: nondualism and the “ancient theology”

The Indian schools divide over the relation between the One and the many: Shankara’s Advaita (nonduality, the world as maya), Ramanuja’s qualified nondualism, and Madhva’s dualism of God, souls and matter (ch. 92). Kashmir Shaiva nondualism appears in ch. 91. In the West the Hermetic and Neoplatonic One, and the prisca theologia that Ficino and Pico traced from Hermes and Zoroaster to Plato (chs. 45, 47), make all named gods into reflections of a hidden source. Egypt had already stated a version of this. In the Theban theology Amun, once the “hidden” member of the Ogdoad, is the hidden force behind all things and all gods are “merely aspects of Amun”. At Memphis, Ptah’s thought produces Atum and the Ennead [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths] (ch. 4). The Kabbalistic Ein Sof is the Jewish form of that source (chs. 104–105). Pike gives its Lurianic emanation: the Supreme Being “withdrew within Himself, formed around Him a void space, and shot forth His first emanation, a ray of light” [Pike, #378717]. He also gives its Philonic counterpart, “that the Supreme Being is a centre of Light whose rays or emanations pervade the Universe” [Pike, #378717]. Issitt and Main observe the sociological side of this current: “Many modern religions are based on theories of secret, lost knowledge from the ancient world”, and Gnosticism “was an inspiration for the founders of Theosophy” [Issitt & Main, #66220].

5. None: Buddhist, Confucian and Daoist reticence

At the far end are the systems that make no claim about a creator. The atheism question in early Buddhism is examined in ch. 87, and the impersonal Dao in ch. 96. Wall groups Confucius and Laozi together: “Both taught practically the same tenets. Neither taught anything about a god, or a future life, but Confucius formulated a version of the Golden Rule” [Wall, Sex and Sex Worship, #49273, “Other Beliefs”]. By his own definition (“A religion inculcates a worship of a god or gods”) such teaching is not strictly a religion at all [Wall, #49273]. Heisman, from a very different starting point, reaches a related comparison: “Of the major religions, Confucianism might be the closest analog to early Judaism. It is not simply because Confucius’s golden rule … is virtually identical to Hillel’s; versions of the same golden rule can be found in nearly all the major religions. Judaism and Confucianism both emphasize ancestral wisdom” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II].

6. Two comparative theories: Pike’s triad and Armstrong’s Axial Age

The library’s two large comparative theories explain the spread of God-concepts in opposite ways. Pike works by diffusion and symbol. One primeval doctrine, triune and solar-astronomical, passed from India and Egypt to Persia, Greece and Israel. Its forms differ, but Masonry can recover its core as a natural religion of the One God [Pike, #378717]. Armstrong works by parallel development. “The period 800-200 BCE has been termed the Axial Age”, in which new insights appeared independently in China, India, Israel and Greece [Armstrong, A History of God, #68999]. Doctrine was secondary in her account: “most of the Axial philosophers had no interest whatever in doctrine or metaphysics”. The sages would say that proving “God” or the “Absolute” first “was to put the cart before the horse. First you must commit yourself to the ethical life” [Armstrong, The Great Transformation, #82303, conclusion]. On Pike’s model the number of gods is a surface variation over one esoteric truth. On Armstrong’s it hardly matters, because practice comes before belief. Heisman’s remark on the near-universal golden rule supports Armstrong’s emphasis on ethics, but he explains it in evolutionary rather than spiritual terms [Heisman, #38252].

7. Post-religious redefinitions: Keshe and Heisman

Keshe removes the mediating layer that Mithra, the prophets and the clergy occupy in the older systems. In KSW 629 he asks: “Then why does Man need an intermediary in a fake name of Prophets and ayatollahs to understand the work of his Creator? There is no room” [Keshe, KSW 629, #378341]. The workshop summary of KSW 636 lists “Don’t need Prophets” and “No difference between Soul of the Creator (STC) & Soul of [the Man]” [Keshe, KSW 636, #378348]. In KSW 205 Keshe even speaks in the Creator’s voice about the Sinai revelation: “What I said to Moses was easy, I transferred the Emotion of the soul … but he transferred it into the physical tablets, which was not the condition” [Keshe, KSW 205, #377848]. This amounts to an immanent nondualism expressed in the vocabulary of field physics (chs. 152, 166). Heisman keeps the name of God but turns it toward the future. Monotheism’s “larger truth” is that God may be built, since “the ultimate end or purpose of humanity is to recognize the image of God in the ultimate slave-technology — artificial intelligence” [Heisman, #38252, “God Is Technology”; ch. 160].

Key points

• Hidden Religion calls Zoroastrianism one of the oldest monotheisms with an “impersonal” Ahura Mazda. Plutarch already reported that Zoroaster called the evil power a “demon”, not a god [#66220; #38272].
• Plutarch gives Mithra the role of “mediator” between two powers, and the Statius scholiast equates him with Apollo, Titan and Osiris [#38272].
• The Indo-Iranian “Lords” had no rival god of evil. The asura/deva inversion made the gods of one branch the demons of the other, and Dumézil, as Ries reports him, reads Mitra-Varuna as “contrast but not opposition”. Egypt’s opposition was Maat against isfet, not two gods [#55116; #38276; Wikipedia: Maat].
• Mesopotamian supremacy followed the ruling city (Marduk, Ashur). Akhenaten’s Aten is classed variously as monotheistic, monolatrous or henotheistic, and Assmann separates its cosmic monotheism from the “Mosaic distinction” [#70458; Wikipedia: Atenism; Wikipedia: Moses the Egyptian].
• Triads predate the Trinity and the Trimurti: An-Enlil-Enki in Sumer and Boyce’s three Ahuras in Iran, while Egypt grouped its gods in an Ennead and an Ogdoad. Theban theology already made all gods “aspects of Amun” [#55116; Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths].
• Day reconstructs Israel’s road to monotheism as the absorption of El and the demotion of the sons of God to angels. Armstrong calls the hostility to other gods “a new religious attitude” [#86469; #68999].
• Islam’s indivisible Allah is defined against the Trinity, and Hidden Religion notes that the Hindu Trimurti is less common than single-deity sectarian worship [#66220].
• Pike sees a universal triad, Hindu, Egyptian and Persian, under a Masonic religion that honours Moses, Zoroaster, Jesus and Muhammad as “Great Teachers of Morality” [#378717].
• Armstrong’s Axial Age puts ethical practice before belief, and Wall and Heisman point to Confucian reticence about God and the near-universal golden rule [#82303; #49273; #38252].
• Keshe rejects all intermediaries between man and Creator, and Heisman relocates God to the technological future [#378341; #38252].