edderkopper:

criolize:

okay i feel like i should know this by now but…what does hard polytheism mean?

Hard polytheism means you view each deity as a separate entity. To a hard polytheist, Mars is a different god than Ares or Tyr.

The opposite of this would be soft polytheism. In soft polytheism, all deities are just different faces of the same divine being (or the same divine being.) Examples would be Wiccans who view all gods as aspects of the Horned God, or the Romans, who treated foreign deities as representations of their own gods under different names.

This is, of course, a spectrum. There are people who believe that, e.g., Woden and Odin are the same guy, but Hermes is different despite having been compared to him in the past. There are people whose polytheism is so “hard” that they believe that even deities by the same name might be different local entities (e.g., believing Athena Alea is different from Athena Polias, or that different regions of Ireland have different Cailleachs) and people whose polytheism is so “soft” that they’re basically pantheistic.

These also aren’t historical frameworks, or frameworks used in academia. They’re just useful terms for modern polytheists to compare views.