Prelude

We don’t believe in superheroes. Nobody thinks Clark Kent is flying above us, or that Wakanda is waiting just across the Atlantic. We know Batman is a man in a suit, that Wonder Woman stepped off a page. And yet — their stories inspire us. They shape how we think about courage, justice, power, sacrifice, tragedy, and hope.

Superheroes are our modern pantheon. They carry forward the same archetypal weight once borne by Zeus, Athena, Shango, Oshun, or Odin. Superman embodies sovereignty and light; Batman discloses the tragic, mortal struggle against chaos; Wonder Woman unites martial strength with eros and justice; Black Panther blends kingship, ancestry, and futurism; Storm commands weather like a goddess of fertility and wrath. Each character is a way of imagining Being.

We don’t worship them, but we let them guide us. Their plurality tells us something fundamental: that no one story, no one figure, no one ontology can capture the truth of existence.

I. A Broken Conversation

Walk into any barbershop, scroll through social media, or sit at a family cookout, and you’ll hear it: debates about gender roles, questions of racial identity, arguments over what’s “natural” and what’s “made up.” Some brothers are frustrated, some are defiant, some are weary, and some are just confused. The debates circle around like a storm — “biology says this,” “culture says that,” “men should…,” “women should…,” “race doesn’t exist,” “race matters more than ever.”

On the surface, these are culture wars. But beneath them lies something far deeper: a fight over what is real, what is true, what it means simply to be.

Western culture inherited a habit of mind from Plato and from Christianity: there must be one ultimate truth, one way to understand Being, one correct account of who we are. Against this, the rest of human history whispers a counterpoint: the world is multiple, Being discloses itself in many ways, and no single account exhausts the truth of our existence.

That tension — between the One and the Many — is not just abstract philosophy. It is the root of why some identities are policed as “immutable” while others are allowed fluidity, why zealots see multiplicity as demonic, and why our conversations about race, sex, and gender keep breaking down.

This series of essays is my attempt to go deeper. To set aside the banal talking points of the “gender war.” To refuse the zealotry of those who claim to know God’s mind with certainty. And to consider an ancient possibility: what if our understanding of the world had followed the polytheistic path of plurality, instead of the monotheistic path of unity? And what if, even now, we can recover that sense of plurality — without abandoning Christianity, without relativism, but with humility and wonder?

II. Reader Forewarning: On Heidegger

Before we embark, let me be clear. One of the philosophers who will guide our journey is Martin Heidegger — perhaps the most influential thinker on the question of Being in the 20th century. And yet, Heidegger was also a Nazi. He joined the party in 1933, served as rector at Freiburg University, and though he later stepped down, he remained a member until the fall of the Third Reich. This fact cannot be hidden or excused.

So why use him? Because Heidegger’s central insight — that Being discloses itself in different ways across history, that no single ontology can capture it once and for all — is too powerful to ignore. We do not embrace Heidegger the man. We use his thought carefully, critically, under supervision of African and global sources that long recognized plurality before Europe did.

This is not hero worship. It is philosophical scavenging: taking a useful tool from a compromised hand, and turning it to better ends.

III. One or Many? The Fork in Human Thought

Every civilization has asked the question: what does it mean to exist? For most of human history, the answer was plural. The Yoruba recognized Shango (thunder and fire), Oshun (sweetness and fertility), Ogun (iron and labor), each as valid forces shaping life. The Egyptians spoke of Ra as the sun’s emergence, Osiris as death and rebirth, Isis as hidden wisdom, Maʿat as balance. The Hindus saw Brahma creating, Vishnu preserving, Shiva destroying — rhythms of life that cycle without end. The Aztecs saw life as precarious reciprocity: gods needing sacrifice to keep the cosmos going. The Polynesians spoke of Tangaroa (sea), Tāne (forest), Māui (trickster) — existence as kinship with nature.

The Greeks, whom philosophy students are taught to revere, also lived this plurality: Zeus for order, Athena for wisdom, Dionysus for excess, Aphrodite for desire, Hades for death, Poseidon for turbulence. Each god was not just a character; each was a mode of Being, a way reality discloses itself.

Polytheism is often caricatured as superstition. But it may have been truer to the human condition than the search for one essence. Multiplicity is how life actually appears to us: in conflict, in love, in reason, in ecstasy, in tragedy, in cycles of birth and death. The gods gave names to these truths.

But then came a different path: Plato’s Forms, Plotinus’s One, Christianity’s One God. In this path, unity was everything. Multiplicity was demoted to mere appearances, or worse, to error, to idolatry, to deception by the devil himself. One truth, one order, one ultimate authority.

That fork — plurality vs. unity — set the stage for the contradictions we face today.

IV. The Weight of Monotheism

Let’s be honest. Monotheism achieved much. By insisting on unity, it gave the West systematic philosophy, universal ethics, law that aspires to fairness, science that seeks general laws. Augustine’s City of God stabilized a chaotic empire; Aquinas’s theology ordered faith and reason together. Modern science, too, is the heir of unity-seeking — it wants one formula, one equation, one law of nature.

But the price was high. Multiplicity was recast as error or sin. The gods of Africa, the Americas, Asia — false idols. The many ways of being human — reduced to deviations from one norm. Even now, zealots thrive on this inheritance: they know what God desires, they declare immutable truths, they police identity categories with a fervor that brooks no plurality.

Dogma is attractive because it offers certainty. It simplifies the chaos of life. But it distorts reality. And it shuts down the plural truths of Being.

V. Multiplicity Returns

And yet, plurality keeps breaking through. It never disappears. In the diaspora, Yoruba orishas became Catholic saints in Santería and Candomblé — syncretism preserving multiplicity under oppression. Indigenous traditions never fully died, even under colonization. And even within Christianity, mystics and poets kept rediscovering plurality: Julian of Norwich speaking of “Mother Jesus,” Hildegard of Bingen hearing visions of cosmic harmony, the Eastern Orthodox preserving icons that mediate many ways of divine presence.

Heidegger, centuries later, reopened the question of Being. He argued that Being is not one thing, but discloses itself differently in different epochs: as physis (emergence), as poiesis (bringing-forth), as will to power, as technological enframing (Gestell). He insisted that no single disclosure is final. The world shows up in many ways, and each way is real.

That is not so far from what polytheistic societies always knew.

VI. Identity as Ontological Battleground

This is where the rubber meets the road. Why do these abstractions matter? Because our identity debates today are really about ontology.

  • Race: Geneticists show most variation is within groups, not between them. Yet race is socially policed as fixed — ancestry, bloodline, the “one-drop rule.” Society treats race as monotheistic: one truth, immutable. That’s why “transracial” identity is dismissed as delusion.

  • Gender: Increasingly seen as fluid, performative, plural. Here, polytheistic sensibility resurfaces: many valid identities, many ways of being.

  • Sex: The battleground. Biology insists on constants; culture insists on multiplicity. Neither side fully wins, and the clash grows bitter.

This inconsistency — fluidity in gender, fixity in race, conflict over sex — reveals our ontological schizophrenia. We are trying to live monotheism and polytheism at the same time.

VII. Zealotry as Obstacle

What blocks us from admitting multiplicity? Zealotry. The refusal to live with tension. The certainty that one’s own truth is God’s truth, absolute and immutable.

In antiquity, polytheism was dismissed as a devil’s ruse. Today, non-binary gender identities, plural religious expressions, and hybrid cultures are dismissed the same way: as confusion, deception, or evil. Zealotry thrives because it offers closure, but it does so at the cost of honesty about Being.

Multiplicity isn’t the devil’s trick. It is the truth of existence.

VIII. What This Series Is (and Isn’t)

This series is not a call to rebuild temples and sacrifice goats to Zeus or Shango. It is not a rejection of Christianity. Many of us — myself included — stand within Christian traditions, and we honor their depth.

What this is, is a thought experiment. A chance to imagine what could have been if plurality had remained central. A chance to ask what could still be, if we learn to accept multiple ways of Being as legitimate.

Each post will stand alone as an essay. One will explore ancient polytheistic ontologies across cultures. Another will trace the Western shift to unity. Another will show how Heidegger reopens plurality. Still others will analyze race, sex, and gender as battlegrounds of Being. The final post will ask what we can recover now.

Read one, and you’ll get a perspective. Read the series, and you’ll get a journey.

IX. Outro

The Iliad tells us that the Olympians once traveled to Ethiopia to feast with “the blameless Ethiopians.” The Greeks, who gave us philosophy, acknowledged that divinity and truth are not bounded by Europe. They wander, they feast, they appear in many places.

That is the image I want to leave you with as we begin. Being has always been plural. Our ancestors knew it. Our traditions whispered it. Even the gods feasted on it.

This series is an attempt to recover that sense — not to abandon what we have, but to enrich it, to heal contradictions, and to learn how to live again in awe of the Many.

The gods are dead, Nietzsche told us, and our understanding of what is, is a carcass. But perhaps they never fully vanished — perhaps they put on capes, masks, and powers to meet us in movie theaters and comic panels.

No one in our culture “believes” in superheroes and villains. But we gather by the millions to hear their stories, because they whisper an ancient truth: Being is plural. The world cannot be reduced to one order, one essence, one fixed identity. It reveals itself in many ways — sometimes in thunder and fire, sometimes in wisdom and craft, sometimes in ecstasy and tragedy, sometimes in the pages of a comic.

This series is about recovering that truth — not to abandon Christianity, not to return to temple cults, but to imagine what our world could look like if we took multiplicity seriously again. If we allowed our politics, our culture, our very sense of self to be as rich, diverse, and awe-inspiring as the pantheons — ancient or modern — that continue to shape us.