Polytheism is a more extreme version of theological refraction, and is more accurate to refer to it as theological fragmentation. The metaphor of the mirror was useful in describing the process of theological refraction, so here will use a similar metaphor of a prism to explain polytheism.
Light itself can be used as a metaphor for explaining how both polytheism and idolatry began. The light that emanates from the sun is described as white light, and its wavelength is the only one that the human eye can detect. When this light passes through an object that refracts light, such as a prism, it is fragmented into its wavelengths. The human eye naturally recognizes seven wavelengths (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet), but the total amount of wavelengths is much greater.
This process of the fragmentation of light is useful in understanding how polytheism works. In the Mishna Torah, the Rambam describes polytheism as having its roots in the universal recognition of the existence of the One True God. He in fact describes it as a process whereby individual, charismatic leaders first formulated a system of honoring God by venerating the elements of nature, such as the sun and the moon. This gradually devolved into systems that attributed divinity to the forces of nature and began worshiping them in-and-of themselves.
Theologically speaking, the fragmentation of light is similar to the process whereby the human mind fragments its concept of God into a host of deities and divine forms. One aspect of the majority of the idols and deities native to the disparate religions of the world is their often colorful and exotic nature. It is fitting, then, that the white light that in the metaphor represents God is broken down into a seemingly endless array of colorful gods and goddesses.
While on the subject of dispersed light, it is most fitting and almost uncanny that God chose the rainbow as the very sign by which He pledged to Noah (and humanity) never to destroy the earth again by Flood. Even more interesting is that the human eye detects seven colors in the rainbow, which seems to correlate with the Seven Laws of Noah that make up the universal laws designed for the entire human race. A rainbow is the product of the same light dispersion that we have discussed up until now, as if to say "You, humanity, dispersed Me into a host of deities as light is dispersed into a rainbow, and so I will use the rainbow as both a testament to this and a reminder to you that I will never destroy the earth again as I did in the Flood." The observance of these seven commandments ensures humanity's staying on the "straight and narrow." A rainbow road.
Eerily enough, in the past decade-or-so the rainbow has become a different sort of symbol, regressively reminiscent of one of the behaviors that led to the Flood. Foresight, anyone?
Another interesting aspect of this is that while fragmented light can apparently be re-merged into its original white form using two prisms, simply mixing the same colors that emerge as a result of fragmentation cannot. As any artist will tell you, the more colors you mix, the closer you get to black, not white. This means that the process cannot be reversed by combination, because attempting to do does not actually reunite the wavelengths. In line with our metaphor, we can thus say that combining all of the religions that emerged from this original fragmentation does not produce our original understanding of God, but instead leaves us with black. The color white is produced when an object refracts all light that hits it, and black is produced when it absorbs all of the colors. Therefore, white is produced by refracting light back to its source, while black is produced by absorbing and consuming everything into itself.
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