Henotheisms

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The belief in and worship of a single god while acknowledging the existence of other deities
2. A religious practice that centers on a primary god among many, recognizing others but not worshipping them
3. The devotion to one god without denying the presence of additional gods in the broader spiritual landscape

Etymology: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, the German philosopher, coined the German word "Henotheismus" in the 19th century, and English took it from there. The coinage was a deliberate piece of scholarly vocabulary: Schelling needed a name for a worship pattern that sat between monotheism and polytheism, one in which a community honours a single chief deity while accepting that other gods exist. The word is built from two Greek elements. The first is "hen," the stem of "heis," meaning "one," which gives the word its sense of oneness. The second is "theism," itself from "theos," meaning "god." Joining them yields something like "one-god-ism," though the meaning is narrower than that literal gloss suggests, because the other gods are acknowledged rather than rejected. Since "henotheisms" is simply the plural of "henotheism," the plural refers to multiple such religious systems, each centred on its own primary deity.