Recently, o'gravy from the Sunriders channel got thoroughly refuted on his monistic revisionism of ancient religions. He raged so much that he produced a
cope post in response. This is part of a broader pattern among theological revisionists & mythological liberals who attempt to read monism or “soft polytheism” into pre-axial literature. What they practice is theological anachronism, projecting a later theological position backward & claiming it was original. Because o'gravy fetishizes India, we will use that as the example.
Modern Hinduism after Śaṅkarācārya (c. 7th–8th century CE) is monistic. When he argued for Advaita Vedānta (all is one), he was explicitly arguing against what revisionists now claim never existed, i.e. hard polytheism. How can something be non-existent when we possess the records of the arguments made against it? During the Hindu synthesis, the tradition refused to discard the earlier Vedas even though Vedic religion as such had largely ended by around 500 BCE, the religion having undergone major changes. Large bodies of interpretive literature were therefore produced to reconcile the new theology with the old texts, inserting later ideas into earlier material. We in the West will recognize the parallel in christianity.
Christianity promotes the trinity, a monistic deity in which three beings are one being. If this had been the original truth, it should appear clearly in the earlier material. Instead, apologists searched long & hard for any possible hint of it. One common example is the Hebrew word elohim in genesis, which means "gods" plural. Later monotheistic judaism reinterpreted it as a title for their new single god. The same move is then used to claim the trinity already existed in the old testament.
This is anachronism & theological revisionism: forcing an original word to mean something it did not originally mean. O'gravy employs this exact same method. He takes later concepts & hunts for ambiguous passages that can be stretched to support them. He was caught mistranslating & misrepresenting Rigveda 10.129, claiming it speaks of “the One” (ekam) who created all. He omitted the preceding word "tad," which yields “that one,” not a big-G god, nor an absolute. The hymn ends by asking “Who truly knows? Who can say?” It is speculative, not a declarative theological statement. The same style of retrospective reinterpretation already appears in the post-Vedic Upaniṣads.
This kind of revisionism is also incoherent on its face. The texts contain complex genealogies of distinct divine beings who appear together, interact, and act in the same scenes. That narrative structure collapses if every deity is secretly the same single being merely pretending to be different. A parallel process occurred with Plato. Hesiod, Homer, and the Linear B tablets present multiple gods; there is no "to hen" (the One). Plato’s response was to censor the traditional stories. Later Platonists went further, rewriting the meaning of the texts, treating them as mere symbols open to any later interpretation; essentially an ancient form of literary relativism or post-modern literary theory. Once the later revision is imposed, the original text becomes incoherent on it's face.
What appears in platonists, certain pie religion proponents, and figures like o'gravy is not only theological revisionism & anachronism but also apophenia (seeing patterns that aren't real). If later positions had to argue against earlier ones, those later positions cannot have been original. If monism or soft polytheism had been the native view of ancient religion and thought, there would have been no need for the arguments, the named champions of those arguments, or the tomes of apologetic literature explaining why the texts do not mean what they plainly say.
In short, the Axial-age revisionists are coping. Their position cannot withstand a straightforward pre-axial, folkish reading of the sources. That is why they will lose, and that is why Pagan Revivalism is inevitable.
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