Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters by Mary-Jane Rubenstein (review)

What is pantheism? Who is Pan? And why should we as scholars of religion, magic, and witchcraft care to know? Mary-Jane Rubenstein's Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters offers a comprehensive look at the utter "chaos" that pantheism has unleashed, in an interdisciplinary journey from Spinoza to Giordano Bruno to Einstein, with a multitude of explorations in between, including the Gaia hypothesis, Indigenous worldviews, multiverses, new materialisms, Indian cosmologies, eco-feminisms, and quantum physics. Rubenstein's goal is to "change the terms of the science- and- religion game" by asking "what sort of Gods and monsters" are created by scientific theories themselves, and "what sorts of ethical values and social formations they reflect and reinforce" (xix). Throughout her book, Rubenstein includes a running thread on the god Pan—who appears in a series of interruptions from "Panic" to "Pandemonium"—with all the rich disorientation that the wild, chimerical goat-foot god has left in his wake. Above all, Rubenstein declares that pantheism, like Pan himself, is heretical—it usurps transcendental notions of divinity and places the gods right here among us, immanent and embodied, whether in "Snapple© or snuffboxes" (53). As such, pantheism has the power to disrupt tidy Western symbolic systems with its range of queer monstrosities, and Rubenstein, in her book, shows us how.

Pantheologies is Rubenstein's third book as sole author, after Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (2010) and Worlds Without End: The Many Lives of the Multiverse (2015), all three published by Columbia University Press. Rubenstein coins the term pantheology to title her book, which she etymologically breaks down as "the identification of pan, or 'all,' with theos, or God," noting that "from there, the term shifts wildly depending on how one defines the 'all' that God 'is' " (3). Pantheology is borrowed, but also separate, from pantheism, which Rubenstein defines in its most basic form as "the identification of divinity with the material world." As such, each of her four chapters deals with a major aspect of this definition: "Pan" (all), "Hyle" (matter), "Cosmos" (world), and "Theos" (divinity) (25).

In her chapter "Pan," Rubenstein confronts "Western philosophy's perennial horror pantheismus as a fear of crossed boundaries and perverse categorical mixtures" by "deliberately summoning this monstrosity from the depths of heretical thinking." To explore so-called horrors, Rubenstein's goal is to reappropriate a term that has been denigrated—not unlike "queer"—in order "to disrupt the very order that finds it so revolting" (32). Specifically, she is interested in the philosophical differences between monism and pluralism via James, of "the all" and "all things" via Hegel, and particularly of Hegel's (mis-)readings of Spinoza via what she terms "Vedāntic projections" (38). How is substance filled with divinity and at once immanent? Here, Spinoza's definition of God as "an absolutely infinite being" is seen to usurp the hegemonic dominance of the human (i.e., Man) in Western metaphysics and introduce a plurality of monstrosities. In her chapter "Hyle," Rubenstein enters into a dense and rigorous examination of matter and materialism in order to interrogate the idea that matter "is the undifferentiated persistently feminized, often racialized stuff that a rational, male principle brings to order" (65). As in all her chapters, Rubenstein does not shy away from formally combining and re-combining disciplines in a way that reflects the monstrosity of the content she hopes to tease out—here, Ionian hylozoists exist alongside anthropological incursions and the plurality of microbes, with a special focus on the Italian polymath, Giordano Bruno, who was executed as a heretic for proclaiming, among other ideas, "the vitality of all things" (84).

In her chapter "Cosmos," Rubenstein asks, what do we mean by "world"? Is the world a deterministic cosmic clock as per Newton? Or a robotic automaton as per Boyle? Or even the relational psyche, composed of "ancestors, parents, ex-lovers, old novels, and bad pop songs?" (108). Here...