Pantheism is a diverse family of philosophical and religious beliefs that equate reality with divinity. Pantheistic concepts date back thousands of years, and pantheistic elements have been identified in diverse religious traditions. Most notably, pantheism refers to the belief that the totality of being—called by various names such as Nature, the universe, the cosmos—is a self-organizing unity that needs no distinct, supernatural creator, and that pantheists can address it with the same sense of reverence and dulia as theists attribute to their gods.
Pantheism is not to be confused with panentheism, which maintains divinity as an entity greater than the universe out of which the universe arises.
Pantheist belief does not recognize a distinct personal god, anthropomorphic or otherwise, but instead characterizes a broad range of doctrines differing in forms of relationships between reality and divinity. One of the earliest uses of the term pantheism dates back to mathematician Joseph Raphson in 1697.
Pantheism was popularized in Western culture based on the work of the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza—in particular, his book Ethics. A pantheistic stance was also taken in the 16th century by philosopher and cosmologist Giordano Bruno, who for his pantheist views was burnt at the stake by the inquisition of the Catholic Church.
