Monolatry
belief in the existence of many gods but with the consistent worship of only one deity
Monolatry (Ancient Greek: μόνος, , lit. 'single', and λατρεία, latreia, 'worship') is the belief in the existence of many gods combined with the insistence on the exclusive worship of a single chosen deity. The term was possibly first used by Julius Wellhausen.
Monolatry is distinguished from monotheism, which asserts that only one god exists, and from henotheism, which accepts both the existence of other gods and the validity of their worship.
The clearest ancient example is the Atenism introduced by the pharaoh Akhenaten in the fourteenth century BCE, which elevated Aten to sole object of worship in Egyptian religion without denying that other gods existed; Egypt reverted to its traditional religion under his successors. Some scholars have also argued that the ancient Israelites practiced a form of monolatry or henotheism before the Babylonian captivity, citing passages in the Torah that acknowledge other gods, though medieval Jewish commentators read the same texts as monotheistic. In modern religion, the classification has been applied to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which teaches that the Godhead comprises three distinct beings and that other divine beings exist; the label is disputed within the church.
Mormon cosmology discusses the existence of many Gods, and a method by which any human can become a God, but Mormons only worship the Godhead and ignore the other gods, as stated by the founder of the religion Joseph Smith: "Paul says there are gods many and lords many; but to us there is but one God, and one Lord".
Atenism
The pharaoh Akhenaten, who was initially enthroned as Amenhotep IV, initially introduced Atenism in the fifth year (approximately 1348–1346 BCE) of his reign during the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. He raised Aten, once a relatively obscure solar deity representing the disk of the Sun, to the status of supreme deity in ancient Egyptian religion.
The fifth year of his reign marked the beginning of his construction of a new capital, Akhetaten (Horizon of the Aten), at the site known today as "Amarna".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Monolatry” as belief in the existence of many gods but with the consistent worship of only one deity. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q956859. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1348 and 1346.
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This entry incorporates text from “Monolatry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.