(January 29, 2019 at 3:04 am)Aoi Magi Wrote: Moreover, the hierarchical structure of a supreme being at the top arises because humans organise themselves in that structure, so it's quite normal to project that same structure on to nature.
This sounds reasonable enough from a psychological perspective. I guess we can project things back into the past and assume that things might have come about this way.
Do you know of any animist religions on record as having this sort of hierarchy? Shinto, for example, doesn't. There is no top god. The polytheism of the Middle East seems to have been henotheist, so that each tribe had a favorite, but it wasn't considered to be the boss of all.
Hesiod's and Homer's Zeus was called the king but certainly didn't equate to anything like the god of the Christian theologians. He was frequently opposed and occasionally confounded. It's true that Zeus/Jupiter took on more characteristics of an all-powerful deity in Roman times, but this appears to me, from what I've read, to be the influence of Platonic and Aristotelian thought. They posited a supreme source, similar in many ways to the Hindu Brahman, but certainly not because they assumed that a metaphysical hierarchy had to resemble a human one.
