Hindu hell

[Aoi Magi]

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.

Almost all polytheistic religions which I know of, has a top-dog/leader/king, even the biblical 'god' Yahweh was part of a pantheon, thing is if you look at religions of past to now, the power and agency of 'god' keeps increasing, as our increase in knowledge keeps explaining away the smaller gods. Hinduism is a bit fascinating in this respect because, yes, it's not a single religion or belief system and it's roots are quite old but it has many fairly recent offshoots too and combined together you can see these changes happening over time. In the ancient vedic times and even earlier, shiva, brahma, e.t.c weren't that prominent, rather nature worship was including various plants and mountains, rivers, after that indra (thunder), agni (fire), e.t.c came into prominence clearly a bit more powerful than mountains and rivers, also you can clearly see the parallels of these deities to others at that time ( like indra and zeus are pretty much rebranded versions of each other), As forces of nature slowly were understood, prominence shifted to brahma, vishnu, maheswar (shiva), who were yet again more powerful than indra and his pantheon, nowadays the shift is again slowly happening towards a parmatma or an amalgamation of the big three to represent a being as the source of creation.