Jan 24, 2023
I agree, and I don't think I said the mirroring had to be conscious or by design. It evolved by hook or by crook, but the strange attractors, as it were, were the imperatives that the state religion should benefit the upper class and express the society's ethos. It's no accident that nomadic hunter-gatherers are more likely to be animists than polytheists, and that kingdoms and empires devised polytheistic religions that simplified themselves, becoming monotheistic. The law of oligarchy reigns in politics and in organized religion, but not so starkly in bands of hunter-gatherers and in their myths.
I developed this idea after reading Kurt Noll's article on divine patronage in Canaanite religion.
