Nice article!
It seems there are a number of ways to look at this evolution into monotheism. I tend to think it was a political move as much as anything else. It’s been argued that Judaism did not begin with a single god, but rather at least with both a male and female god serving together. Eventually the female god was censored out of the religion to consolidate male power. I believe the goddess was named Asher. Religions of the west are misogynistic, so the conversion from a male-female balance to a male-dominated cult was par for the course, as Moses’s golfing buddies would say.
There is another thought that comes to mind here, which is that we may look at polytheism not as a bunch of gods lording over human beings, but rather that the gods are metaphors or reflections of the self in the same way that archetypes work. In this light, for example, it is possible to appreciate the millions of Hindu gods, owing to the fact that people are very complex.
In my estimation, polytheism makes far more sense than the one-god invention, especially if we consider the idea of archetypes.
But more than this, with enough enquiry into the self it is possible to realize that all that we see and experience is ourselves in a deeper sense. Thus, the gods represent the manifold aspects of human psychology. Monotheism is an invention that removed the last vestiges of deeper meaning of spiritual experience from religion and turned it into senseless, autocratic political system in the guise of something spiritual. Out with the metaphors, myths, and connection to nature and in with the rules, dogma, convoluted myths, and cascade of threats and punishments for disobedience and straying from the path. Monotheism gave birth to (or at least promoted to the extreme) a perpetual pissing contest to see whose god was better than the other religion’s god. This, of course, continues today, mainly among the three western religions.
You wrote: Moreover, “When polytheism is superseded by monotheism, the host of deities is either abolished (theoretically), or bedeviled (i.e., turned into demons), or downgraded to the rank of angels and ministering spirits.” It seems as though Catholicism attempted to preserve the pantheon of gods by disguising them as saints. So there’s that.
Next idea: You noted “the personification of God is yet another act of idolatry…” There is no doubt that the god of western religion is nothing short of an anthropomorphized version of consciousness, which is the unseen life force, to use a short definition. This leads to the next thought on the powers of God being omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient. As Christopher Hitchens liked to say, these characteristics point to a psychopathic God imbued with the ability to see all, know all, and have total power yet allows the most horrific human acts and suffering to take place anyway — over and over and over again through the ages. For this reason, at least, the idea of a loving God makes absolutely no sense and is a complete contradiction. Western religion, therefore, is burdened with a self-made conflict that it cannot see its way out of. This is what happens with the inventions of the limited human mind. Myth cannot be invented, it arises organically* or it suffers the faults human thinking.
When it comes to Jesus, I don’t quite see things the way you wrote about them. Looking at the Jesus story one may conclude that we aren’t witnessing polytheism at all. Instead, we are looking at a metaphor in which Jesus’ story is the transformation from human consciousness to universal consciousness. (This story is quite similar to the story of Siddhartha Gautama who becomes the Buddha, the awakened one. Jesus’s death is a metaphorical death in which the egoic self must die to be reborn as the universal Self (taught for thousands of years by the Vedic religions). By his example he laid the way to be saved from the sin of being a human derailed by the egoic mind. Taking the Jesus story literally makes it an absurdity without sense or purpose. There is much more to say about this, but we can save it for another discussion.
* organically: in a way that happens or develops naturally over time, without being forced or planned by anyone (Cambridge Univ Press)
Please forgive any typos... written in haste
