Playing Devil's Advocate for a second: let's take the Christian Divinity, an extremely complex God. The Old Testament God could be seen as an anthropomorphism of all natural forces, which is why his worshippers do not necessarily see contradiction between his merciless, warlike commands and loving, nuturing qualities. People add their voices, their interpretations, their mystic encounters to the mix, and the God is described in a vast number of different ways, myriad unique names, a process like the wrapping of an invisible object in order to see its perimeter.
Theologians and politicians arrive to discuss which interpretations are kosher, by this time a world wide religion has formed around the ideas, discussed and interacted with by people who have not contributed directly to the body of existing scripture. There are many splinter groups and cults, one of which captures the popular imagination more than others, and conception of God-as-love is liberated from the God-as-nature. Cue the same process over again, the contributions of scholars, mystic, laypeople, theologians, politicians.
Several thousand years have passed, and the object at the centre of this linguistic wrapping paper has taken on a highly complex form of its own, not the result of one person's thought simply bolstered by others beliefs, but the creation of countless people who have all participated in a relationship with the divinity - the product of too many minds to count. That's not inconceivable, and although the process is simple it's also rich in depth and variety.
The middle ground is that the above process occurs, but the ideas are all projections onto a force which has existence in its own right. The force seems particularly responsive to anthropomorphism, it wears different masks well, and displays different characteristics at time (the Dion Fortune illustration of water behaving in different ways in clouds, in rapids, in an underground river, in the sea, in a cup). As the force manifests in different ways, we have different means of describing it; Father; Son; Spirit; Kether through Malkuth; Commander of the Armies of the Lord; Paraclete; Son of Man, ad infinitum.
Or the deities are pre-existent, and we are attempting to describe beings that have been around longer than humanity in some cases (but not all). These three are not exhaustive, but you can see how the ancestor-become-divine might follow a similar process. There seems to be a trend towards the first explanation in modern practitioners, probably because the idea that we're solely responsible for the creation of the Gods appeals to some control-freak aspect of their identity. It bolsters their ego to believe that they can make and unmake pantheons. The control myth is a pretty seductive illusion. |
