In Steiner's reading, humanity did not climb from many gods to one: worship descended from Archai to Archangeloi to each person's own Angelos.
Monotheism as a Descent from Polytheism in Anthroposophy is Rudolf Steiner's reversal of the standard religious-historical ladder, stated in the closing lecture of The Karma of Vocation (GA 172), given in Dornach on 27 November 1916. Where academic religious studies treats the movement from many gods to one god as progress, Steiner reads it as a step down through the spiritual hierarchies. Ancestral cults, carried by remnants of atavistic clairvoyance, revered the Archai, the Time Spirits, through the etheric bodies of the dead. Polytheism then worshipped the Archangeloi, the folk-guiding spirits behind figures such as Zeus. As the individual ego began to be born, each person sank to venerating only his or her own Angelos: the passage called monotheism. The next step down, worship of man himself in the Roman Caesars, was met by the Mystery of Golgotha.
Monotheism as a descent from polytheism is one of Steiner's most deliberate provocations. He asks his Dornach audience to abandon the pride of religious scholarship, which ranks one god above many, and to see the sequence instead as a narrowing: from the Time Spirits of the ancestral cults, through the folk-gods of mythology, down to the single guardian Angelos each newborn ego could still perceive.
In Steiner's Own Words
That is, they begin to worship angels, every person his or her own angel, rather than an archangel. They descend from the higher polytheism to the lower monotheism. After what has previously been presented to you, you will not consider what I am about to say as something strange. You will see that people must cure themselves of the pride that permeates the entire field of religious studies, which deems itself justified to consider monotheism as a religion superior to polytheism. By no means is it so, but the relationship of the two is just as has been described.
What it Means Today
For a century after E. B. Tylor's Primitive Culture (1871), the ladder from animism through polytheism up to monotheism stood in the academy as the very shape of religious progress, and Steiner's Dornach audience of 1916 would have taken that ranking for granted. The scholar who has done most to break the ladder is the Egyptologist Jan Assmann. In Moses the Egyptian (1997) and The Price of Monotheism (Stanford University Press, 2010; German original 2003), Assmann argues that exclusive monotheism arrived not as a refinement but as a rupture he calls the Mosaic distinction: the division of religion into true and false. The older polytheisms never drew that line, because their gods were translatable; Ishtar could be read as Aphrodite, and treaties between peoples were sworn on equivalent deities.
Assmann's key exhibit is Akhenaten of Egypt, whose Amarna revolution of the fourteenth century BC he names the first counter-religion, and it is worth noticing that Steiner, eighty years before him, also pointed to Egypt in the second millennium before Christ as the place where the passage to monotheism began. Steiner is not asking anyone to rebuild the old pantheons; in the same lecture he says the answer to the descent is the Mystery of Golgotha, which addresses what is common to all humanity rather than any one people's god. Thalira synthesis: Assmann counts the cultural price of the Mosaic distinction from the outside, while Steiner names the spiritual mechanism from the inside, the shrinking of worship from Time Spirits to folk-gods to the single Angelos of the newly born ego, two accounts of one descent.
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