Prayers

But in the prayers addressed to other deities (Indra, Agni, Mithra, etc.), the same properties are assimilated to these gods. Thus, each deity becomes the only and Supreme in the representation of the worshippers at the moment of addressing him with prayer, and all the other gods recede into the background and become as it were secondary and subordinate. We meet with this phenomenon in almost all ancient religions. Here is the prayer of the Egyptian Amun-RA: “Glory to thee, Creator of all, Lord of law, father of the gods, Creator of mankind and animals, the Lord of the seed, which sends food for the beasts of the field You are one that does not have similar, the only king, the only one among the gods.” But also infinitely rises above the host of other gods and Ptah-Tanen in the following prayer: “let us praise the God who reigns in heaven, who created gods and men in all their generations, who created all the edges of heaven and earth and the great sea in his name.” The more ancient the religion, the more often we meet with this kind of assimilation to each individual deity of the attributes of unity and infinity.

The existence of such a catenotheism can be explained by the fact that at first “the gods were not sufficiently fixed and separate, so that each mixed with all and all merged into one” (VL. Soloviev). But it is very possible that there is a vague consciousness, an unformed faith, or a vague presentiment of a single deity embracing and pervading the whole world, though manifesting itself in various forms. It may be said that ancient man sought everywhere for one God, but before his underdeveloped consciousness there were so many beings who claimed the position of this Supreme deity that he could not finally stop at any one. Of course, this was not pure monotheism in the strict sense of the word, but there was no pure polytheism, which subordinates the various regions of the world to special special deities, recognizing them as more or less independent and independent position.

§11. Development of religion and factors of this development
In studying the religion of any one people, it is not difficult to notice that this religion has undergone quite noticeable changes in various periods of its history, and these gradual changes, according to the General law of development, have brought to religion more and more height and ideality, both in respect of religious beliefs and moral concepts, and in respect of the nature of The religion of the Hindus, for example, went through three major stages of development-vedaism, Brahmanism, and Buddhism; in turn, each of these forms of religious consciousness had its own periods of development; so, for example, in vedaism, you can distinguish three main points of development, most significantly different from each other.