They begin as creative impulses, stories and metaphor replete with cunning, analogy and all the twists and turns a canny storyteller-cum-shaman can get in there to wow their audience by way of ritual / ceremonial exorcism.   So I guess it's all entertainment, no matter how seriously we might take it.

In the beginning humanity saw itself as other from Nature, and with its new found words and cognition began the process of personifying it in terms both benevolent and malevolent. In time our many gods were rolled up into the one big horrible monotheistic super god and Nature became the metaphor of that, thus giving Mankind carte-blanche to enslave women, massacre others for thinking differently and use the planet indiscriminately for its own ends.