Hume on the origins of polytheism

This paper explains Hume's thinking on the origins of polytheism and monotheism, or presents my interpretation of Hume. Hume thinks monotheism - specifically, there is one God who designed nature - is the outcome of reflecting on the neat regularities of nature and that this would have come after polytheism, because the curiosity or pure love of truth which leads to these reflections belongs to a more refined age. I appeal to Raymond Firth's We, The Tikopia - a study of a remote and technologically simple people - to propose that we cannot be confident of this claim of Hume (that curiosity about the regularities of nature did not exist in primitive circumstances) and also that it is difficult for us to reliably anticipate what specific questions would preoccupy their curiosity (is there any land where one cannot hear the sound of the sea?). I also propose that, if you could somehow send a traveller back in time and then cause him to return, probably any so-called primitive people (or competitive members of them) would react by sending the traveller back with an indirect message: "We are better than this fellow."