Excellent, thought-provoking post, Chuzzlewit!
You raise some fascinating questions.
I, too, read Frazier's "The Golden Bough" many years back. (One had to, in order to understand "The Waste Land." That, and Jessie Weston's book on the Holy Grail, which was nowhere near as interesting.) And I too was struck by the similarity between the Christ legend and the story of the fertility deities/kings (as the reader was, of course, meant to be).
Another suggestion. Think of a symbol -- the cross -- as the "core", rather than a concept or a doctrine. The cross always impressed me as a mysteriously powerful symbol, with a resonance extending far beyond the immediate context of the Crucifixion. And, indeed, the symbol of the cross precedes Christianity, which appropriated it and transformed it. (Especially interesting, if you buy the view of some Biblical scholars, that the Crucifixion never actually occurred!) From the Online Dictionary of Symbolism:
The Cross.
It is a world centre and therefore a point of communication between heaven and earth and a cosmic axis, thus sharing the symbolism of the cosmic tree, mountain, etc. The cross represents the Tree of Life and the Tree of Nourishment; it is also a symbol of universal, archetypal man, capable of infinite and harmonious expansion on both the horizontal and vertical planes; the vertical line is the celestial, spiritual and intellectual, positive, active and male, while the horizontal is the earthly, rational, passive, and negative and female, the whole cross forming the primordial ANDROGYNE. [In Christian terms], it is the salvation through Christ's sacrifice; redemption; atonement; suffering; faith. The cross also signifies acceptance of death or suffering and sacrifice" (Cooper, 46). Crossroads are often thought of as symbolizing points of intersection between the paths of living and the dead; and as a framework for coordinates, the cross gives people the ability to orient themselves within space and time.
umich.edu
Your notion of the beneficent angel possibly becoming "the core of a new age polytheism" is intriguing. Possibly -- if new-agers would stop being so omniverous; that is, stop trying to cram every oddity they can lay their hands on into their spiritual grab-bags.
Joan
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