Acknowledged in advance- I haven't completed DAI yet (much less the DLC), so my reckoning here may be lacking information...
But I've been a DA fan a while now, and I've been really digging the Solas revelations of the Fade plus the anomaly that is Cole- a Fade spirit... that... somehow... found its way "embodiedly" into... you know, "reality..." as a moody, blond white kid who combs his hair into his eyes. And given this data I've been considering the way gods tend to be described- the Old Gods, the Elven Gods- pantheons in general. They tend to have a "God of X," "God of Y." It's never just God #1, God #2 or God Joe, God Sally, Boss God. There is always a sort of denomination to them- an emphasis based on one or a few characteristics of human experience- God of Wine, Celebration, and Lust, Goddess of Beauty, Love, and Agricultural Prosperity. This is similar to demons/spirits, no? Demon/spirit of Rage, Demon/spirit of Justice. So it struck me- maybe the DA deities we keep reading about in the lore, coming from the same "place" behind the Veil as the demons/spirits anyway... ARE just demons/spirits. I'm talking DA "world," mind you, not the world... And if Cole can enter into "reality" despite being a Fade creature (of Pain-Revulsion?)- or wisps (of Elemental Meanness) or pride demons, etc.- then this would be how the gods do it. Same deal.
So from there I started extrapolating. Since we don't have a universal "cosmic origin" story in DA (nearly all major religions have one, all completely fantasy-based), perhaps the origin of DA is a world the way Solas describes it: no "no man's land" of a Veil keeping the world a duality, just one continuum with an extreme of "Fade" on one side, "Reality" on the other (which seems like "freedom" or "imagination" on one side, "order" or "science" on the other). (In reality religion is a retreat into imagination from science, but I mean in DA. I mean, we're talking a false dichotomy of imagined and fictional-DA-real, but enough metagaming...) Always religion tends to claim we had some sort of perfect paradise and irrevocably lost it, so that history is allegedly inevitably just one long declension from fabled ancient glory days. In DA's case overall we've "fallen" from an effective state of harmony between the imagined and the "real," some instability forcing a boundary ("Veil") between them despite that some like Cole on the Fade side can still venture to the "real" while some like Solas- or really mages in general to a greater or lesser degree- can venture into the Fade.
The main DA story is obviously the whole Tevinter mage intrusion into the perfect and wonderful and nothing-could-possibly-be-wrong-with-it Golden City. (Actually I'd have to wonder if that city were a fixed entity in the Fade given the fickle nature of people's experience there, but ok.) So there is already a "paradise lost" myth. But this hasn't gone far to explain the existence of gods that everyone keeps being on about. Maker this. Fen'harel that. I've read some good fan theories about parallels between the various "ancient" beliefs pointing to something more consistent between all of them, but that still doesn't provide much context on its own, just polishes details. Since DA is a fiction and thus gods can "really" exist in DA (if the writers so deem), perhaps it's more than just the Tevinter intrusion making gods upset. Maybe it goes back to before there was some fabled Perfect City that extended only to the borders of the Veil. Maybe there was a cataclysm before that, the Veil being an uneasy truce. Maybe it's not a matter of delineating fixed deities but of establishing the most salient, sustainable relationship between the animated elements of the structured world with those of the mystical. And the battleline drawn between them is what keeps folks afraid of dreams and magic and makes ventures "into" the Fade as freaky as they look in DAO and DA2- not to mention what makes ventures of demons/spirits into "reality" typically monstrous and violent.
Totally far out, man. Groovy. Deep thoughts. OK, notice the title of the thread is "musing..."
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