there's this book written in the 1870's by an abolitionist minister, Moncure D. Conway, and I find it super interesting. it's called 'Demonology and Devil-lore', and it's basically this guy's theories as to how various deities evolved. keep in mind this is all just a single dead dude's opinions, so a big spoonful of salt is required, but he says that older deities (like Old Testament God) rarely have a clear split between good/bad, and can deliver both with the same hand, and that the later splitting of good vs evil (like New Testament God, who's quite a bit nicer) can sometimes be attributed to politics. because if you're attempting to use religion as a form of control, it's better to position your guy as the Good guy. and he goes over how various demons are just the bastardized remnants of gods from conquered/colonized religions that have been swallowed by christianity, and then makes an attempt to exhaustively categorize them by type (this is where the book gets a bit dull. as an aside, this guy would have loved Pokemon.)
anyway, it got me thinking about how religious syncretism would work in a world where gods were REAL, and so that became the subplot of The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo.
it's set in 'fantasy Britain', which is a land that has experienced wave after wave of conquest and colonization. about mid 1500's, so we've had the Bell Beaker people, the Celts, the Romans, all the way to the current spread of Christianity, sorry, I mean The Goddess of the Resurrection. and she has to ability to literally demonize worshippers of other religions (which is why there's so many fun animal-people hybrids around), which makes it mentally easier for the crusaders of the Goddess to mop them up. easier to kill people if you don't see them as people.
her ultimate goal in all this is to swallow up all the gods she can and incorporate them into herself, because that's just what every god wants as part of their life cycle. and she's had great success, so far!
tl;dr The Ignoble Invasion of Prince Proculo might be an isekai yaoi monsterfucking book, but I couldn't have done it without minister Moncure Daniel Conway and his autism-fuelled theory book.
