[Raekai]

This is making me think of GURPS Cabal a bit.

Originally Posted by GURPS Cabal, p. 121

Virtually all the deities or deified spirits of the known world still exist within Briah [the Iconic Realm, above Yetzirah the Astral Realm]; many of them continue to interact with worshippers, if only to gain extra energy points.

This causes a problem with overlapping deity issues. To what extent are Poseidon Hippios (Poseidon Horse-Maker) and Poseidon Enosichthon (Poseidon Earth-Shaker) the “same god” as Poseidon Gaieochos (Poseidon Earth-Embracer), the “traditional” Lord of the Sea? Is Poseidon Hippios “actually” a pre-Doric horse-god of the Thessalians? Are all three of these aspects of Poseidon avatars of the same entity, and is Poseidon actually the same god as Neptune? Is he the same as Njord, the Norse sea-god? Cabalists have encountered all manner of Poseidons, and a similarly dizzying variety of other deities.

Some theopathologists suspect all of the gods (or at least all of the ones visible in Briah) to be nothing more than eidolons of the various Aethyrs; in this theory, the various Poseidons and Neptunes and so forth are all shadows of Muumiah, the Aethyr of Elemental Water. Interaction between Muumiah and other Aethyrs, or between their decans, may have “calved off” the non-watery aspects of Poseidon from the central “sea-god” concept. This theory, however, has at least as many historical and empirical holes as it does theological and philosophical ones. For now, Cabalists (and other tourists in Briah) step gingerly around anything that claims divinity – gods are notorious for their poor sense of humor and lack of perspective about such matters.

I hope that's not too much text from one book. And I know this forum is for DFRPG, but this feels entirely too fitting.

So, it seems to me that Odin and Zeus would be different interpretations of the Allfather rather than Zeus being an interpretation of Odin, and I think people would be plenty-willing to fight over who has the correct interpretation. For monotheistic religions, it's not crazy to believe that they worship the Allfather and see the other deities as angels or whatever else (and maybe the Trickster was vilified an turned into the Adversary). Or they may have folded up all of the deities and they simply perceive them as one! If certain deities don't map perfectly, it's not crazy to think that (like in the above excerpt from GURPS Cabal) that there might be two (or more!) different interpretations of a deity that cover certain aspects. It could also go the other way (like in my monotheism example) where a defining line got lost and two different deities are interpreted as one! Or where the lines got muddy, so there are two different deities, but some of their aspects got swapped. And all of them could be real, but just stepped down from their archetypal god.

EDIT: And, of course, Douglas Cole has already said some pretty similar stuff himself. Though, my main addition would be that the Allfather would never directly intervene in mortal affairs—Odin or Zeus would as particular aspects or interpretations of the Allfather.

Originally Posted by Monotheism and Competing Divinities in Norðlond

One other possibility here is that the gods themselves are real, but given form by the Will of their worshipers. This provides for all sorts of mayhem, as if (say) the Goddess of Death gets a whole lot of followers, she will eventually be supremely powerful. This starts to look like actively proselytizing competing belief systems, which of course isn’t anything our modern world has in great supply (*cough sarcasm cough*). If you want to check out a source where some of that is referenced while still feeling the viking love: read Poul Anderson’s The Broken Sword.

If you want to go all “There’s a War in Heaven,” this is probably the most self-consistent route to take. A strongly monotheistic belief could eventually “force” all of the disparate facets of a One-as-Many being into simply the One Being. If folks are worshiping only the Allfather, eventually not only will the Allfather subsume the other gods, he’ll sort of stop being the Allfather. Talk about being self-conflicted.

So, even if all deities are really "the same", there is plenty of room for conflict between differing interpretations of deities as well as between different deities themselves.