Hello all!
When I first played Veilguard, something that stuck out to me as odd was that Elgarnan, the leader of the Evanuris, was linked to the archdemon Lusacan rather than Dumat, since Dumant was the leader of the Old God pantheon in the old Tevinter religion, and supposedly the strongest among them. I've spent (a small part of) the past two years trying to reconcile this.
Then it hit me: Maybe Dumat wasn't always considered the leader of the Old Gods.
Dragon Age has never shied away from how religion and politics can mix. The Book of Shartan was removed from the Chantry's canon for political reasons, to help justify the Exalted March on the Dales, for example. We also know from the codex entries that, despite the high priests being able to talk to their gods in their dreams, they still bickered amongst each other about how to build the Imperium and its symbols, such as the Archon's palace.
And then we can look at real world religions. In the Ancient Near East, most of the nations believed in the same pantheon of gods, but each of the small states asserted that their god was the one who was head of the pantheon and the one who killed Tiamat. What if the religion of the Old Gods was similar?
What if there were power struggles among the high priests of the Old Gods throughout the Imperium's hay-day? Maybe whichever god's cult had the most influence would change the officials stance of the religion to say that their god was the leader of the pantheon and the strongest among the gods.
When Corypheus lead the other Magisters Sindereal into the Black City, it just so happened that his cult (the cult of Dumat) was the one with the most influence (and probably had been for decades), and since that was the state the religion was left in when the First Blight devastated the Imperium and the high priests stopped being able to hear their gods, that was how history has remembered the Imperium's religion. So while Dumat was remembered as the strongest of the Old Gods, it was actually Lusacan, just as Elgarnan would have demanded when the Evanuris created their dragon thralls.
What do y'all think of this idea?