In fact, it's starting to increasingly look like the Maker is just a distorted memory of the king of the Evanuris, and probably Andraste was possessed by the spirit of the Evanuris queen or whatever. The elves are literally behind everything! Such creativity!
I'm remembering shit from years ago but I think things go more or less like this:
The Ancient Elven Empire was little more than a lot of elves enslaved to the whims of their most powerful Mages.
Those Elven Gods achieved true immortality - inability to be destroyed - by somehow using Dragons as their phylacteries.
At one point the Elven Empires discovers the Titans and the ancient Dwarves. Former are giant magical creatures deep within the earth that bleed Lyrium, the latter being no more than their construct-children-immune system. Both communicate with 'singing' of the 'Stone', similar to how Darkspawn act.
One of the Elven Gods also killed a Titan. This most likely triggered the first instance of what we know as the Darkspawn. It's very possible that killing a Titan is how the Dragon - Elven God union achieves true immortality but there's no direct evidence of that.
When the Elven Gods were banished from the material world their phylacteries stayed behind as anchors. Those Dragons came to be worshiped by the northern humans.
Those humans would learn magic from their connection to the Dragons and would be used in an attempt to free the Evanuris from their prison. Doing so allowed the Darkspawn to find them and corrupt their Dragons.
The first of the corrupted Dragons to fall, Dumat, is said to have been killed around the time Andraste was born. She would therefore be an Old God child, whatever relationship between the Evanuris, their Dragon minions and the Titan being purified from the Darkspawn taint and refined into a human being that is in tune with but not entirely understanding of certain fundamental truths about this universe.
Andraste is also an Alamarri, meaning she's a southern human who did not worship the Old Gods but rather retained portions of her people's distinct spirituality. These southerners saw no distinction between what would be a God or a Spirit. They also believe that mortals and Gods alike can die and reincarnate. Simply put if these ancient humans were to cry out for a God that is The God and The Creator of the Universe and a commensurate Spirit/Demon/Whatever answered that call they'd see no contradiction in terms. Thus, the spreading of the Chant of Light giving birth to the Market Warhammer Chaos God Style or simply causing this absentee creator to return to the world are pretty much the same thing.
After Andraste's death a number of Cults of the Maker spread throught the continent. At times persecuted, eventually elevated as state religion. These early andrastians were decentralized to the extreme and only held together by oral traditions, some resembling artifacts of Tevinter slave culture that date to centuries before Andraste herself was born.
Two hundred years after that the first Orlesian Emperor creates the united Chantry and forces the disparate Cults of the Maker to create a religious orthodoxy. That's the Chant.
Finally, History has been obfuscated over centuries/millennia due to post post apocalyptic nature of the setting. Each culture is built on the deliberately misunderstood bones of whoever came before since those organizations/orders/brotherhoods first tasked with putting the world back together felt the need to hide shit below the carpet. When the Elven Gods killed the Titan whatever they unleashed was just sealed into the Earth. When Tevinter was founded they were deliberately bamboozled by their dragon gods. When the first inquisitors and post Tevinter kings had to pacify the continent after the first and second blights, they felt it was better to obfuscate and quell any and all sources of knowledge of the forbidden demonic power that was everywhere back in the day.
Assuming I'm right about half of this the real problem, to me, isn't that the setting likes to demystify itself. It's that every time it does so it points to this rather sleek and straightforward story of how everything went down. It's an ancient conspiracy by an Elven God and Witches and Bishops and the like to try and redeem or at least survive the original sins of those ancient elven gods. This leaves no room for doubt, faith or an absentee God that does not seem to but could be I dunno intervening in the world.
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