"Where Did The Gods Go?" II

In the Pagan world view, there is no difference in meaning between the questions "What gods are worshiped in this country?" and "What gods exist in this country?" (An ambiguous intermediate form of the question would be "What are the gods of this country?") So maybe what happens to gods that are no longer worshiped is simply a matter of what is believed or imagined to happen to them? Different things are imagined so maybe a majority, consensus or composite view prevails?

One character in Poul and Karen Anderson's The Dog And The Wolf (London, 1989) has an active imagination:

"Evirion came to think that it was as if the Gods mocked him: the Three of Ys, Taranis the Thunderer, Belisama the All-Mother, Lir of the Deeps, dethroned, homeless, become trolls. He denied it with every force he could summon, but it gnawed past his defences like the sea undermining the foundations of the city. If not They, then Someone laired here and hated everything human." (pp. 128-129)

The thought of the Three as trolls overcomes his resistance to it as though the thought reflected an external reality. We know that Dahut transformed into a siren or mermaid lairs nearby. She had reason, as she saw it, for hatred but surely not of "everything human"? Why does she lure sailors to their deaths? Is she controlled by someone or something hostile? We were definitely told that someone had awaited her when she underwent a process that should have ended simply in her death.

If all national pantheons had an equal ontological status, then the world would be full of gods, as Thales said. Some works of fiction, eg, The Broken Sword by Poul Anderson and The Sandman by Neil Gaiman, accept this premise. The Romans cleverly acknowledged the reality of foreign gods but avoided divine overload by identifying Zeus and Thor with Jupiter, Ares with Mars etc. In the Andersons' King of Ys tetralogy, a Latin inscription identifies Belisama, Taranis and Lir with Venus, Jupiter and Neptunus but Gratillonius tells his men that such identifications are not always accurate.