Money might seem real, but is it really?
Yes. Yes it is.
it's only real because we humans have decided it's real and it has value.
Yes. Like numbers. Or colours. Or musical notes.
All intangible; All artificial; All nevertheless real.
All real myths.
Yes. Unlike
fake myths, such as Jane Eyre, Thor, Hercules, Sherlock Holmes, or Jehova.
If all human knowledge were somehow destroyed, and we had to start from scratch living a paeleolithic existence, we would eventually re-invent money, numbers, colours and music. But not one of the fictional characters I listed above would return.
We would probably have gods, and certainly have storybook characters. But they wouldn't be much like the ones we have now.
I'll actually disagree with you on this.
I would expect that a few things would end up rather similar, in fact.
We would end up with:
• At least one deity that is represented by three parts arranged likely but not necessarily as "A1, B, A2" or roughly analogous to "parent; idea; child", so a "trinity god".
• At least one deity that is representative of greed, related intimately with some rare material with "trade potential", so a "Mammon" by some name or another.
• Several pantheons headed by storm gods, as storms.
• A number of religions headed by people discussing concepts of rebirth that worship some story of someone who "figured something out, and who will return".
• At least one of the trinity god religions will claim at least one of the "rebirthers".
• A large number of religions will contain a "Prometheus story" of a figure who reveals something that was secret and experiences something WORSE than death repeatedly for doing it.
My reason for thinking these things is the reality of the concept of memetic reproduction which happens via the form "originator; record; RE-originator" when the originated idea reaches people not merely happy with adoption but whose personality requires, for lack of a better way of describing it, *a pilgrimage through the original thought process*.
Then there's the Mammon thing which organized around the emergent behavior of people with respect to money...
The storm gods should be apparent to anyone familiar with the primacy of storms in maritime cultures.
The rebirth religions will happen for the same reasons as the "originator; record; re-originator" deity pattern where some deity (really an idea) is "reborn" again and again in a human "host", for the same reason as the "Trinity religion" will have a similar concept; they're both common and easy misinterpretations of certain emergent memetic cycles.
Inevitably a person who says all of this in terms that are are approachable by lay-persons will be elevated as a deity.
And of course the Prometheus story because of what conservative people do to disruptive inventors.
I wouldn't say things would look radically different. I think it would be more like Nethack where all the same options and items and functions still exist just behind different names, and possibly with slightly different distributions.