The term fantasy is a loaded one - speak it aloud these days and, as if by magic incantation, you’re likely to summon into the minds of audiences a remarkably homogenous set of images from HBO’s Game of Thrones.  (A decade ago, those images might have come instead from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies - though I doubt the impact would have been anywhere near as all-pervasive - and before that, you’d probably just have ended up with a mish-mash variance of porn images, to each their secretive own).  

Such is the power wielded by the engines of imagination our culture has set in motion.  Around the curve of the globe, tens of millions of individual minds take on a unified fictional construct, which becomes a kind of lingua franca by which those minds can interact.  Our acknowledged fiction factories have been pulling this trick for quite a while now - ask any Star Wars fan; indeed ask yourself, if you’re not one of the aforementioned fans, how those two words have come to be so resonant inside your skull.  But of course even such major cultural artefacts as Game of Thrones and Star Wars pale into insignificance beside the fiction factories of our deeper history - Christianity, Islam, Judaism, the Norse pantheon, the Greek and Roman gods and so on back; these are the real winners in the fantasy stakes.  No-one, not even the most ardent geek, is going to die in battle with the name of Luke Skywalker on their lips.  But the geeks of religion have been doing exactly that with the names of their favourite fictional characters for thousands of years.