In terms of human historical experience, the image of the gods is actually inseparable from human cognition. Human beings often give images and personalities to God for their own reasons and in their own way.

In all belief systems, people seek a "personified God" who is deeply ingrained in people's consciousness when they first come into contact with the concept of God.

Many believers in monotheistic beliefs believe that the main god is abstract, and in the ant world is no exception, and the gods of many tribes on both sides of the great river have no concrete image.

But most of the time, when people talk about gods, they are talking more about human beings than about what gods really are, and gods are given the kind of image that people want.

One of the fundamental drivers of religion is the evolving response of people to environmental stimuli. People tend to think of natural phenomena as an intermediary between the gods and humans.

For example, lightning is a man with a gray beard (like Zeus in Greek mythology) standing in a dark cloud and emitting from between his fingers.

Our ancestors, in a gatherer-hunter society, may have felt that trees also had souls because of the patterns on them that resembled human faces. Ancient frescoes preserved in caves around the world provide the earliest evidence of human spirituality, showing the interdependence of our ancestors and nature. The Trois-Frères cave in southwestern France is beautifully painted with animals floating in the air, but there is no sight of hunting. In the middle of them is a mysterious creature: its body is part human, part stag, and part owl. These are clearly not depictions of real animals, but of another world beyond the realm of matter.

In ancient societies, with the development of human society, small groups of gatherers and hunters evolved into more densely populated and agrarian societies with a division of labor, and the image of gods in people's minds also changed.

With the establishment of agrarian societies, people began to think that humans could dominate nature, and in their imagination God was of course the master of nature. With the advent of writing in sedentary societies, some ancient civilizations represented by Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations left more detailed records of their beliefs. The use of words to describe the gods not only changed the image of the gods in people's minds, but also made people clearly aware of their subconscious and secret desire to portray the gods in their own image.

As people began to try to harness and manipulate the forces of nature, the gods also became powerful and moody, fighting each other like humans to control their divine realm.

At some point, the gods became too human-like, and the ancient Greeks began to question their legitimacy. Did the gods really look like humans, as depicted in ancient Greek statues? These doubts also lead to a new perspective: perhaps there is only one true God.

The rudiments of this theistic belief are contradictory to polytheistic beliefs, for a single god and the prevailing habit of anthropomorphizing gods are incompatible: how can a single god be both an angel and a demon at the same time?

But people are slowly coming to terms with the idea that there is a more powerful god over a group of less powerful gods. It also reflected the social class of the time: the bulk of power was concentrated in the hands of one person, and among the gods, there was also a god who held the majority of power.

It wasn't until the first explicit expression of monotheistic belief in the Bible that true monotheism took hold. As Jehovah declares: "I am the first and the last, and there is no true God besides me." ”

And when Jesus appeared, he represented a human God who was still needed. At the same time, he continued to preach and tell people how loving and forgiving God (the Father) is. At first, not everyone accepted that Jesus himself was God, until the principle of "Father and Son" was established in Jehovah the Father and Jesus the Son.

In the seventh century A.D., the religion was born out of the Arabian desert to compete with the personified God of Christianity. Although the religion denies the "Trinity" and believes that God does not have a specific image, material carrier or form, there are still passages in the Qur'an that are "full of anthropomorphic depictions of Allah Allah." Some *** have also asked the question, how could Allah create all things and be cut off from the world He created? So, for the most part, Allah appears in human form, like God and Jesus.

It can be seen that in the history of mankind, the trajectory of the development of religion has often followed the trajectory of animism, polytheism, polytheism with a main god, and monotheism.

Regardless of the religion, most of the time, the image of the deity is a human being, or at least a personality.

Even if it is not a human image, it can be generalized to other images that humans can recognize: animals, plants, and rarely non-living images. A small number of fantasy images: dragons, unicorns, and griffins, creatures with demigod characteristics, can also find one or more archetypes corresponding to human cognition.

And the protagonist finds illogic in it after comparing the old world of the big-headed ant "remnant" and the ant myth on both sides of the river.

It stands to reason that the old world was more developed than the civilizations on both sides of the great river, but in terms of the degree of religious development, the old world was still a polytheistic stage with a main god, while monotheistic religions developed on both sides of the great river, which could only use fire, and believed in gods without specific images, which was a very progressive religious stage.

In addition, what the protagonist cares about very much is the image of the god of the old world of the big-headed ant "remnant".

The god of the tree is a flake, and the god of wind and water is a plate; Vulcan is a flickering flame (this is easy to understand), but there is a circle underneath the flame; The rain god is a cake with many holes.

These figures are completely unrelated to living beings, and look very strange, and it is rare for a religion to assume the outward image of a god with a large amount of non-living matter. Even if the protagonist secretly feels that there is a clue in it, he can't grasp that little bit of inspiration.

As for the main deity, it is an image of four limbs, with a soft and smooth body surface, which many animals fit: frogs, lizards, naked mole rats, and even humans.

None of these creatures, judging by the protagonist's current experience, exist in this world, and the highest life form in this world is insects.

Why do ants use a different image from themselves as the main god? Where did they learn about this image? Have they ever seen a creature like this?