Today, I will explain a little about my reasoning in deciding what kind of religion, faith life or spirituality my world would have. (For the record, I am a Roman Catholic Christian, and a faithful one.) I knew that I wanted the ant part of my world to have a religious aspect in their culture. That went along with their being “the good guys”. I looked at the role of world religions in human culture: monotheism, plural gods, good and evil across history and across the globe. I can’t begin to count the number of cultures I researched and read about concerning each one’s view of creation and the entrance of evil (and in some cases not a “devil” but a “trickster god”) into the world. I went way beyond Genesis Chapter 1, Pandora’s box and all the other “common” ones, and included North and South American Native American traditions, Indian and Asian cultures in my study. I even looked at how other modern fantasies such as C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia and Star Wars handled this topic.

Both ancient and modern cultures with many gods, both male and female, use the pronouns he and she in place of the god’s name. Cultures with one god (mainly the Judeo/Christian/Islamic cultures which historically were male dominated) use “he” because “it” just doesn’t work, even though “god” doesn’t really have gender.

But ants, even in our day, are female dominated—all daughters of one queen, so it would be logical for them to use “she” when needing a pronoun to refer to their god. But what name to give this “she”? After a great deal of thought, I decided on the word essence—capital “E” when referring to the spiritual entity, and lowercase “e” when referring to the part of Essence in each ant. And after a lot more thought, I wrote the ants’ creation story, and included it at the beginning of each of the four volumes.

As for the roaches? They are basically agnostic or atheistic, until they begin to learn from the ants.

Next time: Why did I choose the names I used?