Previous sections have examined communities of faith. In this section we explore the idea of a community of the image. God-given images inspire extraordinary devotion and can come to represent the entire nation, effectively playing the role of Head of State. But manmade images, made, re-made and endlessly reproduced, can be just as powerful a means of binding people together. They unite those who make them in a shared sense of belonging, or those who look at them across the centuries in a common conviction that they will be guided and protected. Sculpture and painting can carry us to worlds beyond words and beyond ourselves, worlds normally accessible only to poets and prophets, mystics and shamans. The ambiguities and contradictions of belief, with which language struggles, can be accommodated or even dissolved. Images which carry different kinds of truth and different levels of reality have for most societies been a key part of living with the gods.