BOOK REVIEW: ‘Living with the Gods’ By Neil McGregor

OPINION:

LIVING WITH THE GODS: ON BELIEFS AND PEOPLES

By Neil McGregor

Alfred A. Knopf, $40, 512 pages

“Living With The Gods” is an enormous and illuminating project, undertaken by Neil McGregor in collaboration with the BBC and the British Museum, of which he is the former director.

As the author notes at beginning: “Every known society shares a set of beliefs and assumptions — a faith, an ideology, a religion — that goes far beyond the life of the individual and is an essential part of a shared identity.”

Taking this as his topic, he focuses on actions and ceremonies that shape individuals and their communities, aiming “to understand what shared religious beliefs can mean in the public life of a community or nation.”

Though he explores the central books of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions, his purposes are best served by objects such as statues, paintings, coins, housewares, clothing and ceremonial utensils. They can often illuminate more than written texts, which are inherently language-bound so can conceal or mislead as well as reveal.

“The silence of objects allows us into territory difficult to enter in other ways” he writes. It also allows him to put the religions of small groups on the same footing as the major world religions, and to cover behaviors such as heroic cults that are not normally thought of as religious.

The result is a book about communities of people making things, celebrating events, fighting battles, mourning deaths, enjoying the seasons and their festivals. It’s impossible not to be fascinated, especially by the copious illustrations of artifacts from the British Museum — the oldest of them a lion man that’s around 40,000 years old.

There’s also numerous photographs of pilgrimages and sites where people have come to celebrate festivals and worship their gods. One of the most recent is of St Paul’s in London, featuring the Lampedusa Cross made of timbers from the wreckage of a boatload of illegal immigrants in 2016.

The range of these images amazes. Many, like the lion man, astonish with their age and technical skill. Another example is a Bronze Age relief of the tempest god Ningirsu, his eagle wings outstretched behind alert protective stags. Other images shock. A gory 16th-century crucifix bordered by roses and strawberries is hard to look at, and, equally, so is the photograph of Indian soldiers taking aim at the Sikh’s Golden Temple in Amritsar in 1984.

On the other hand, some objects such as a 19th-century model of the Siberian Ysyakh festival mesemerize with their beauty. The German “Schutzmantel Maria” that closes the book is another example. “It shows The Virgin Mary spreading her protective cloak. Beneath its sheltering folds are ten small figures representatives of a whole society: men and women of different ages or types, all praying or looking anxiously out.” Mary herself is serenely and determinedly braving the world that threatens the denizens of her cloak.

This image surely speaks to everyone — Christian or otherwise — of protective maternal love. Many other images are obscure, even mystifying, but Neil McGregor explains how they illustrate the ties that bind people to their society. He is helped by experts such as Rabbi Julia Neuberger, theologian Karen Armstrong, Cambridge classics professors Mary Beard, former Archbishop Rowan Williams, and numerous archeologists, historians and religious teachers, who are quoted extensively.

As well as offering expert elucidation, most of these authorities humanize their knowledge hoards by speaking of it in the context their personal feelings or experiences. The Anglican Dr. Rowan Williams, for example, explains why he likes to pray before an icon.

While the illustrations make this book visually gorgeous, the discussion of numerous beliefs and practices makes it intellectually stimulating. Anybody who has the slightest experience of Protestant Christianity takes hymn singing for granted. Churchgoers have their favorites; holidays such as Easter and Christmas are celebrated with special hymns.

But such community singing is not typical of other religions. “It was one of Martin Luther’s great insights that few things bring disparate people more quickly and effectively together than sharing a song they all know by heart,” the author writes.

His discussion of Ethiopian Christianity and its links to Rastafarians in Jamaica is equally illuminating. So, too, are the accounts of the eighteenth-century synagogue in Plymouth, England, of religion in Ancient Egypt and Peru, and the observances of the indigenous populations of Alaska and Siberia. In the end, Christianity probably gets more attention than other religions, but this is in no sense a book about Christianity or any other single religion, nor is it a history of religion.

It is a serious, always fascinating, always readable exploration of the understanding that “Religion addresses many of the same defining questions as politics. How does a society organize itself to survive? What sacrifices can society properly expect of the individual Who is included in the community we call ’we’?”

• Claire Hopley is a writer and editor in Amherst, Mass.