I awoke again recently to a cloudy sky, sidewalks covered with gritty snow, and the town plow barreling noisily down Main Street. I consoled myself with a short walk wearing microspikes and the anticipation of a morning ahead to read.
I’m nearly finished with Living With the Gods, a new book by Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum. In it MacGregor focuses on beliefs, cultures and varieties of religious systems across history. He highlights the ways in which they have been both beneficial and destructive. For me, the book has been informative, at times familiar, and often surprising. A terrific antidote to my late-winter impatience.
His first chapter ignited my latent anthropologist. It focuses on a 40,000-year-old figure he calls Lion Man, discovered in Ulm, Germany, in 1939. Combining the features of a lion and a human, it is carved on the ivory tusk of a mammoth. This 12-inch-tall statue is the “earliest known representation of something beyond human experience.” The dramatic wearing down of the sharp edges of the primitive carving further indicates that it was frequently handled. Most likely, Lion Man was a ritualistic object passed from person to person in a circle around a fire. Its discovery recalls a human community seeking to strengthen “the sense of themselves as a group.”
Many parts of Living With the Gods had a sense of familiarity. I recognized some of the tales MacGregor spins out from Greek mythology and the Bible, enjoyed stories of how much of our musical tradition is grounded in religious contexts, and walked along happily on visits with him to sites like Stonehenge and Newgrange.
But a lot here has been new to me. Knowing Rastafarians only as a Jamaican religious group stereotyped by dreadlocks and reggae, I had missed their profound connection to a unique Christianity rooted in Ethiopia.
And while I knew Hindus practiced ritualistic bathing in the Ganges during religious gatherings, MacGregor adds complexity as he elaborates on this tradition. For some Hindu festivals, an entire city is constructed by the government along the Ganges, complete with tents, water, sanitary systems, electricity and food, all free to the millions of people who attend.
At the end, the city is dismantled to avoid its destruction by the next monsoon. But also, MacGregor notes, the ritualistic destruction emphasizes that life itself is “about producing something with real commitment but then accepting its disappearance just as easily.”
Fortunately, MacGregor does not mince words in several chapters about the negatives of belief systems. For some in the modern world, religion is “essentially bigoted mumbo-jumbo, in the name of which people blow each other up,” he says. And he shows how all too often, it has been the cause of incredible division and destruction, in history and today.
Looking back, I have no doubt that my attraction to a book like Living With the Gods springs from my liberal arts education at a Midwestern college. During my years there, all entering students took a four-semester sequence combining courses in historical studies and the humanities.
Today, my writing table is within easy reach of the bookshelf on which I keep the texts from those classes. They were the start of my passionate support of the humanities at every level of education. And their lasting influence makes all the difference on a March morning when signs of spring are hard to find.
Mary K. Otto lives in Norwich.