Neil MacGregor was director of the National Gallery,
London, from 1987 to 2002 and of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015. In
Mumbai as a speaker for the Tata Literature Live! festival, Macgregor spoke
about his latest book, Living With The Gods, and discussed the idea of religion
and their changing relevance in the world over millennia. MacGregor considers a
museum to be a lending library and his books are extremely well-curated
repositories of knowledge drawn from this library to tell the stories of people
and our world. For him, historical objects are much larger than symbols of
national significance and form our collective world heritage. His approach to
religion and culture draws on these historical artefacts and examines their
multiple dimensions and the stories they tell of different communities. Edited
excerpts from an interview:
You talk about the idea of all religions emerging out
of a need to tell stories in order to give meaning to our lives. But what
happens when these stories are increasingly conflated with historical truth?
This argument is captured in that wonderful phrase by
Joan Didion, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”. For most of history,
the value of the story was the extent to which it enabled you to understand
your place in the big scheme of the world. The difference between a story that
was imagined and a story that was historical was not a central one; it was the
effect of the story enabling us to live with each other. The fact that there
was only one kind of historical, scientific and verifiable truth was an
18th-century idea. Two big things happened since the Enlightenment in Europe—firstly,
the Europeans tried to say that religion and politics were different things.
And they saw in religion things that could not possibly be true like the Virgin
birth for example. They also saw that the church and state were in it together
to oppress and that’s the basis of all European secularism—a hostility to the
church as an instrument of state oppression and the idea if a story wasn’t
historically true, then it could have no value. And this misses a central point
that this story does not just have to be the opiate of the masses administered
by the powerful, it can also be the strength of the masses.
You speak about religion as stories that work to give
the oppressed dignity but how does this idea work for those who are equal
stakeholders in the state and economy?
We are in a different position with respect to the
conversation about religion than any previous generation. Until the 1960s-70s,
it was only possible to think of the individual being fulfilled in the context
of the whole community. Religion is about dependence, on each other and on the
world around us, and all the stories of all religions is about how you manage
that dependence and find in it strength and truth. In the last three or four
decades, with the rise of wealth and technology, a huge number of people can
now believe that they are not dependent and that they are in control as
individuals, and this is historically completely new. So the crisis we are
approaching is completely new where the individual asks the question whether it
is possible to have a life which is not dependent on the rest of the community.
And that is why the stories of our dependence have disintegrated—communism,
socialism as well as the ideas of Western European and American social
democracy. This has happened because a critical mass of people believes that
they are in a position to chart this path on their own. And there isn’t one
story that works for everybody anymore. This is a frightening concept,
especially for those who are dispossessed as they can ask the question, “Where
is my story now?” The political stories have been taken from them and the only
ones that remain are the religious ones and this is a phenomenon we are seeing
from South America to Africa, from Asia to large parts of Europe. Our previous
narrative was that everyone in the community had to be looked after by the
welfare state. With immigrants coming into Europe, the western world is not
prepared now to go on accepting that and the demonstrations rather than being a
Christian-Muslim confrontation, is an “us and them” confrontation. They are
taking a secular narrative of a collapsed social democratic system and turning
it into a religious one.
How does atheism fit into this notion of religion as
stories for the whole community?
Science explains and religion gives meaning. Atheists
have really struggled to do this on a communal level. This is an idea I discuss
in the book and the two examples I looked at were 18th century revolutionary
France, which abolished the church and God and established reason as religion.
That wasn’t enough and a religious identity was replaced with a national
identity. Most atheist philosophies have turned into very violent nationalisms
and this is yet another example of a story—albeit a secular one. The second
example was that of the Soviet Union, which tried very hard not to be
nationalist but it didn’t work out like that. Communism became a religion and
the teachings of Lenin and Marx took the place of the Holy Scripture. We
haven’t therefore seen an atheist state and we’ve got various surrogates. And
while individuals can be atheist in their own capacity, it is extremely
difficult to carry this forward on a community level.
How is it possible to have multiple narratives of
religion that work for all of society?
What about the rise of majoritarianism and religious
fundamentalism in India today?
Many have argued that what is happening is that
European traditions of single religion nationalism, literal truths and Semitic
monotheisms, which are alien to India are being introduced here. But we came
from a different place and they are our historical inheritance. Those problems
and approaches are being introduced into India, and it is a tension between a
long traditional Indian way of thinking and exclusive habits of thought which
are very characteristic of European thought and monotheism.
What is the role of a museum today?
I think a museum has a critical role to play in
today’s world as it is the place where the artefact is preserved, examined and
made available to the wider public. It is the place where it can be
demonstrated to what extent this object supports the interpretation of a
particular narrative and whether the texts are or are not true. And therefore,
museums need to have the courage in performing this role and also need to be
protected spaces. One of the defences against fundamentalism is the courageous
academic research of museums. This is a much bigger role than it was 50 years
ago. And while none of us can be entirely neutral, a museum has to keep
aspiring to neutrality. And in order to do this, a museum must be a space of
debate. A museum is not a temple of truth but a workshop struggling towards
truth. And this is possible because museums on the whole are civic spaces and
belong to everybody. The museum is a safe space for dangerous conversations.
Science explains and religion gives meaning to the
world: Neil MacGregor. Interview
by Diya Kohli. LiveMint , November 25, 2018
Dip in, dip out, argue, agree and disagree: Living
with the Gods is the newest manifestation of a rich multimedia format that
keeps on giving, devised by that superb writer and lecturer, Neil MacGregor,
sometime director of the British Museum, and his team. This ample publication,
subtitled “On Beliefs and Peoples”, is intertwined with the objects on view in
last year’s exhibition at the British Museum “Living with Gods: Peoples, Places
and Worlds Beyond”. That was accompanied by a small guidebook and followed by
30 BBC radio broadcasts, which incorporated many voices – academics, experts,
curators – as well as the chief narrator and interlocutor, Neil MacGregor, not
to mention music and other sound effects.
MacGregor first ventured into the potent combination
of radio broadcasting and publication with the imaginative and wildly
successful History of the World in 100 Objects – each object chosen from the
vast collections of the British Museum. The format was a stroke of genius,
enabling persuasive approaches to the biggest subject imaginable – human
culture – by devising accessible and representative segments. It has been
widely imitated, and deservedly so: for example, the Imperial War Museum has
published A History of World War One in 100 Objects. It is wonderfully
adaptable, telling stories about the very objects that were themselves devised
to show and tell stories.
In several senses this latest iteration of the possibilities
of understanding complex ideas and emotions through objects is the most
difficult: it is probably true that the highest proportion of what we might
call “art” is a way of making visible an interconnected web of belief and faith
in the imagined – and invisible.
Inuit parkas made of seal gut; Newgrange near Dublin,
a mere 5,000-plus years old, where the ray of light at the same time every
December signals the turning of the year; the life of Indian rivers; a 17th
century melancholy Muscovite icon of Our Lady of Kazan; the classical third
century Buddha in prayer from Gandahar, Pakistan: the 16th century Iznik
blue-and-white mosque lamp, exhibiting swirling calligraphy… Those are just a
handful from the dazzling selection of man-made artefacts, and natural
landscapes that are part of a dizzying array of diverse earthly manifestations
that are involved in ways of human life – and belief. Everything here has a
meaning, and MacGregor does not shy from the spectrum of human behaviour, evil
to good, enabled by belief, mistaken or not.
He and his experts are surefooted and do not shy away
from episodes of intolerance, hatred or murder in the name of belief. If there
is an overall thesis, it is that by looking at history to gaze at the current
world cycle, we recognise that there are groups influential beyond their
numbers which are turning secular and material preoccupations to versions of
faith and belief which are energising holy – and unholy – conflict, war and
terrorism. Understanding the backgrounds to belief and faith are more important
than ever, in part so that we can learn to avoid the violence that can be
caused by distorted adherence to imposing beliefs on societies at large.
As long as human history has been recorded, its
surviving material culture has been the product of faith, that inescapable
human longing to find a pattern to human existence (and, of course, its
history), and what might come after the ending of individual life. No less a
philosopher than Rousseau simply stated that “no state has even been founded
without religion servings as its base”. Political systems also demand faith,
nowhere more so than with communism, and currently many believe that the
pragmatic myth of liberal capitalism is dying.
So long before societies organised themselves in such
complex ways, it is thought that any communal human grouping had to have some
shared belief system. The assertions at the exhibition were very firm, and
reiterated in this satisfyingly solid publication is that there is no known
human society without beliefs in invisible spiritual powers. Moreover there is
a natural human inclination for transcendent worlds and beings expressed in
stories, objects, images and rituals. Living with the Gods suggested more than
that phrase from Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”, expanding it to “I
think, therefore I believe.” You might even believe in atheism, which is also a
kind of faith, and indeed in increasingly secular societies, nationalism.
We begin, so to speak, at the beginning with the Lion
Man, the oldest known human-animal image, created 40,000 years ago from mammoth
ivory, and discovered in a cave in southern Germany in 1939 but not pieced
together until after the war, when further discoveries were made, including a
smaller Lion Man. The Lion Man is a solid figure, an imagined creature. But
ephemeral elements also come into play – light, water and fire, constantly
changing – to be examined commemorated, depicted, worshipped.
The spirits of the ancestors inhabit many places;
shamans from various cultures communicate with these spirits, negotiate with
them, ask for protection. In other ways, the spirits of the dead have to be
cared for, and there are objects associated with a huge array of beliefs about
the worlds beyond the senses, the underworld, hell and heaven.
Buildings are made for the gods: the oldest known are
in South-East Turkey built by hunter-gatherers about 11,000 years ago. In
Mesopotamia (now Iraq) Sumerian peoples ritualised communal worship some 6,000
years ago in structures usually made of stone, with stone statues depicting the
human form. Ancient Hinduism has temples, rituals, sacrifices and a huge
pantheon of gods. Greeks and Romans also had sacrifices and temples, and gods
made overtly in man’s image, only on a larger scale, polygamous, squabbling,
petty and power-crazed. More recently, only several millennia ago, the three
great monotheist religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – shared some prophets
and preachers, and structure time each with their own characteristics: some
with music, all with prayers, fasting, communal meals, dietary suggestions and
the like. There are portable creations to aid such worship – rosaries and
prayer beads, and many great buildings. Buddhism, more a way of life, has its
prayer wheels, mantras, prayer flags. There are festivals and processions, each
with costumes, statues, vehicles to carry statues and representations of
deities, bonding social occasions.
It is the stimulating mission of this marvellous book
– which draws no conclusions, asking questions rather than providing answers –
to draw our attention to all the man-made things that attempt to portray
visions of the invisible world, and how humans interact with their imaginings.
The objects may be stable and solid, from the smallest coins – and even
American dollars are adduced for their religious phrases – to vast temples, but
human reactions are anything but. There are no solutions to the human quest
here, but myriad embodiments of varied hopes, expectations and journeys.
Neil MacGregor: Living with the Gods review - focuses
of belief. By Marina Vaizey. The Arts Desk , September 23, 2018
Neil MacGregor has chosen to open his new book with a
statement of what it is not. Living with the Gods, he writes, is neither a
history of religion, nor an argument in favour of faith, nor a defence of any
one belief. Rather, it is an attempt to define the nature of belief, the way it
influences people and the countries they inhabit, and to show how fundamental
it is in explaining who we are and where we came from. For, as he says, it is in
deciding how we live with the gods that we decide how to live with each other.
MacGregor has spent many years using art and
artefacts as a means of looking at the past, and once again his new book has
been accompanied by a radio series and an exhibition. Most of the objects he
describes come from the riches of the British Museum, of which he was director
for 13 years. Scrolls, pots, fragments of cloth, hair, icons, coins, statues,
cuneiform texts and inscribed vessels act as triggers for short essays designed
to show how societies have imagined and inhabited their place in the world.
Though much of the modern world lives far from its dead, the British Museum is
full of their spirits. This scholarly, elegantly written book is a reminder of
how seldom, when visiting a museum, most of us take the time to inquire into
what lies behind the objects we look at. Living with the Gods is a celebration
of curiosity.
The Enlightenment thinkers believed that if you could
separate organised religion from the state, there would be no more wars. It
was, MacGregor writes, to ignore a crucial element in the human psyche: the
need to belong and to have a story, a narrative, not only as an individual but
as a community, complete with legends and myths; and it was ever thus. At
Göbekli Tepe in south-eastern Turkey, 6,000 years before Stonehenge was built,
hunter-gatherers were already cooperating in the making of a shared site for
religious ceremonies. It suggests, MacGregor notes, that “we lived with the
gods before we lived at close quarters with each other”. Analysing, one by one,
objects from every corner of the world and every moment in history, he
describes the way that humans have used places, as well as objects that can be
touched and felt, to make connections with the divine. It is this interweaving
of history and the links between time and place that make his book so enjoyable
and so impressive.
Every so often, after the public has left, the
cleaners in the British Museum come across little offerings laid at the foot of
statues, most often Hindu ones. The cases of exhibits themselves are full of
these propitiating gifts, whether in clay, silver, gold, wax or metal. A
19th-century Japanese picture of a shrine, found in an agricultural community,
has a pedestal, decorated with three foxes; visitors to the shrine regularly
brought tofu with which to feed them. In the north of what is now Colombia, the
Muisca, who lived between 600 and the 1530s, were skilled gold makers, to judge
by a rare piece that has survived. Having made their delicate, exquisite
objects, they threw them into a lake as offerings to the gods, to ensure a
peaceful equilibrium between heaven and earth. It took the arrival of
Europeans, who dredged the lake and plundered everything they found, to put an
end to such gracious selflessness.
While most of MacGregor’s book concentrates on the
peaceable aspects of faith, from pilgrimages to shrines, household gods to
shared deities, he does not avoid the acts of violence committed in the name of
religion, especially where religion and state act as one; or where, as in
revolutionary France and Russia, rulers set out to replace religion with reason
and wound up with murder. The current religious turmoil of the Middle East
finds its place in Living with the Gods, but a jubba, a beggar’s tunic, worn by
the followers of the messianic Islamic Mahdi in Sudan and now in the British
Museum, gives MacGregor the opportunity to describe the slaughter of 12,000 of
the Mahdi’s followers by the British under Kitchener at Omdurman in 1898.
Behind many of MacGregor’s objects lie stories of considerable violence.
Living with the Gods, with its sections on everything
from French laïcité to the Yup’ik people of Alaska, who believe that the soul
resides in the bladder of seals, ends with an unexpected message. Far from
shrinking away, organised religion appears to be spreading. In Japan, one of
the most secular countries in the world, young pregnant women are once again
choosing to wear specially propitious sashes and taking offerings to the
temples, in the name of children they have lost or aborted. In India, the
numbers of Hindu pilgrims attending the Kumbh Mela festival to celebrate the
virtues of detachment and compassion have now reached 100 million, making it
the largest religious event in the world. Faith is providing cohesion and
reassurance.
However, as MacGregor admits, everywhere from
Pakistan to Israel, Myanmar to Nigeria, religion is increasingly shaping
national identity and politics, and driving territorial disputes. It is also
hard not to feel, at the end of this fascinating book, that with our battery
farms, exploitation of resources, pollution and the hunting of animals and
birds to extinction, the interrelationship between humans and the living world
is seriously out of kilter. We have a very long way to go before we live
properly either with the gods or with each other.
Living with the Gods by Neil MacGregor review – the
nature of belief. By Caroline
Moorehead. The Guardian , October 15 , 2018
In the middle of “The Simpsons Movie” (2007), news of
an impending apocalypse reaches the citizens of Springfield. The congregants
gathered for church immediately flee to Moe’s Bar for some strong drink. On the
way, though, they encounter the bar’s patrons stampeding in the opposite
direction in order to pray. The scene raises a question or two. What is it that
religion provides us that nothing else can? And what can’t religion give us
that might be supplied elsewhere?
Neil MacGregor’s “Living With the Gods” helps us
think about these matters from the widest possible perspective. A former
director of the British Museum, Mr. MacGregor is best known for “A History of
the World in 100 Objects” (2010), which used museum artifacts—everything from a
13,000-year old spear to a latter-day Visa card—to fashion a history of our
species. In “Living With the Gods,” Mr. MacGregor draws on this same engaging
technique, marshaling physical objects both within and beyond the museum’s
walls to tell the sweeping story of human religious belief.
He begins by taking us back, in a way reminiscent of
the theological scholar Mircea Eliade (1907-86), to the stirrings of religion
in early man’s attempts to come to grips with the four great natural forces:
the sun, the rain, the fire of forge and hearth, and the waters of rivers and
lakes. Physically, of course, this quartet displays a pattern, the sun being
the celestial version of earthly fire and rain being the heavenly variant of
terrestrial streams and ponds. But Mr. MacGregor’s discussion brings out a
deeper symmetry in the way each laid a cornerstone of religious practice.
The harvest rain’s principal contribution to the
origins of religion was to spawn a priestly class—diviners and shamans—to
forecast or summon it. In Egypt, as Mr. MacGregor shows, priests fashioned
earthen figurines of the agriculture god Osiris, implanting them with seeds and
burying them after each harvest to sprout new corn. Beyond the capacity of
priests to control or even predict, rain infused in early clergy an attitude of
humility, Mr. MacGregor says, as they mediated with the gods on behalf of their
flock.
The terrestrial waters of rivers and lakes, by
contrast, were both controllable via aqueducts and dikes and predictable in
their flooding or receding. They assumed a different role in the religious
world, begetting rituals that the laity could perform for itself, such as the
cleansing of sins. Here Mr. MacGregor presents us with a gouache of the goddess
Ganga, whom Hinduism millennia ago deemed to be the source of the Ganges River.
Each fall to this day, when the river recedes, a sandbank emerges that can
accommodate a pop-up city for millions of believers. Bathing in the Ganges
brings them into direct physical contact with heaven.
For the early peoples of the Northern Hemisphere, the
sun induced anxiety because its path through space and time, though beyond
human control, was all too heartbreakingly predictable: It would move south
each year, leaving behind months of cold and darkness. And so across Eurasia,
priests turned to ancient astronomers and engineers to construct versions of Ireland’s
Newgrange. A massive stone edifice, Newgrange contains a small aperture though
which—at exactly 8.58 a.m. each Dec. 21—a beam of sunlight flows, reassuring
all assembled that the sun is returning. Roughly 5,000 years old, Newgrange
symbolizes, as Mr. MacGregor notes, primordial religion’s sponsorship of
technological expertise.
Earthly fire, meanwhile, is under human control to
summon, yet if not well tended risks an unpredictable path through space and
time. In ancient Rome, accordingly, fire fell under the management of skilled
domestic craftspeople, tool makers and food preparers. It furnished them with
religious roles, inspiring deities such as Vulcan, god of the forge, and Vesta,
goddess of the hearth. The vestal virgins, whose images appear on coins and
friezes in Mr. MacGregor’s pages, held the high responsibility of keeping the
Roman national hearth alight.
The artifacts in “Living With the Gods” link the
natural elements, each with its own degree of controllability and
predictability, to the origins of human religious order, in which priests,
laity, experts and craftsmen all found a place. Indeed, this is Mr. MacGregor’s
main thesis: that religion, above all, produces community. It unifies a people
through ceremony and ritual. Émile Durkheim, the pioneering French sociologist,
argued the same thing.
And there’s much truth to it. Yet as Mr. MacGregor
moves forward in time to the major living religions, principally Christianity,
Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, his objects begin to suggest something different.
What strikes the reader is not so much the cohesion of unified belief
communities as the development of divisions within each: orthodoxy versus
revisionism, fundamentalism versus liberalism, God’s singularity versus his
plurality.
Take two of Mr. MacGregor’s images: an Eastern
Orthodox icon of Mary with Jesus and—this one he relates through an anecdote
rather than showing it—an Orthodox Jew being “given a bust of the composer
Rossini, and in the Orthodox spirit of not keeping images of the human body,
[knocking] off his nose.” Together these depictions remind us that orthodoxy
divides some faiths more than others. Unlike Hinduism and Islam, which today
are composed of much the same sects that existed at their origins,
Christianity’s current divisions—such as the 11th-century schism between Rome
and Constantinople—came later in its history, as did Judaism’s: Its Reform and
Conservative branches, for example, evolved in the 19th century. It’s not
surprising, then, that Mr. MacGregor’s imagery calls to mind that both
Christianity and Judaism have distinctive trajectories that designate
themselves “orthodox.” It’s a term used by some to signify that other
co-religionists have departed from a longstanding path.
If orthodoxy is a rejection of innovation within the
faith, fundamentalism is a reaction to the world outside the faith, whether the
supposed error of other religions or of the secular world. Fundamentalism is a
trait shared most prominently by proselytizing movements within Christianity
and Islam, both holding a well-elaborated belief in hell. Mr. MacGregor’s only
art portraying soldiers of faith in battle comes from those two religions.
Christianity also shares a certain kind of internal
division with Hinduism, over whether and in what ways the godhead is unitary or
multiple. Mr. MacGregor shows us a golden reliquary containing remains of the
Three Kings, which recalls the Christian trinity, a doctrine that holds the
divinity to be at once one and three. And we see a photograph of a market stall
in northern India containing statuary of the Hindu gods, around whom competing
denominations organize, content with divine multiplicity. No comparable
artifacts from Judaism or Islam appear in the book. Those faiths unite in
deeming God indivisible.
Mr. MacGregor takes us to up the present, leaving us
wondering what messages his matchless collection of objects, fashioned by human
beings to celebrate a God-created world, might carry for our future. Do they
have anything to say, for example, to the scientific visionaries who tout our
coming capacity, through virtual reality, to create our own worlds? And what
about the idea that artificial intelligence will soon allow us to upload our
minds onto super-computers, where we ourselves will supposedly live forever as
hyper-intelligent “gods,” as the philosopher John Gray puts it?
In these respects, Mr. MacGregor’s images sound a
cautionary note. Virtual worlds of our own devising might be appealing
fantasies. But a world created by God—or even, if one so believes, a universe
that sprang from no conscious entity at all—is a thing richer than fantasy:
It’s a mystery. Just take one glance at Mr. MacGregor’s image of William
Blake’s stunning print “Ancient of Days,” in which an awesome God creates the
cosmos, and compare it with even the most lavish, fully immersive universes
that we ourselves might fashion through virtual reality. However much the human
ingenuity reflected in virtual worlds might transport and delight us, only the
godly genesis depicted by Blake can transcend and deliver us.
What about eternal life as a god-like digital being?
My favorite, among Mr. MacGregor’s images, is that Indian stall hawking
figurines of the Hindu gods. In its midst there stands a bespectacled man in a
business suit. He is, Mr. MacGregor tells us, B.R. Ambedkar, one of the authors
of the Indian constitution who worked tirelessly to abolish the caste system.
While we use the term “mythical” to describe the accomplishments of the gods around
him, we use a different term—“legendary”—for Ambedkar’s, and for all great
human achievements in which we wrestle agonizingly with the upper limits of our
capacities. It’s far more stirring, this image reminds us, to be the stuff of
legend than of myth. As artificial intelligences, we might accomplish godlike
mental feats without experiencing pain or struggle. As digital algorithms, as
far as we know, we would be conscious of nothing at all.
All of which brings us back to Moe’s Bar in
Springfield. In a way, Moe’s libations are simply a homelier version of our
promised techno-future. They offer the obliteration of pain, or even of
consciousness, just as does the prospect of our becoming digital gods. Or they
promise elation, even a kind of psychedelic consciousness, just as virtual
worlds do. In response, the objects in Mr. MacGregor’s book quietly offer the
most potent of replies. They remind us of why Moe’s Bar is empty when the
churchgoers arrive.
‘Living With the Gods’ Review: The Gang’s All Here. By Andrew Stark. The Wall Street Journal , November 16, 2018.
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