Culture | Transcendental meditation

Neil MacGregor on living with gods

Why humans need a spiritual dimension in their lives

THE modern human is by turns intrigued, bewildered, horrified and enraptured by religion. In a world where many people look to science to decipher the universe, there is something fascinating, and a bit frightening, about spiritual systems and codes which have commanded passionate loyalty among millions of people for millennia, but which are still impenetrable to outsiders.

It follows that any successful effort to explain or even just describe religion in broad strokes may be on to a winning streak. With a landmark exhibition, a BBC radio series and a forthcoming book that will sum up both, the British Museum and its collaborators are rising to that challenge.

It promises to be far more successful than any attempt to address the subject in a single medium could be. The project appeals, as most popular forms of religion do, to the mind, the eye and the ear.

A prime mover in this initiative is Neil MacGregor, the institution’s former director whose didactic skills as a lecturer and broadcaster have already redefined the role of great museums. It follows on from “A History of the World in 100 Objects”, his groundbreaking 20-week-long series of radio stories that went out in 2010. Now the BBC has started transmitting his reflections on religious culture in 30 new radio talks of 15 minutes each. The talks draw in part on “Living with Gods”, an exhibition at the British Museum that uses objects to portray the transcendent as it has been conceived throughout human history.

The oldest item, and the subject of Mr MacGregor’s opening talk, is a mammoth-tusk sculpture called the Lion Man dating back to the Ice Age. Even among hunter-gatherers who were struggling to survive, it was worthwhile for someone to spend up to 400 hours fashioning an object that served nothing but a talismanic purpose, connecting people to invisible worlds. The newest object is a cross made by an Italian carpenter from bits of a ship that was carrying refugees when it foundered in the Mediterranean near Lampedusa (pictured). As part of his broadcast, Mr MacGregor goes to the cave where the Lion Man was found and talks to a German scholar. With a remit to travel wherever he needs and speak to anyone who can help, his enquiries take him to, among other places, the Ganges river in India and the Stone Age tomb of Newgrange in Ireland.

Listeners are invited to follow his wanderings, to take jumps between cultures and historical eras and even to leap between the here-and-now and the transcendent. In the same few minutes, Mr MacGregor describes a coat made from seal-gut by the Yupik people of Alaska and a figure of Osiris, an Egyptian deity that is connected with life, death and the underworld. The coat speaks of indigenous hunters’ sacramental relationship with their prey, the Osiris figure of the new life engendered by the Nile.

It takes a deft communicator to pull off such verbal pirouettes. What holds the material together, though, is Mr MacGregor’s interest in the role of religion and ritual in human society. He speaks compellingly of the human mind’s need to find patterns in the universe and to situate itself within those giant matrices.

Jill Cook, who curated an important show at the British Museum in 2013 that explained how the Ice Age made the modern mind, is also the curator of this new exhibition. She shares Mr MacGregor’s desire to present religion as a social phenomenon that has been present in every age of history, cementing and expressing social bonds, and also violently dividing people. By including exhibits related to the communist cult of atheism, she shows that attempts to squeeze religion out of society have sometimes dramatically misfired: anti-religion can easily become a cult.

Mr MacGregor is a social anthropologist on a vast plane, whereas Ms Cook leans more to the neuroscience of religion. By including sounds, such as softly heard bells and flutes, she draws attention to the aural stimuli that can arouse people’s spiritual antennae.

However, they have a common purpose: to bring home the ubiquity, and the social character, of religion to a mainly secular public. To the modern mind, speculating about moral and philosophical questions is something people engage in individually. In most eras of history, and in many parts of the world today, such freedom would be inconceivable.

As the exhibition and the radio series both proclaim, religion has generally been an activity, not a set of true-or-false propositions, and above all a collective activity in which the tribe or nation finds meaning.

Some of the objects that are highlighted have been considered sacred in themselves, such as a copy of the Kazan icon of the Mother of God. This depiction of Mary, deemed to have played a role in protecting Moscow from foreign invaders, is credited with such holiness that it can extend to reproductions. Others are spectacular reminders of what has been considered holy, and the efforts which have been made to convey sanctity from one place to another. For example, the radio series ponders giant silver vessels in which a Victorian-era maharajah brought water from the Ganges to London, and the exhibition includes a more modest receptacle in which pilgrims to Mecca gathered water from a sacred spring and brought it to their families.

Mr MacGregor and Ms Cook do justice to these marvellous objects, at the same time driving home the point that humans are “hard-wired” for religion, a concept they both use. But that well-made point leads on to another one.

Whatever sociologists may say about football as a cult, many people alive today are not religious in the way their forebears were. The hard-wiring seems to have been loosened, even among those who formally adhere to a faith. For anyone interested in the broad sweep of human history, that too is something rather mysterious.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Transcendental meditation"

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