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Living With The Gods On Beliefs and Peoples First United States Edition. Edition Neil Macgregor. Complete Edition

The document discusses the book 'Living with the Gods' by Neil Macgregor, which explores the role of shared beliefs and ideologies in shaping human identity and community. It emphasizes that these beliefs, often religious, influence public life and individual relationships within societies. The book aims to understand how these shared beliefs contribute to communal life and the dynamics between individuals and the state.

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)
58 views72 pages

Living With The Gods On Beliefs and Peoples First United States Edition. Edition Neil Macgregor. Complete Edition

The document discusses the book 'Living with the Gods' by Neil Macgregor, which explores the role of shared beliefs and ideologies in shaping human identity and community. It emphasizes that these beliefs, often religious, influence public life and individual relationships within societies. The book aims to understand how these shared beliefs contribute to communal life and the dynamics between individuals and the state.

Uploaded by

cyczjitnff778
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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‘The first condition of human goodness is
something to love; the second, something to
reverence.’
GEORGE ELIOT
‘Religion is an attempt to find meaning in events,
not a theory that tries to explain the universe.’
JOHN GRAY
‘Religious beliefs are not universal truths, but
community truths, and they guide lives rather than
describe facts. They express what it means to
belong to a community and to owe allegiance to its
values.’
DON CUPITT
Sunrise at the Harischandra Ghat at Varanasi on the Ganges, with
bathers facing the rising sun (see this page)
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF
Copyright © 2018 by the Trustees of the British Museum and the BBC
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in
Great Britain by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, London, in 2018.
www.aaknopf.com
Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin
Random House LLC.
By arrangement with the BBC and the British Museum
The BBC logo and Radio 4 logo are registered trademarks of the British
Broadcasting Corporation and are used under license. BBC logo © BBC,
2005.
LCCN: 2018030942 (hardcover); ISBN 9780525521464 (hardcover)
Ebook ISBN 9780525521471
Cover image: Nose and lips of Akhenaten, c. 1353–1336 BC. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Edward S. Harkness
Gift, 1926 (26.7.1395)
v5.4
ep
FOR PAUL KOBRAK,
companion through earth and air, fire and water
Contents
Cover
Epigraph
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction: Believing and Belonging

Part One: Our Place in the Pattern


Chapter 1: The Beginnings of Belief
Chapter 2: Fire and State
Chapter 3: Water of Life and Death
Chapter 4: The Return of the Light
Chapter 5: Harvest and Homage

Part Two: Believing Together


Chapter 6: Living with the Dead
Chapter 7: Birth and the Body
Chapter 8: A Place in Tradition
Chapter 9: Let Us Pray
Chapter 10: The Power of Song

Part Three: Theatres of Faith


Chapter 11: The House of God
Chapter 12: Gifts to the Gods
Chapter 13: Holy Killing
Chapter 14: To Be a Pilgrim
Chapter 15: Festival Time

Part Four: The Power of Images


Chapter 16: The Protectoresses
Chapter 17: The Work of Art in Times of Spiritual Reproduction
Chapter 18: The Accretion of Meaning
Chapter 19: Change Your Life
Chapter 20: Rejecting the Image, Revering the Word

Part Five: One God or Many


Chapter 21: The Blessings of Many Gods
Chapter 22: The Power of One
Chapter 23: Spirits of Place
Chapter 24: If God Be with Us
Chapter 25: Tolerating and Not Tolerating

Part Six: Powers Earthly and Divine


Chapter 26: The Mandate of Heaven
Chapter 27: Thy Kingdom Come
Chapter 28: Turning the Screw
Chapter 29: ‘There Is No God!’
Chapter 30: Living with Each Other
List of Illustrations
Further Reading
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION
BELIEVING AND BELONGING
Lthativing with the Gods is about one of the central facts of human existence:
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. Such beliefs have a unique power to define
– and to divide – peoples, and are a driving force in the politics of many parts
of the world today. Sometimes they are secular, most obviously in the case of
nationalism, but throughout history they have most often been, in the widest
sense, religious. This book is emphatically not a history of religion, nor an
argument in favour of faith, still less a defence of any particular system of
belief. Looking across history and around the globe, it interrogates objects,
places and human activities to try to understand what shared religious beliefs
can mean in the public life of a community or a nation, how they shape the
relationship between the individual and the state, and how they have become
a crucial contributor to who we are. For in deciding how we live with our
gods we also decide how to live with each other.

Belief is back
After the end of the Second World War the Western world basked for
decades in a prosperity without precedent in history. The United States
offered most of its citizens – and its immigrants – what appeared to be
endlessly rising standards of living. In 1957, the Prime Minister, Harold
Macmillan, famously told the British public that they had ‘never had it so
good’. They agreed, and he comfortably won the next election. Across
Western Europe and North America, economic growth was the norm: peace
had on the whole led to plenty.
In the rest of the world, the Soviet Union and the United States were
locked in bitter conflict, sometimes military, always ideological, competing to
win new recruits for their preferred systems of Marxist state communism or
liberal democratic capitalism. As both are essentially economic propositions,
the debate increasingly and unsurprisingly centred not on their very different
notions of freedom and social justice, but on which system could provide the
greater material benefits for its society.
There is a striking example of this elision – equation – of ideals with their
material outcomes on the US dollar bill, or, more precisely, on two dollar
bills. Even though most of its population was Christian, the United States had
been founded on the explicit basis, enshrined in the Constitution, that the new
nation should not have an established religion. But in 1956, in an effort to
distinguish itself even more sharply from the atheist Soviet Union, Congress
resolved to make greater public use of the long-familiar motto ‘In God We
Trust’. In a gesture rich in unintended symbolism, it was decided that the
words should appear not on public buildings or on the flag, but on the national
currency. They have been printed on dollar bills ever since, and on the ten-
dollar bill they hover protectively over the US Treasury itself. The ironic
phrase the ‘Almighty Dollar’ had been circulating since the nineteenth
century, warning against the conflation of God and Mammon. Now, however,
one of the defining American beliefs was to be expressed on the most revered
manifestation of its success: its money.
On the face of it, it might seem that the new wording on the dollar bills was
an assertion of the supremacy of God in the US political system, a twentieth-
century American version of the letters DG – Dei Gratia, ‘By the Grace of
God’ – which accompany the portrait of the sovereign on British currency, or
the Qur’anic texts on the coinage of many Islamic states. In fact, it was almost
the reverse.
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