LIVING WITH THE GODS
NEIL MACGREGOR Allen Lane, 512pp, £30, Oldie price £17.35 inc p&p
This book has its roots in Neil Macgregor’s radio series of the same name. And that’s all to the good, according to John Carey who reviewed it in the Sunday Times: ‘seeming to hear Macgregor’s calm, educated tones as you read is one of its pleasures’. It is centred round artefacts, beginning with the 40,000-year-old mammoth ivory carving of a lion-headed man found in a cave. ‘Macgregor thinks it was used in communal rituals, and if so it illustrates his dominant argument that religions bind societies together. But he is aware that what binds also excludes. The book ends with the hostile passions aroused by immigration, and with the Lampedusa Cross, made as a gesture of compassion by a village carpenter using debris from wrecked migrant boats.’
In the Evening Standard, Douglas Murray pointed out that Macgregor
had not set out to make an argument, ‘just to demonstrate the central place that religion has always had, and almost certainly always will have, in this strange species of ours’. Christopher Howse in the
Telegraph, however, thought this approach lumped too much stuff haphazardly together in the search for a universal mythos. And he could have done without the excerpts from celebrities: ‘Some talk interestingly but not authoritatively. Grayson Perry, the intelligent cross-dressing potter, was asked to comment on a gilt wooden Japanese carving a foot high that he had never seen before. It depicts three foxes, one holding a key and one carrying on its back a plump robed woman holding a sword in one hand and a heart in the other. “It is surely about survival and comfort and good things and the continuation of a healthy, happy life, yet with the sword and the heart, death is hovering,” he hazarded. “Maybe without the anger of the goddess, we might be a bit smug.”’ Well, wrote Howse: ‘Maybe. But to any Japanese the central figure is instantly readable as the Shinto deity Inari. A third of Shinto shrines in Japan are dedicated to her, and she is often depicted as coming to earth from heaven riding on a fox. She is associated with the rice harvest …’ David Aaronovitch in the Times believed that the ‘pictures and Macgregor’s contextualisation of them are enough to make a very superior coffee-table book’.