Living with the Gods: On Beliefs and Peoples

MacGregor (A History of the World in 100 Objects), former director of the British Museum, assembles art objects to understand belief through the ages in a book that reads like a guided tour of the museum. MacGregor organizes the tour into six themes: the place of humans in the universe, community through belief, the performance of faith, faith work performed by images, the argument between mono- and poly-theism, and the relationship between divine and earthly power. For each section, MacGregor selects a number of items, including some not in the museum’s collections, such as the patterned stone at Newgrange and cave paintings in South Africa. For the most part, though, he depends on the museum—and the experts who work there—for discussions of, for instance, the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon Marbles, the Sutton Hoo mask, and Egyptian mummies. (There is, perhaps surprisingly, no acknowledgement of recent controversies regarding the sourcing and ownership of many of these objects.) The commentary of experts is set off from the rest of the text in italic type, giving the book the feel of actual museum notes next to artifacts. This is a visually propulsive catalogue of the wonders of the British Museum. (Oct.)