Living with The Gods Exhibition - British Museum

I found this exciting at the beginning and disappointing by the end.  It begins with a communion with a 40,000 sculpted piece of walrus ivory.  Lion-man of the Hohlenstein-Stadel.  The oldest figurative art.  Its amazing and may equally be female.  But around the wall of the dark space are words and phrase s that suggest the exhibition is really going to explore the meaning of spirituality.  And I was ready for it having just been reading Mary Beard on the Parthenon in which she has a small section where she hints at the complexity of polytheism.  So in the dark space beyond the Lion-Man you read the words: Thinking, Making, Symbolism, Worlds beyond Nature.  'Tranfering thoughts into objects'.  'Turn everyday experiences of being into worlds beyond nature'  And this is what religion is something to reshape the ordinary into the sublime, or the complex into a story, of the scary into the sphere of the Gods. 

But the Exhibition didn't deliver it just became tokenism as so many exhibitions do.



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