Living with the Gods

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time. He focuses on a Kirchenpelz or 'church fur' - a sheepskin coat made in the late 19th century in Transylvania, now part of Romania, for the German-speaking Saxon community there. This was not just 'Sunday Best': to wear this coat was to proclaim in public your allegiance to the Lutheran Church, and your identity as a Transylvanian Saxon. He also reflects on the importance and power of communal singing within the Lutheran Church and elsewhere: the German theologian and priest Martin Luther did not invent hymns or congregational singing, but he did transform them, making them central to worship as never before.

Producer Paul Kobrak

Photograph (c) The Trustees of the British Museum.

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time.

He focuses on prayer, reflecting on how this most highly individualized of activities is also a profoundly communal act, with objects including a 16th century ivory and gold qibla, used to find the direction of Mecca - a function now offered by smartphone apps.

Producer Paul Kobrak

Produced in partnership with the British Museum

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time.

He focuses on rites of passage, marking the transition from childhood to adulthood, including a lock of bound hair, from the collections of the British Museum, which reveals an important ritual for teenage boys on the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu.

Producer Paul Kobrak

Produced in partnership with the British Museum

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time.

He focuses on how societies and communities seek to protect the newly-born and their mothers, including the role of St Margaret of Antioch, patron saint of childbirth, and the use of protective omamori in Japan.

Producer Paul Kobrak

Produced in partnership with the British Museum

Neil MacGregor's series on the role and expression of beliefs continues with a reflection on our relationship with the dead.

In the British Museum, he focuses on mummy bundles from Peru, skeletons wrapped in textiles made of llama wool or cotton. For the living, these were ancestors with great wisdom and knowledge of the world, who could be called upon to help key decision-makers.

He also examines two Chinese 'ancestor portraits', and discovers how and why they were venerated by surviving family members.

Producer Paul Kobrak

The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum, with the assistance of Dr Christopher Harding, University of Edinburgh.

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time. He focuses on the natural world and seasonal change: the Yupik people of Alaska depend on the seal, and ancient Egyptians looked to the god Osiris to bring fertility to their arid land. Both societies, in radically different climates, devised practices that acknowledged the fact of their dependence on the natural world - and engaged everybody with the responsibility of co-operating with it.

Producer: Paul Kobrak

The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world, and focuses on light.

He experiences the sunrise whilst inside the monumental stone passage tomb at Newgrange, Ireland, a structure older than Stonehenge or the pyramids in Egypt. Here, on the winter solstice, thanks to the design of the tomb, a bright, narrow beam of sunlight reaches deep inside the structure.

He also considers the story of Amaterasu, the Japanese sun goddess, whose decision to hide herself in a cave plunged the world into darkness, and reflects on how - centuries later - the image of rising sun became closely linked with Japanese national identity.

Producer Paul Kobrak

The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time, and focuses on water, including a visit to the Ganges at Varanasi, India.

In Islam, Christianity and Judaism, water is an essential part of religious practice. But for no faith does water - and one particular kind of water - play such a significant role as for Hindus. To bathe in the river Ganges is not just to prepare to meet the divine, but already to be embraced by it. The river Ganges is the goddess Ganga, and the waters of this river, which govern life and death, have not only determined many aspects of Hinduism, but in considerable measure shaped the identity of the modern state of India.

Producer Paul Kobrak

The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum.

Neil MacGregor continues his series on the expression of shared beliefs in communities around the world and across time.

Many societies have seen the mesmerizing phenomenon of fire as a symbol of the divine. Neil MacGregor focuses on sacred fire which comes to represent the state itself: the perpetual fire in the Temple of Vesta in Rome, the great Parsi fire temple in Udvada, India, and 'la Flamme de la Nation', the Flame of the Nation, constantly burning beneath the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Producer: Paul Kobrak

The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum.

Neil MacGregor, former Director of the British Museum, begins this series about the role and expression of shared beliefs with the Lion Man, a small ivory sculpture which is about 40 000 years old. The figure has a human body and the head of a lion - it is a being that cannot exist in nature. While we shall never know what the Lion Man meant to the community in which it was created, we do know that it mattered enough for the group to allow someone to spend about 400 hours carving it.

The programme visits the cave in southern Germany where fragments of ivory were discovered in 1939. These fragments were gradually pieced together by archaeologists decades later to re-assemble the figure. Some smoothing on the torso suggests that the Lion Man was passed from person to person in the cave.

Neil MacGregor begins the series with this object because, in his words, 'what the archaeologists did as they pieced together the Lion Man is what societies have always done: work with fragmentary evidence to build a picture of the world. You could say that it's when a group agrees on how the fragments of the cosmic puzzle fit together that you truly have a community - one that endures, encompassing the living, the dead and the yet unborn. What this whole series is about is the role that such systems of belief - and perhaps even more the rituals that express those beliefs - have played in the creation, and sometimes in the destruction, of societies. Are we humans distinguished not just by a capacity to think, but by our need to believe - in a context where the search is not so much for my place in the world, but for our place in the cosmos - where believing is almost synonymous with belonging?'

Producer Paul Kobrak

The series is produced in partnership with the British Museum, with the assistance of Dr Christopher Harding, University of Edinburgh.

Photograph: (c) Museum Ulm, photo: Oleg Kuchar, Ulm.