Here Comes the Sun
Living with the Gods
BBC
4.7 • 616 Ratings
🗓️ 26 October 2017
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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 Photograph: (c) The Trustees of the British Museum.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | And it's as if at that time, at solstice time, there is no barrier between the world of the living and the world of the dead. |
| 0:09.0 | Hello, I'm Neil McGregor. |
| 0:11.4 | For the whole of human history, believing and belonging have gone together. |
| 0:17.0 | In this series of podcasts, I'm looking at objects and at places to see how those shared beliefs have helped build communities and how they can also divide them. |
| 0:27.8 | The series is called Living with the Gods and it's about faith and about society, but it's essentially about how we live with each other. |
| 0:37.2 | In this episode, we look into the light. |
| 0:40.3 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:42.3 | Sorry, you have to wait for you. |
| 0:48.3 | Is that okay? |
| 0:50.3 | Yeah, thank you. |
| 0:51.3 | You're okay. |
| 0:52.3 | It's early in the morning. It's very cold and it's very dark. |
| 0:57.9 | I'm with about 20 other people who are standing very close to me. |
| 1:02.1 | I can hear them, but I can't see them. |
| 1:05.4 | It's a bit like being in a crowded underground carriage where the lights have failed. |
| 1:10.0 | But this is a much more momentous journey. |
| 1:13.4 | We're here because people began standing in this darkness over 5,000 years ago. And like them, |
| 1:21.3 | we're standing waiting for something miraculous, the light. This darkness around me now is created and held by a structure older than the light. This darkness around me now is created and held by a structure older than |
| 1:31.7 | stonehenge or the pyramids in Egypt, and it's the one place in this world, where as a human |
| 1:37.5 | being you can imagine most desperately wanting to see light. I'm in a tomb in the great stone passage tomb at New Grange, |
| 1:47.0 | about 30 miles north of Dublin, waiting for the sun to rise at the winter solstice. |
| 1:54.5 | New Grange sits high in a bend of the river Boyne, dominating the landscape, |
... |
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