“How could I not be distracted? Here was a deity just like those I’d visited in museums as a child—a god of ancient myths, fantastic stories and long-lost rituals; a god from the distant past, from a society utterly unlike our own. Those were the terms on which I wanted to encounter him; not as a distant and abstract being, but as the product of a particular culture, at a particular time, made in the image of the people who lived then; a god shaped by their own physical circumstances, their own view of the world—and their own imaginations. Sitting in that lecture hall, it seemed to me that this potent figure had somehow been theorized away and replaced by the abstract being with whom we are more familiar today (…).”