TITLE: What is the proper initiation to the theory of motives for a new student of algebraic geometry?
QUESTION [35 upvotes]: A preliminary apology is in order: I realize that most of my contributions to this site are in the form of reference requests. I understand that this makes it seem as though I do nothing more than sit around most of the time, soaking in as much advanced mathematics as possible, despite my position as a lowly undergraduate. In all actuality, this couldn't be more accurate; I really do just sit around reading maths most of the time. 
Alright, now that I put that out there, I am curious as to where I might find a coherent treatment of the theory of motives; one which is below the level of a professional mathematician and roughly suited for readers of Hartshorne or Eisenbud/Harris's wonderful scheme theory text. That is, I want to understand the discipline which I hear extolled as beautiful and complex by researchers in the field, but which is notoriously abstruse and difficult to learn/understand. I wonder if expositions of the theory of motives are necessarily highly technical, or if it is approachable to the ambitious advanced undergraduate. 
Thank you again, MO community, for imparting your wisdom regarding good references. It is very much appreciated =)

REPLY [3 votes]: Here is a very understandable introductory article by R. Sujatha. For a beginning student this is good.
In my case, after that article, my next encounter with motives was with the more precise definition of a motive from the initial parts of Deligne's monograph “Le Groupe Fondamental de la Droite Projective Moins Trois Points”. It even sort of defines a mixed motive; in fact it is the only definition of mixed motive that I know.
Read the Mathscinet review and also, Jordan Ellenberg's opinion on this remarkable paper of Deligne. I myself was astonished when I first looked into it and saw how much stuff was contained in it.
Deligne's paper "Formes modulaires et représentations $l$-adiques" proving that the Weil conjectures imply the Ramanujan conjecture, is almost close to the theory of motives even though it does not explicitly mention motives. Here the representations of the absolute Galois group on the étale, or rather on the $\ell$-adic, cohomology is considered. This might give some starting insight into the Galois representations approach to motives.