| Apotheosis. |
| Religious leaders -- Biography. |
| Kings and rulers -- Biography. |
| Heroes -- Biography. |
| Religion and politics. |
| Religion and sociology. |
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Summary
Summary
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE , THE IRISH TIMES AND THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
SHORTLISTED FOR THE PEN HESSELL-TILTMAN PRIZE
A provocative history of men who were worshipped as gods that illuminates the connection between power and religion and the role of divinity in a secular age
Ever since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie, acclaimed as the Living God in Jamaica, to Britain's Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island, men made divine--always men--have appeared on every continent. And because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence--civil wars, imperial conquest, revolutions--they have much to teach us.
In a revelatory history spanning five centuries, a cast of surprising deities helps to shed light on the thorny questions of how our modern concept of "religion" was invented; why religion and politics are perpetually entangled in our supposedly secular age; and how the power to call someone divine has been used and abused by both oppressors and the oppressed. From nationalist uprisings in India to Nigerien spirit possession cults, Anna Della Subin explores how deification has been a means of defiance for colonized peoples. Conversely, we see how Columbus, Cortés, and other white explorers amplified stories of their godhood to justify their dominion over native peoples, setting into motion the currents of racism and exclusion that have plagued the New World ever since they touched its shores.
At once deeply learned and delightfully antic, Accidental Gods offers an unusual keyhole through which to observe the creation of our modern world. It is that rare thing: a lyrical, entertaining work of ideas, one that marks the debut of a remarkable literary career.
Reviews: (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Bidoun editor Subin examines in this thought-provoking if overstuffed study instances in which earthly men have been worshipped as gods. Documenting the relationship between such cases of "accidental divinity" and "something else we mistake for eternal: the modern concept of race," Subin starts with 20th-century examples including Rastafarianism, which saw several spontaneous and distinct strands of thought identifying the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I as a Black messiah in the 1930s, and the deification of England's Prince Philip by some inhabitants of the island of Tanna in the South Pacific. Subin also explores the interplay between deification and politics in India, where "the act of defining religion was also an act of justifying colonialism," and notes that Annie Besant, a British Theosophist and advocate for Indian self-governance, was the first person to call Gandhi "Mahatma," or "great soul," an "epithet he would come to loathe." Turning to the Americas, Subin argues that European explorers' accounts of being confused for gods by Indigenous peoples were used "to justify conquest and maintain European supremacy in the fragile settlements." Subin draws intriguing and illuminating connections between race and religion, but the book's various strands don't quite cohere as convincingly as she suggests. Still, this is a stimulating and challenging look at a fascinating historical phenomenon. (Feb.)
Guardian Review
Just one glance was enough. In 1974, Prince Philip was returning from a holiday in the south Pacific when he became a god. Midway through the journey, the royal yacht Britannia was anchored off the island of Aneityum. Villagers from Tanna, a neighbouring island, paddled out in their canoes to catch a glimpse of him. "I saw him standing on the deck in his white uniform," Jack Naiva, the chief of the Yaohnanen people until 2009, said in a later interview. "I knew then that he was the true messiah." Haile Selassie I, the Ethiopian king, didn't even need to be seen to be perceived as divine. In 1931, National Geographic ran a 68-page report on his coronation in Addis Ababa. Preachers and pamphleteers read the article in faraway colonial Jamaica and proclaimed him their ordained saviour, a manifestation of the "black divine". A baroque magazine piece - written by, of all people, the then US consul-general to Ethiopia - became a gospel for generations of believers who called themselves "Rastafarians" after Selassie's birth name: Tafari Makonnen ("Ras", a title, was bestowed later). By the 1950s, the anthropologist George Eaton Simpson reported that men were proselytising on the streets of Kingston with the Bible in one hand and a "weathered copy" of the magazine in another. Never mind that Selassie didn't consider himself "black", or the fact that National Geographic routinely ran pieces that referred to indigenous people as "savages", and African Americans were forbidden from becoming members or using its library in Washington DC. As Anna Della Subin notes in Accidental Gods, the cult of the utopian Rastas was born in a crib of contradictions, "among those in the new world living in the obscenity of injustice". Subin traces tall tales of these inadvertent deities at exhaustive length: Koreans worshipping statues of General MacArthur after the 1950 war; Hawaiian tribesmen revering Captain Cook as a supernatural being after bludgeoning him to death; residents of Papua and New Guinea voting for the US president Lyndon B Johnson in an election. Again and again, a link is made between the effects of modernity - rudderless secularism, ruthless empires and capitalism - and the fervour with which, in reaction, these men end up being immortalised. The script of accidental divinity remains the same over centuries: a stranger, usually white or powerful, becomes a symbol, then an object of veneration, part of an ongoing local power struggle, a conduit for an idea not necessarily his own. Faith, for Subin, is invariably an allegory for something else. This approach can be taken too far. A group described by one contemporary observer as "Maratha simpletons", for instance, might have been worshipping a statue of Lord Wellesley on an elephant in colonial Bombay. What seems more plausible, however, is that they were just worshipping the elephant. Ganesh, the Hindu elephant god, is, after all, a household deity in the region, and pilgrims flock to Mumbai's beaches every September to immerse effigies. Subin discerns anti-imperial resistance in everything from Sudanese djinns, or supernatural beings ("a way to contend with the invasion of a foreign force"), to shamanic rituals in colonial Ghana (a counterpart to "the rhetoric of politicians, of colonial discourse"), and even the notion of being possessed by spirits (an idea "born at the crossroads of enslavement and enlightenment"). Deification, she repeatedly asserts, is a "form of defiance". History and hysteria coalesce in oral testimonies of MacArthur appearing in Koreans' dreams years after his death, and French colonial officials mysteriously frothing at the mouth in Niger. In India, Subin digs up 18th-century reports of British soldiers' graves in India being "consecrated" by Hindu rituals, and teenage widows purportedly dissenting against the Raj by campaigning for their right to immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres. But is all as it seems? At least two older white writers tell Subin about visiting an isolated community or tribe and being confused for someone celestial. What might just as well be traditional gestures of curiosity and hospitality - being asked endless questions, say, or being welcomed with offerings of food and incense - are written up by western travellers as signs of their own cosmic importance, and Subin accepts these accounts uncritically.That said, her portrait of the Rastafarian movement is wonderfully attuned to the transformative power of belief. Despite their obsession with Selassie, Rasta activists did propel Michael Manley to power in Jamaica, and it was Manley who first ushered in the reforms - labour rights, free education, universal healthcare - necessary for a colony to effectively transition to democracy. Another chapter on the theosophist Annie Besant and her protege, Jiddu Krishnamurti, brilliantly dissects their troubled relationship. In India, when Subin isn't construing the slightest presence of "turmeric and lime" on colonial-era tombstones as evidence of deification, or insisting that it was Besant who first called Gandhi a mahatma or "great soul" (actually, it was either the poet Rabindranath Tagore or an anonymous Indian journalist), she can persuasively describe how British historical writing repeated the same stories of colonels and viceroys being worshipped in shrines - how the idea of white divinity mattered more to the empire than to the natives. But the overarching thesis doesn't quite impress. The problem with positing divinity as a defence against encroaching modernity is that it only reinforces stale dichotomies: a scientifically advanced west, a permanently backward east. Belief, in this vision, is still the exclusive domain of the oppressed and the enslaved; India is still a land of gods and snakes. It's all very well dwelling on Bussa Krishna, an Indian villager who stopped eating after Donald Trump contracted Covid-19 in 2020, but how does Subin avoid mentioning the overwhelmingly white followers of QAnon in the US, who believe that John F Kennedy Jr will come back to life? Subin may portray individual white gods as delusional narcissists and racists and imperialists, but white people, in the aggregate, still come across as oddly less deceived. Their superior scepticism is a myth that remains somewhat unchallenged in this otherwise subversive book.
Kirkus Review
A thesis on how divinity and its varied incarnations have surprised cultures for hundreds of years. In her debut, Subin, an essayist who studied the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School, takes readers five centuries deep into a survey of (mostly) men who were inadvertently lionized. She first explores a myriad of sanctifications, including figures in the Rastafarian movement of the 1930s and, of course, Christopher Columbus, who was adulated as a "celestial deity." Especially illuminating is the author's case study of how Gen. Douglas MacArthur unwittingly became deific throughout four distinct episodes in his military tenure. Subin surmises the military leader became "quadrisected, each quarter experiencing a different way to become fleetingly, precariously divine." The author also considers French American anthropologist Nathaniel Tarn, who was sainted by conflicted villagers in the highlands of Guatemala in the 1950s. The book tours the "accidental godlings" formed from the glorified doctrines of religious leaders, politicians, dictators, and royal princes while citing numerous references on the ultimate consequences of divine exaltation or the dangers of enmeshing religion and politics. Subin examines how the appearance of fetish idols by European imperialists "integrated into some of the foremost theories of Western modernity" and legitimized conquest, while other forms of deification, particularly involving White authority figures, contributed to early forms of classism, sexism, and racism. In the concluding section, Subin addresses how the very idea of Whiteness became a divine prognosticator: "Race, the scholar-activists remind us, is not only a word but a sentence, of who can live and who will die." Written in erudite, scholarly prose, Subin's appreciation for these "gods" is a vibrantly narrated yet overlong text richly embellished with generous illustrations. The author's exploration captures mortals throughout history who were feted, shaped myths about power and influence, and were startlingly exalted into godly status. A colorful, exhaustive, occasionally exhausting contemplation of global history's cavalcade of avatars. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Table of Contents
| First Rites | p. 1 |
| I Late Theogony How new gods are made on a decolonizing earth | |
| 1 In the Light of Ras Tafari | p. 17 |
| 2 The Gospel of Philip | p. 68 |
| 3 MacArthur, Four Ways | p. 93 |
| 4 Gods in Uniform | p. 114 |
| 5 The Apotheosis of Nathaniel Tarn | p. 139 |
| II The Ragged Edges of Religion On the British Raj and ideas-belief, masculinity, the nation-mistaken as eternal | |
| 6 The Mystical Germ | p. 163 |
| 7 A Tumescent Trinity | p. 191 |
| 8 Passage | p. 210 |
| 9 The Tyranny of Love | p. 230 |
| 10 Mythopolitics | p. 271 |
| III White Gods How whiteness was defined in the New World | |
| 11 Serpents | p. 305 |
| 12 Adam Blushed | p. 329 |
| 13 How to Kill a God | p. 359 |
| Liberation (Last Rites) | p. 378 |
| Notes | p. 387 |
| Appendix | p. 445 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 451 |
| List of Illustrations | p. 455 |
| Index of Inadvertent Deities | p. 461 |