Content area
Full text
If you've considered accidental divinity-mortal men being worshipped as gods-you've probably thought it a rare phenomenon, something relegated to a distant past. But as Anna Della Subin reveals in her riveting exploration, ACCIDENTAL GODS (Metropolitan Books, $35), it has occurred with startling regularity around the globe. In just the twentieth century, the unwillingly divine included Haile Selassie I (for Rastafarians), Prince Philip (for the Tanna islanders in Vanuatu), General MacArthur (for numerous groups, in places as far-flung as Panama and Japan), Jiddu Krishnamurti (for the followers of Theosophy), and Mahatma Gandhi (for many Indians, but more widely, too). Subin doesn't write about any contemporary gods, but we might surmise that worship is still under way in unexpected quarters. Were QAnon followers to announce the divinity of Donald Trump, would anyone be surprised?
For many readers, there will inevitably be a sense of the eccentricity of such worship. In the Fifties, early Rastafarian preachers stood on street corners "preaching with the Bible in one hand and a weathered copy of National Geographic in the other." The June 1931 issue contained an article by Addison Southard about Selassie's coronation, which the speakers treated as near-gospel. In one Congolese cult, members entered a trance and appropriated the power of individual Belgian residents, who had the ability to "heal and protect, and avert calamities, natural disasters and theft." Krishnamurti was "chosen" for divinity at age eleven by a pedophilic lapsed Anglican priest named Charles Webster Leadbeater (the boy was the son of Leadbeater's secretary). Leadbeater and Annie Besant, the force behind Theosophy, groomed the reluctant child for godhood. Subin lays out the rituals of young Krishnamurti's days, noting that Leadbeater would read Krishna ghost stories at bedtime, "in order to eliminate all fear unbefitting a deity." Then his door would be locked from the outside.
The book is replete with such astonishing details. Subin, who combines fierce analytic intelligence with powerful storytelling, has here synthesized vast amounts of abstruse information. While another might run the risk of prurient or condescending anthropological interest in such behaviors, Subin deftly places them in the broader context of imperialism. She traces not only instances of deification, but also the social phenomena-colonization, of course, as well as the Enlightenment zeal for taxonomy-that brought them...