How new gods are made

Some of the most unlikely people have had godhead thrust upon them, says Bob Rickard, entranced and enlightened by this hefty study of more than 80 mortals who have been deified

Balloonists coming down in the French countryside were taken for gods or angels

Accidental Gods

On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine

Anna Della Subin

Granta Books 2022

Hb, £20, 460pp, ISBN 9781783785018

Many of the subjects of this delightfully curious book had no deliberate part in their ascendency. It also includes a few accidental goddesses. This process seems to be universal – folklorist Robert Darnton wrote about the first balloonists coming down in the French countryside and being taken for gods or angels; and, as recently as 1999, footballer David Beckham was deified as a Buddhist protector god in Bangkok’s Pariwat temple ( FT137:20) – and one worthy of serious study.

Anna Subin – an American writer, editor and journalist – had the splendid idea to study a selection of more than 80 people, from diverse cultures and times, who have been inadvertently deified, often in their absence and sometimes long after their demise. Some of her subjects are well known – St Paul, Columbus, Prince Philip, Haile Selassie, various Cæsars, Gandhi, Queen Victoria – but her galaxy of lesser knowns is the real treasure trove. Subin’s themes, too, are familiar in that she acknowledges the racism of the old colonial empires in facilitating how poor, aboriginal, uneducated peoples viewed the “civilised” invaders. But there is so much more than that in her narratives.

Subin’s lively and erudite discussion doesn’t just expose some neglected corners of history but shines a compassionate light into them, revealing the long forgotten origins of local deities and heroes. What makes it a really satisfying read is that she spends some time with the characters her curiosity resurrects from oblivion, revealing the often improbable (and often comic) chains of events that led to their apotheosis. Then, icing her cake, her branching investigations follow various closely related aspects – from the ritualistic to the comedic – each more wonderful than the previous. The entranced reader cannot help but be delighted and enlightened by these further expeditions as she enthusiastically pursues her subjects, even into the Afterlife.

Subin divides her hefty study simply into three sections: the first dealing with how new gods are made; a long study of the British Raj and its ideals of nationality and masculinity; and lastly on the variations of how “whiteness” was deified all over the world. Significantly, many of her examples are of figures from the “civilised” world who ventured into the dark hearts of Africa, Japan, India, and South America.

As an example of how an accidental god might be among your acquaintances, Subin recalls her own friendship with the venerable Belgian anthropologist and translator Nathaniel Tarn, devoting a whole chapter to the weirdness that permeated his life and travels. Tarn’s own inadvertent apotheosis occurred during his doctoral fieldwork in Guatemala in 1953, with villagers who worshipped an ancient indigenous god called Maximón (or Mam) which he described as “a four-foot-tall bundle of wood, iron and cloth”. Joining a group to wash the god’s clothes at midnight, Tarn noticed that the shaman and his helpers had fallen asleep, intoxicated. So he knelt to complete the ceremony, reciting “in broken Latin” from a Catholic prayer book “with dramatic gestures and crosses”.

Followers of the Mam were, however, in eternal conflict with neighbouring Catholics, whose priests were determined to enforce the local law against idolatry. Their assassination of the Mam recalls the bungled deicide of Rasputin: the fetish was shot at, set on fire and then beheaded. Horrified villagers saw priests dashing away from the scene with the god’s head – an old mask believed locally to be “as ancient as the universe itself” – machetes and “robes aflutter”.

The greatest eye-opener for me was Subin’s long examination of the historical tradition of suttee ( sati) in popular Hinduism in which widows were believed to enter the flames of their husband’s pyre voluntarily and thereafter were worshipped as deities. Subin shows how, to a significant degree, the reactions of the white governors and priests, largely male and British, was one of horror at the intensity of female devotion. A turning point came in 1816, when Digambari, a 14-year-old widow, was forbidden to immolate herself so she dragged her husband’s body to Calcutta while fasting in protest. Digambari’s plight in turn ignited many uphill struggles for the rights of the continent’s suppressed, the neglected and the vulnerable.

There is only space here to give a general idea of the variety of interesting elements in this wonderful study. For instance, you’ll read about how Columbus’s ships were thought by their beholders to have come from the sky; the uncanny “photos” of Ascended Masters; the odd deifications of unknown British soldiers; MacArthur’s entry into Tokyo “like Jesus on the Mount”; how Gandhi learned to be a Hindu from the Theosophists; what Baden-Powell meant by “muscular Christianity” for boys; the native deification of the spirits of dead colonialists in Central Africa; and the racialist element of the Spanish Inquisition.

Subin’s method has academic qualities, but reads as easily as a lively but convoluted novel. I found Accidental Gods unputdownable as she elegantly segues from one obscure topic to the next in a way that kept my interest throughout. It is a cornucopia of history’s forgotten moments – the juicy and marvellous ones never taught in school – brought to life by Subin’s undisguised love of detail and compassion for human folly. If they ever taught history like this, schoolkids would be on the edge of their seats.

★★★★★