Prince Philip, volcano God? You’d better believe it

Humanity can’t seem to shake its habit of turning ordinary people into deities, from Haile Selassie to General MacArthur

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He was a prince of Greece – but he wasn’t Greek. He was a man of Danish, German and Russian blood, but he sprang from none of those places. Who was he? Prince Philip, of blessed memory, consort of Queen Elizabeth II? Or was he – as a handful of her subjects, half a world away, would have it – the son of Vanuatu’s volcano god Kalbaben?

Essayist Anna Della Subin wants you to understand why you might mistake a man for a god; why this happens more often than you’d think; and what this says about power, and identity, and about colonialism in particular. An early proof of Accidental Gods arrived on my doormat on Tuesday, November 2, the same day QAnon believers gathered in Dallas’s Dealey Plaza to await the resurrection of JFK’s son John (dead these 20 years). So: don’t sneer. This kind of thing can happen to anyone. It can happen now. It can happen here.

Men have been made divine by all manner of people, all over the world. Ranging widely across time and space, Accidental Gods is a treat for the adventurous armchair traveller, though a disconcerting one. We are reminded, with some force, that even the most sophisticated-seeming culture exists, by and large, to contain ordinary human panic in the face of an uncaring cosmos.

After the Second World War, during the Allied occupation, ordinary Japanese folk plied American General Douglas MacArthur with lotus roots and dried persimmons, red beans, rice cakes, bonsai trees, walking sticks, samurai swords, deerskins, a kimono, and much else besides. These were offerings, explicitly made to a newcomer god. Now, we more often talk about them as acts of gratitude and respect. This is just ordinary decency – why would one poke fun at a land one has already nuked, defeated and occupied? Japan’s detailed historical record lets us focus on politics while drawing a veil over the Meiji dynasty’s frankly embarrassing theology.

But not everyone has such a rich political account of themselves to hide behind. In the early 1920s, Hauka mediums in Niger, central Africa, were possessed by the spirits of their European conquerors. Their zombified antics were considered superstitious and backward. But were they? They managed, after all, to send up the entire French administration. (“In the absence of a pith helmet,” we are told, “they could fashion one out of a gourd.”) In the Congolese town of Kabinda, meanwhile, the wives of shamanic adepts found themselves channelling the spirits of Belgian settler wives. Their faces chalked and with bunches of feathers under their arms (“possibly to represent a purse”), they went around shrilly demanding bananas and hens.

Western eyewitnesses of these events weren’t at all dismissive; they were disturbed. One visitor, reporting to Parliament in London in or before 1886, said these people were being driven mad by the experience of colonial subjection. Offerings made to a deified British soldier in Travancore, at India’s southernmost point, were, according to this traveller, “an illustration of the horror in which the English were held by the natives”.

But what if the prevailing motive for the white man’s deification was “not horror or dislike, but pity for his melancholy end, dying as he did in a desert, far away from friends”? That was the contrary opinion of a visiting missionary, and he may have had a point: across the subcontinent, “the practice of deifying humans who had died in premature or tragic ways was age-old”, Subin tells us.

Might the “spirit possessed” just have been having a laugh? Again: it’s possible. In 1864, during a Māori uprising against the British, Captain PWJ Lloyd was killed, and his severed head became the divine conduit for the angel Gabriel, who, among other fulminations, had not one good word to say about the Church of England.

Subin shows how, by creating and worshipping powerful outsiders, subject peoples have found a way to contend with an overwhelming invading force. The deified outsider, be he a British prince or a US general, Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie or nonagenarian poet Nathaniel Tarn, “appears on every continent on the map, at times of colonial invasion, nationalist struggle and political unrest”.

This story is as much about the colonisers as the conquered, as much about the present as the past, showing how the religious and the political shade into each other so that “politics is ever a continuation of the sacred under a new name”. Perhaps this is why Subin, while no enthusiast of empire, takes aim less at the soldiers and settlers and missionaries – who at least took some personal risk and kept their eyes open – than at the academics back home in Europe, and in particular the intellectual followers and cultural descendants of German philologist Friedrich Max Müller, founder of the science of comparative religion. Their theories imposed, on wholly unrelated belief systems, a set of Protestant standards that, among other things, insisted on the insuperable gulf between the human and the divine.

(Outside Christian Europe, this divide hardly exists, and even Catholics have their saints.)

So, Europe’s newfangled science of religion “invented what it purported to describe”, ascribing “belief ” to all manner of nuanced behaviours that expressed everything from contempt for the overlord to respect for the dead to simple human charity. Subin quotes contemporary philosopher Bruno Latour: “A Modern is someone who believes that others believe.”

Subin sings a funeral hymn to religions that ossified. Writing about the catastrophic partition of India along religious lines, she writes, “There was no place within this modern taxonomy for the hundreds of thousands who labelled themselves ‘Mohammedan Hindus’ on a 1911 census, or for those who worshipped the prophet Muhammad as an avatar of Vishnu.”

Accidental Gods is a playful, ironic and ambiguous book about religion, at a time when religion – outside of Dealey Plaza – has grown as solemn as an owl. It’s no small achievement for Subin to have written something that, even as it explores the mostly grim religious dimensions of the colonial experience, does not reduce religion to politics but, to the contrary, leaves us hankering, like QAnon’s unlovely faithful, for a wider, wilder pantheon.

QAnon conspiricists are devoutly waiting for the resurrection of John F Kennedy Jr

arguments over insulin did not stop once it went into mass production. Over the next half century, the hormone was extracted from the pancreases of pigs and cows, as a by-product of the meat industry, and worked tolerably enough in people. (In healthy humans, the pancreas secretes insulin so as to enable sugar to pass from the blood into the tissues that need it as fuel.) But scientific breakthroughs in the 1970s, explained in vivid detail here, enabled researchers to dream of creating human insulin in the lab. This meant inserting the DNA for human insulin into a bacterium, and using its manufacturing machinery to mass-produce the desired substance. Or, in other words, cloning.

So began public debates about genetic engineering and “playing God” with nature, debates that researchers in the field later admitted they hoped to prevail in by concentrating on insulin as the poster child for their determination to help humanity with this newfangled wizardry. And help they did: the technology behind the mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 descends directly from that research on insulin.

Once actual human insulin could be synthesised in great quantities, there seemed little reason for it to become super-expensive. But science, especially when allied with commerce in the institution of a pharmaceutical company, doesn’t necessarily know when to stop. New forms of insulin “analogues” – slightly different versions of the molecule that still work in the human body – kept being developed, with slight advantages claimed for them. Hall doesn’t quite say that this was because drug companies needed a constant churn of novel products in order to keep their profitable patents, but it’s plain that, if such were your motivation, this is exactly what you would do.

The pleasures of this book, meanwhile, lie mainly in the storytelling detail and the gossipy richness of the lives, friendships and feuds glimpsed in the hubbub of decades pursuing the improvement of human health. (One of its major themes is that science is mostly like this, a vast and messy long-term collaboration, rather than a lone genius thinking something up in the patent office.) Surveying the long pre-history of diabetes as a death sentence, we meet the 18thcentury Scottish medic Francis

Home, who found that the urine of a sufferer was so sweet as to be fermentable into what he described as “a tolerable small beer”. The British psychiatrist Harold Bourne, meanwhile, was the first to speak out courageously in the 1950s against the fashion for treating mentally ill patients with “insulin shock”, or deliberately sending them into a diabetic coma.

We also witness the work of trailblazing women, and the difficulties some men had in coming to terms with it. There is the Oxford mathematician Dorothy Wrinch, who dreamed of finding a strict algorithmic order beneath the natural world, and the physicist Florence Bell, who did early work on DNA. “When the Institute of Physics held a conference in Leeds in 1939,” Hall reports, “Bell’s presentation of her work was reported by the Yorkshire Evening News with the stunned headline ‘Woman Scientist Explains’.” The chemist Dorothy

Crowfoot Hodgkin, meanwhile, is the only British woman to have won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry to date. When it was announced in 1964, the Daily Mail’s headline was “Nobel Prize for British Wife”. Hall slyly suggests that it might have been the demands of working under Hodgkin at Oxford that turned one of her young undergraduates off chemistry and steered her into political life as, later, Margaret Thatcher.

And there is that irascible pioneer Fred Banting again. “If there is one thing in modern civilisation that disturbs a research man,” Banting said in 1940, “it is the newspapers. If there is anything that I fear, if there is anything that I loathe, if there is anything that I despise as unfair, untrustworthy, as undependable and as unscrupulous, it is the modern newspapers.” Perhaps it may come as comfort to some readers to find that the age of fake news began long ago.

One 18th-century medic fermented a diabetic’s urine into ‘a tolerable small beer’

Divine inspiration: in Vanuatu, Prince Philip was revered as a living god