4 The New York ReviewApotheosis Now
Fara DabhoiwalaAccidental Gods :
On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine
by Anna Della Subin.
Metropolitan, 462 pp., $35.When he stepped ashore in October
1492, in what he understood to be part
of India or Japan, Christopher Colum-
bus’s first act was to claim possession of
the land for the Spanish crown. After
that, he distributed cloth caps, glass
beads, bits of broken crockery, “and
many other things of little value” to its
inhabitants, recording in his diary that
they were a “very simple” people, who
could easily “be kept as captives...
[and] all be subjugated and made to
do what is required of them.” They re-
minded him of the aboriginals of the
Canary Islands, the most recent vic-
tims of Castilian conquest, Christian-
ization, and enslavement. “They are
the colour of the Canarians, neither
black nor white,” he observed.
Columbus also believed that the “In-
dians” regarded him and his crew as ce-
lestial beings. His earliest description of
this, two days after landfall, was unsure:
“We understood that they asked us if we
had come from heaven.” But speculation
soon hardened into certainty. Though
the natives “were very sorry that they
could not understand me, nor I them,”
Columbus nonetheless confidently sur-
mised that they were “convinced that
we come from the heavens.” Every tribe
he met seemed to think the same: it ex-
plained why they were all so friendly.
Over the decades that followed, this
notion became a staple of Europeans’
accounts of their reception in the New
World. According to the sixteenth-
century Universal History of the Things
of New Spain, compiled by a Franciscan
friar in Mexico, Hernán Cortés’s light-
ning capture of Moctezuma’s empire in
1519 was made possible by the Aztecs’
misapprehension that he was “the god
Quetzalcoatl who was returning, whom
they had been and are expecting.” The
following year, while rounding the tip
of South America, Ferdinand Magel-
lan’s crew encountered a giant native,
“and when he was before us he began
to be astonished, and to be afraid, and
he raised one finger on high, thinking
that we came from heaven.” The Incas
of Peru initially received Francisco
Pizarro as an incarnation of the god Vi-
racocha, so one of his companions later
wrote, and venerated the conquistadors
because “they believed that some deity
was enclosed within them.”
It was a popular, endlessly elaborated
trope. By the eighteenth and nine-
teenth centuries, white men colonizing
other parts of the world were hardly
surprised anymore to encounter sim-
ilar instances of mistaken deification.
After all, the error seemed to encap-
sulate the innocence, intellectual infe-
riority, and instinctive submissiveness
of the peoples they were born to rule.
What’s more, as Anna Della Subin ex-
plores in her bracingly original Acci-
dental Gods, unsought divinity was a
remarkably widespread phenomenon
that spanned centuries and continents.In Guiana, the long- lived prophecy of
“Walterali” commemorated Sir Walter
Raleigh’s supposedly providential ex-ploits against the Spaniards. In Hawaii,
the death of Captain James Cook came
to be regarded as the tragic apotheosis
of a man mistaken for a god. Across
British India, shrines sprang up around
the graves and statues of colonists who
were worshiped as deities with super-
natural powers. The tomb of Sir Thomas
Beckwith in Mahabaleshwar acquired a
clay doll in his image, which received
offerings of plates of warm rice. In
Bombay, the effigy of Lord Cornwal-
lis, the former governor- general, came
to be permanently festooned with gar-
lands and beset by pilgrims performing
darshan, the auspicious ritual of seeing
and being seen by a god who was pres-
ent inside his likenesses.
Even as they battled to convert the
local heathens from their misguided
ways, Christian missionaries met the
same fate. Long after he’d returned to
Scotland, a portrait of the first chaplain
of St. Andrew’s Church in Bombay,
the Presbyterian James Clow, became
the object of pagan veneration. In the
church vestry, the congregation’s “na-
tive servants” offered up ritual homage
to it and tried to carry off pieces of the
canvas as personal talismans.
An especially celebrated cult grew up
around the ferocious soldier John Nich-
olson, a staunchly Protestant Northern
Irishman who’d begun his career in
the disastrous British invasion of Af-
ghanistan in 1839, then rose to become
deputy commissioner successively of
Peshawar and Rawalpindi. He was an
unspeakably brutal man, who kept a
severed human head on his desk, fre-
quently expressed his immense hatred
for the entire subcontinent, and begged
his superiors to allow him to flay alive
and impale suspected rebels—so in-
stinctively violent were his proclivi-
ties that “the idea of merely hanging”
insubordinate Indians was “madden-
ing” to him. Yet before he died, while
leading the pitiless British invasion,slaughter, and looting of Delhi in 1857,
he had inspired a cult of hundreds of in-
digenous “Nikalsaini” followers, army
sepoys and ascetic faqirs alike, who
surrounded his unwilling figure at all
hours, solemnly chanting prayers and
rendering obeisance to their idol.
Something similar befell General
Douglas MacArthur, the conquering
hero of World War II. From Panama
to Japan, Korea to Melanesia, his per-
sona was made to take on divine prop-
erties of different kinds, in the form
of wooden ritual statues, shamanistic
shrines, and spirit persons, and as an
avatar of the Papuan god Manarmak-
eri, whose return will herald the age of
heaven. Even Western anthropologists
not infrequently became enmeshed as
involuntary deities in the very value
systems they were trying, as neutral,
external observers, to describe.
Resistance was always futile: disclaim-
ing one’s divinity never seemed to dispel
it. Nicholson was deeply revolted at being
worshiped. He raged against the Nikal-
sainis who followed him around, kicked
them into the dirt, beat and whipped
them savagely, and imprisoned them in
chains, yet they interpreted all this as
“their god’s righteous chastisement.” “I
am not God,” Gandhi repeatedly yet
fruitlessly declared from the early 1920s
on, as ever more elaborate tales began to
spread about his supernatural powers,
and he was pestered incessantly by peo-
ple wishing to touch his feet. “The word
‘Mahatma’ stinks in my nostrils”—“I am
not God; I am a human being.”
In 1961 a group of Jamaican Rastafar-
ia ns traveled to Add is Ababa to meet for
the first time with their living god, Haile
Selassie. They were unfazed by the
aging Ethiopian emperor’s own stance
on the matter: “If He does not believe
He is god, we know that He is god,” his
apostles maintained. In despair, the Ja-
maican government invited Selassie for
a state visit, hoping that his public dis-avowal of their delusions would sap the
movement’s growing strength and polit-
ical clout. “Do not worship me: I am not
God,” the diminutive septuagenarian
politely beseeched his dazzled follow-
ers when he arrived in the Caribbean.
But this only had the opposite effect, for
Rastafarian theologians knew full well
what the Bible taught: “He that hum-
bleth himself shall be exalted, and he
that exalteth himself shall be abased.”What are we to make of such episodes?
As Accidental Gods brilliantly lays out,
European observers were quick to jump
to obvious- seeming conclusions. Ac-
cidental divinity bespoke the natives’
recognition of the personal greatness of
their overlords: Nicholson was adored
because he epitomized “the finest, man-
liest, and noblest of men,” as a typical
Victorian paean put it. The question of
why such worship sometimes alighted on
arbitrary, obscure, and unheroic figures
(violent sadists, deserters, anonymous
memsahibs) was submerged beneath
the general idea of effeminate natives in
thrall to their masculine conquerors.
It was also believed to testify to their
intellectual inferiority. As the academic
study of religious beliefs developed over
the course of the nineteenth century,
European scholars defined “religion” in
ways that classified the practices of “un-
civilized races” as superstitious, back-
ward, or “degenerate”—thereby further
justifying colonialism. Compared to
“real” religions with fixed temples,
scriptures, and “rational,” monotheistic
worship, above all Christianity, the be-
liefs of “the lower races,” they theorized,
were stuck in an earlier stage of develop-
ment. The worship of deified men was
a primitive category error, “the irratio-
nal, misfired devotions of locals left to
their own devices,” in one of Subin’s
many luminous turns of phrase: proof
of their inability to rule themselves.
In reality, from Columbus onward,
Europeans repeatedly blundered into
situations they didn’t properly under-
stand and whose meaning they then in-
variably recast as vindicating their own
actions. Across the Americas, the Pa-
cific, and Asia, the indigenous terms and
rituals applied to them were in fact com-
monly used of rulers and other powerful
figures, not just of deities, and signified
only awe, not some separate, nonhuman,
“godlike” status. Likewise, because
sudden death precluded re incarnation,
people in India had for millennia been
accustomed to appeasing the power-
ful spirits of those who were therefore
eternally trapped in the afterlife—that,
not reverence for white superpower, was
why they singled out many random, pre-
maturely deceased Britons for the same
treatment. Nor was the apotheosis of liv-
ing colonists usually intended to honor
them, let alone to reflect some personal
virtue: it was simply a way of mediating
and appropriating their power, one way
of creating collective meaning in the
midst of imperial precarity and violence.
Above all, the very idea of a binary
division between humanity and divin-
ity was itself a peculiarly Christian
dogma. In most other belief systems,
the two were not strictly separated but
overlapped. Reincarnations, communi-
cations with the spirit world, living gods,Illustration by Masha Krasnova-ShabaevaDabhoiwalah 04 07 .indd 4 12 / 16 / 21 6 : 03 PM