6 The New York Reviewavatars, demigods, ancestor deities, and
the powers of kings and lords—all were
part of an interwoven spectrum of nat-
ural and supernatural authority. Much
the same had been true in European
antiquity. The ancient Greeks thought it
normal for men to become gods. Among
the Romans, apotheosis became a tool
of statecraft, the ultimate form of me-
morialization. Cicero wanted to deify
his daughter, Tullia; Hadrian arranged
it for his wife and his mother- in- law, as
well as for his young lover, Antinous.
For emperors, it became a routine ac-
colade—“Oh dear, I think I’m becom-
ing a god,” Vespasian is said to have
joked on his deathbed in 79 CE.
Similar ideas circulated among
Jesus’ early followers. It was only from
the Middle Ages on that the notion of
humans being treated as gods came to
be regarded by Christians as absurd,
despite the fact that their own prophet,
saints, and holy persons embodied sim-
ilar principles. And so it happened that
modern Europeans ventured abroad
and began to impose their own cate-
gory errors on the views of others. As
Subin tartly observes, “correct knowl-
edge about divinity is never a matter of
the best doctrine, but of who possesses
the more powerful army.”Though Accidental Gods wears its
learning lightly and is tremendous fun
to read, it also includes a series of lyr-
ical and thought- provoking meditations
on the largest of themes. How should
we think of identity? What is it to be
human? How do stories work, grow, and
stay alive? Belief itself, Subin suggests,
is as much a set of relationships among
people as it is an absolute, on- or- off state
of mind. European myths about the
primitive mentalities of others served
to justify colonization and theories of
white supremacy, and still do. Regard-
ing indigenous practices as antithetical
to the “reasoned” presumptions of “de-
veloped” cultures has always allowed
Western observers to overlook their
complicity in creating them—to see
them only as the errors of “superstitious
minds, the tendencies of isolated atolls,
rather than a product of the violence of
empire and the shackling of peoples to
new capitalist machineries of profit.”
It also serves to mask the extent to
which Western attitudes depend on
their own forms of magical thinking.
Our culture, for example, fetishizes
goods, money, and material consump-
tion, holding them up as indices of per-
sonal and social well- being. Moreover,
as Subin points out, none of us can
truly escape this fixation:Though we may demystify other
people’s gods and deface their idols,
our critical capacity to demystify the
commodity fetish still cannot break
the spell it wields over us, for its
power is rooted in deep structures
of social practice rather than sim-
ple belief. While fetishes made by
African priests were denigrated as
irrational, the fetish of the capitalist
marketplace has long been viewed
as the epitome of rationalism.To see a myth is one thing; to grasp
it fully, quite another. It turns over,
changes its shape, slips away, fades out
of view. The further back in time Subin
ventures, the more fragmentary her
sources become, the larger the gaps in
what they choose to notice. But morethan once she is able to illustrate, almost
in real time, how indigenous and West-
ern mythmaking can be intertwined,
codependent, and mutually reinforcing.
Following its “discovery” by Captain
Cook in 1774, the Melanesian island
of Tanna was devastated by centuries
of colonial exploitation: its population
kidnapped to provide cheap labor, its
landscape stripped bare for short- term
profit, its culture destroyed by mission-
ary indoctrination. By the early twenti-
eth century this treatment had provoked
a series of indigenous messianic move-
ments that looked forward to the expel-
ling of the colonizers and the return
of a golden age of plenty. The messiah
would incarnate a local volcano god, it
was believed, though the exact human
form he would take was not clear.
One perennially popular idea was
that the savior would appear as an
American (perhaps Franklin D. Roose-
velt, perhaps a black GI). This was be-
cause the island was under British and
French control—movements of deifica-
tion provoked by colonial injustice often
sought to access the power of their tor-
mentors’ rivals or enemies. In 1964 the
Lavongai people of the occupied Papua
and New Guinea territory sabotaged
the elections organized by their colonial
masters by writing in the name of Pres-
ident Lyndon B. Johnson, electing him
as their king and then refusing to pay
taxes to their Australian oppressors. On
similar grounds, midcentury Indian and
African religious sects sometimes de-
ployed avatars of Britain’s enemies—in
India, Hitler was seen as the final com-
ing of Vishnu, while Nigerians wor-
shiped “Germany, Destroyer of Land”:
My enemy’s enemy is my friend.
During World War I, indigenous
populations in far- flung Allied colo-
nies independently developed cults of
Kaiser Wilhelm II, who, it was said,
would shortly sweep away the English-
speaking whites who had stolen their
land and were exploiting their people.
High above the Bay of Bengal, on the
plateau of Chota Nagpur, tens of thou-
sands of Oraon tea plantation work-
ers gathered at clandestine midnight
services and swore blood oaths to ex-
terminate the British. They spoke of
the Germans as “Suraj Baba” (Father
Sun), passed around the emperor- god’s
portrait, and sang hymns to his casting
out of the British and establishing an
independent Oraon raj:German Baba is coming,
Is slowly slowly coming;
Drive away the devils:
Cast them adrift in the sea.
Suraj Baba is coming...The salient point is not that such hopes
were untethered from reality, but what
they expressed. For what can the pow-
erless do? To what can they appeal to
restore the rightful order of things, in
the face of endless loss? “Do you know
that America kills all Negroes?” a Pap-
uan skeptic challenged one of LBJ’s
apostles in 1964. “You’re clever,” the
apostle replied. “But you haven’t got a
good way to save us.”Around this time, the British colo-
nizers of Tanna were indoctrinating
its inhabitants in the goodness of their
young queen Elizabeth II and her hand-
some consort—a man, they learned,
who was not actually from Britain, or
Greece, or anywhere in particular. Asit happened, the legend of the volcano
god told that one of his sons had taken
on human form, traveled far, and mar-
ried a powerful foreign woman. Prince
Philip vacationed in the archipelago
and participated in a pig- killing ritual
to consecrate a local chief. He was the
Duke of Edinburgh, and Tanna’s is-
land group had once been called the
New Hebrides. In 1974 one of the many
local messianic factions realized that
he must be their messiah.
It proved to be a match made in
heaven, for the British monarchy it-
self, in the twilight of its authority, was
ever more reliant on invented ritual
and mythmaking. Once Buckingham
Palace learned of the prince’s deifica-
tion, it began to celebrate and publicize
the story for its own purposes, deftly
positioning it as evidence of the affec-
tion in which the royal family (and by
inference the British) were supposedly
held all across the former empire, and
as a counterweight to the prince’s well-
deserved domestic reputation as an un-
regenerate racist. This Western interest
in turn produced an unceasing stream
of international attention and visitors to
Tanna, to investigate and report on the
islanders’ strange “cult,” which not only
helped to strengthen the myth’s local
appeal but even influenced its shape.
In 2005 a BBC journalist arrived on
the island to report the story, bringing
with him a sheaf of documents compiled
by the prince’s former private secretary,
including official correspondence from
the 1970s, press clippings, and other
English descriptions of the islanders’
beliefs. His sharing of these papers, and
his lengthy discussions with the locals,
inadvertently seeded new myths, many
of which, as Subin dryly notes, sounded
“much like palace PR describing philan-
thropic activities in an underdeveloped
land.” Myths stay alive by constantly
adapting, encompassing, and feeding off
one another. This was a classic case of
mutual mythmaking: the deification of
Prince Philip was produced in Bucking-
ham Palace and Fleet Street, as well as in
the South Pacific. To this day, white men
from Europe and America keep turning
up on Tanna, claiming to be fulfilling the
prophecy of the returning god.*In Subin’s irresistible medley of his-
tory, anthropology, and exhilaratingly
good writing, the most powerful stories
are those of indigenous mythmaking as
outright political revolt. For in many in-
stances in which white men were turned
into gods, the purpose was wholly sub-
versive: not just to channel the strength
of the colonial imperium for one’s own
ends, but to grasp the colonizers’ power
and turn it against them. In 1864 a Maori
uprising led by the prophet Te Ua Hau-
mene killed several British soldiers. The
head of their captain, speared on a pole,
became the rebels’ protective talisman
against other white invaders and their
divine conduit to the angel Gabriel. Just
as they reinterpreted the Bible to mean
that Maori land should be restored and
the British driven out, so too they ap-
propriated a colonist’s actual mouth
and made it speak their truth.
Even more unsettlingly, across their
newly conquered African territories,
from the 1920s onward British, French,and Belgian administrators found
themselves faced with a strange con-
tagion of spirit possession, in which the
locals took on the colonists’ identities.
People would fall into a trance and then
claim to be channeling the governor of
the Red Sea or a white soldier, secretary,
judge, or imperial administrator. They
demanded pith helmets and libations of
gin, marched around in undead forma-
tions, issued commands, and refused to
obey imperial edicts, calling themselves
Hauka, or “madness,” in the Sahel, and
Zar in Ethiopia and the Sudan.
One version in the Congo claimed to
have created deified duplicates of every
single colonial Belgian. Each time an
African adept joined the movement, he’d
adopt the name of a particular colonist,
and his wife that of the spouse. In this
way, Hauka captured the entire colonial
population, from the governor- general
down to the lowliest clerk. On entering
their trance state, the locals usurped the
colonists’ power: the wives went around
with chalked faces and wearing special
dresses, screeching in shrill voices, de-
manding bananas and hens, clutching
bunches of feathers under their arms in
representation of handbags.
Precisely because spirit possession
was unwilled and painful, this was a
means of resistance that mechanisms
of imperial power could not easily
counter. Early on, a district commis-
sioner in Niger named Major Horace
Crocicchia decided to suppress it by
force. He rounded up sixty of the lead-
ing Hauka mediums, brought them
in chains to the capital, Niamey, and
imprisoned them for three days and
nights without food. Then he forced
them to acknowledge that their spirits
could not match his own power, taunt-
ing them that he was stronger and that
the Hauka had disappeared. “Where
are the Hauka?” he jeered repeatedly,
beating one of them until she acknowl-
edged that the spirits were gone.
It only made things worse. Almost
immediately a new, extremely powerful
specter joined the spirit pantheon. All
across Niger, villagers were now pos-
sessed by the vengeful, violent avatar of
Crocicchia himself—also known as Kro-
sisya, Kommandan, Major Mugu, or the
Wicked Major. Deification of this kind
was a form of ritualized revolt, a defi-
ance of imperialist power that not only
mocked but appropriated its authority.
All this also explains why, toward
the middle of the twentieth century,
the rise of a powerful, proud, anti-
imperialist black ruler at the heart of
Africa was so intoxicating to people on
the other side of the globe who had been
dehumanized for centuries because of
the color of their skin. For black people
in the Babylonian captivity of the New
World, Ethiopia had long been held up
as Zion, the land of their future return.
Even before its dashing new emperor
was crowned in 1930, American and Ja-
maican prophecies had begun to foretell
the coming of a black messiah. Rasta-
farianism became a religion for all who
opposed white hegemony: to worship
Haile Selassie as a living god was to re-
ject colonial Christianity, racial hierar-
chy, and subordination, and to celebrate
black power. No wonder its tenets have
spread across the globe and attracted
nearly a million followers. As Subin’s
rich, captivating book shows, religion is
a symbolic act: though we cannot con-
trol the circumstances, we all make our
own gods, for our own reasons, all the
time. Q*This is evocatively documented in the
photographs, images, and text of Jon
Tonks and Christopher Lord, The Men
Who Would Be King (Dewi Lewis, 2021).Dabhoiwalah 04 07 .indd 6 12 / 16 / 21 6 : 03 PM