THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER13, 2021 79
languages but not in others—but Subin
suggests that it is an epistemological and
ontological question, too, about what a
god is and how much we can ever know
about one of them.
If a god is simply someone we adore
and whose every need we serve, then in-
fants might count, and if he is someone
to whom we pay allegiance and make
offerings, then any politician supported
by our tax dollars might qualify, and if
he is a personage who fills us with fear
and dread, then we could include den-
tists and domestic terrorists. But when
we call someone a god, as with Zeus or
Jesus or Shiva, we mean that he has an
entirely separate existential status from
us, and powers—omnipotence, immor-
tality—that are superior to our own.
Yet this is precisely the distinction
that can be erased, or, at any rate, eroded,
in cross-cultural comparisons. Consider
Captain Cook, and whether he was re-
ally heralded by the Hawaiians as Lono
or whether his crew and his country-
men chose to believe as much in order
to justify colonialism. This single cul-
tural collision has been the subject of
an extended debate in anthropology,
fostering a decades-long division be-
tween two schools. One is represented
by the Princeton professor Gananath
Obeyesekere, whose “The Apotheosis
of Captain Cook” (1997) claims that it
is illogical to believe the natives ever
mistook a white colonizer for one of
their gods, and that the fantasy wasn’t
just about Cook’s heroism but also about
the legitimacy of imperial rule over al-
legedly primitive people. The other
school is exemplified by the late Uni-
versity of Chicago professor Marshall
Sahlins, whose “How ‘Natives’ Think:
About Captain Cook, for Example”
(1995) argues that it is also an act of cul-
tural imperialism to silence Hawaiians
in the telling of their own history, which
includes, however inconveniently for
some scholars, attestations of the con-
fusion of Cook with Lono.
These two camps are ultimately ar-
guing about their field more broadly, and
specifically about the possibility that
someone from one culture can under-
stand the inner life of anyone from an-
other. For her part, Subin writes that
“one can never truly know” what some-
one else “really believed,” basically shrug-
ging off the task. Yet she writes beauti-
fully of the spiritual life of marginalized
people, taking their devotions seriously
and revealing the subversive purpose and
power of the beliefs and practices that
their oppressors so often misunderstood.
She describes in convincing and com-
passionate detail the pejoratively named
“cargo cults” of the Pacific, which flour-
ished during the Second World War,
when airplane runways, military sup-
plies, and commercial goods were incor-
porated into extant mythologies, not as
objects to be worshipped or cultures to
be imitated but as part of colonial resis-
tance movements. The John Frum cult
on Tanna, for instance, regarded the
American G.I.s as servants of the Apoc-
alypse. Equally compelling is her de-
scription of the Hauka on the Gold
Coast, whose shamans were sometimes
possessed by the spirits of colonial bu-
reaucrats and soldiers—not because the
shamans believed the outsiders to be de-
mons or gods but because they were at-
tempting to control them, and to ma-
nipulate their behavior.
Such accounts belie the salacious
coverage that so often characterizes sto-
ries of “man worshippers” from around
the world. Yet they are sometimes pre-
sented here in ways that overlook their
atavistic nature and their ancient ori-
gins. Where Western figures were de-
ified, or allegedly deified, they were not
worshipped as new gods or viewed as
godlike on their own merits; rather, they
were drafted into preëxisting cosmol-ogies, similar to the way the Aztecs con-
solidated imperial power by replacing
Mixcoatl, a Toltec man-god, with
Huitzilopochtli. Subin is a subtle thinker
and a stylish writer, but her account
overlooks precolonial history like this,
and here and there is cluttered with
bric-a-brac instead: an incomplete
abecedarian poem of lesser gods, occa-
sional lurches into the present tense and
the first person, an orphaned appendix
that clouds rather than clarifies an ear-lier chapter. The most trying of these
is an interlude that she calls “The Apo-
theosis of Nathaniel Tarn,” a travelogue
of sorts—set not in Santiago Atitlán,
where Tarn says he was deified by the
Tz’utujil Maya, but in Morocco, where
Subin was living when Tarn, whom she
had met several years earlier, paid her
a visit. Tarn is an anthropologist by train-
ing; in the nineteen-fifties, his gradu-
ate supervisor sent him to the high-
lands of Guatemala, where the villagers
mistook him for the reincarnation of a
radical shaman who was said to have
turned into a rain angel after his death,
controlling storms from his throne atop
the trees, somewhere between Earth
and Heaven.
This is all according to Tarn, whose
story Subin relates credulously despite
otherwise constructing her book around
canny critiques of claims of this very
nature from others. Cook, Cortés, Co-
lumbus: their alleged deification was
only ever colonial propaganda, she ar-
gues. But when the “accidental god” is
a friend his apotheosis is presented as
plausible, even appealing: “On Nathan-
iel’s last morning in Morocco, it was
still pouring with rain, appropriately
enough for a former rain god.” At the
end of her theogony, Subin writes, “If
the world we inhabit is disenchanted,”
perhaps we can still “find enchantment
in one another,” a cheery if condescend-
ing assessment of an existence that bil-
lions of people—colonized, colonizer,
and decolonized alike—still find full
of actual gods and real miracles.
What’s telling about this lapse is not
that Subin validates her friend’s belief
that he was deified; it is that doing so
requires her to accept that at least some
of the Tz’utujil Maya sincerely wor-
shipped him as a rain god. And why
shouldn’t they? This is the deep psycho-
logical mystery underlying the theolog-
ical and political matters that animate
“Accidental Gods.” No one can stop us
from worshipping anyone else, whether
politician, explorer, prince, or poet, or,
for that matter, from devoting ourselves
to other living things or inanimate ob-
jects, whether crocodiles, meteorites, or
money. One of the most extraordinary
things about apotheosis is how ordinary
it is, how truly democratic it can be:
anyone can become a god, and we can
each have our own.