In Rudyard Kipling’s short story The Man Who Would Be King, two British soldiers-of-fortune, Daniel Dravot and “Peachy” Tolliver Carnahan, hit upon a foolproof plan to improve their financial lot. They will travel into Kafiristan – an area better known today as contemporary Afghanistan – and set themselves up as kings. Their plan goes well; rather too well, in fact. As an astonished Dravot is able to say, “That’s just the beginning … they think we’re gods!” Alas, hubris overreaches them. Just as Dravot is about to be wed to the region’s queen, she bites him in a moment of panic, revealing that he is “neither god nor devil but a man!” Disgrace and death ensue.
Although Dravot does not make an appearance in Accidental Gods, his presence is felt throughout. Anna Della Subin’s book is permeated with the tricksters and the conmen of history, who considered it expedient for their own reasons – financial, social, sexual – to set themselves up as divinities. Yet they paled in number to those who, for whatever reason, did not seek to be revered as gods, but instead had divinity thrust upon them. The “index of inadvertent deities” is especially amusing, and featuring the eclectic likes of Sir Evelyn Baring (later the first Earl of Cromer), Adolf Hitler and Plato. Such trifling concerns as moral standing – or, indeed, the ability to perform any action that might be objectively viewed as divine – become wholly irrelevant.
Subin has picked a suitably metaphysical subject for her book, and appropriately enough all human life is here. She begins with the 1930 coronation of Haile Selassie in “a spectacular week-long celebration in Addis Ababa”. The event was of enough international import for the playboy Duke of Gloucester to be sent from Britain, bearing, as Subin tartly notes, “a crown and sceptre once stolen from the country as well as a traditional English coronation cake”. The expectation was that Selassie would rule Ethiopa more or less as a European protectorate, but events had their usual unfortunate habit of overturning hopes. By the early 1960s the nascent Rastafarian movement (“those in the new world living in the obscenity of injustice”) had decided that Selassie was in fact their deity. It was something that the emperor did little to dispel but indeed encouraged, thanks to his handing out gold medallions to the movement’s elders. When he died a year after the coup that removed him from power, his apparent death was greeted with little more than a shrug by his followers. Was this not merely the sign of his return home?
Accidental Gods teeters constantly on a knife-edge between hilarity and tragedy, as befits its denizens. Gilbert & Sullivan would have had a field day with the cast of princes and military men and clergymen who keep accidentally finding themselves granted the trappings – if not the powers – of divinity, and then use their standing in the most petty and pointless of fashions. Yet, as Subin writes in her prologue, “the accidental god haunts modernity … he, always he, walks bewildered into the 21st century, striving for a secular authority yet finding himself sacred instead.” He is a truly universal figure, appearing “on every continent on the map”; the false deity can be summoned up “at times of colonial invasion, nationalist struggle and political unrest”.
There are numerous instances of near jaw-dropping surrealism, which are all the more effective for the casual way in which Subin presents them. The story about how the late Prince Philip was worshipped as a god by members of the Yaohnanen tribe in the South Pacific is well-known but still fascinating, and the way it is presented here, with a combination of poignancy and hilarity, is a fresh and original approach. Even the most dedicated of false-god-watchers will find new details to stagger and to beguile. It was a revelation to discover that Lyndon B Johnson, of all unlikely people, was lionised by the inhabitants of Papua New Guinea. The space that Subin devotes to the way in which the American general Douglas MacArthur was treated as a deity in multiple different forms – not least as the “Itchy Old Man” of legend – is entirely justified thanks to the way in which she unearths strange and fascinating vignettes. There are, after all, few other military commanders whose likeness was carved into a balsa-wood idol so that his prowess would continue long beyond his death and into the afterlife.
Accidental Gods is at its strongest when it is confronting the absurdities and inconsistencies in the conflation of humanity and divinity. It is therefore weakest when Subin moves away from reportage and into the realms of the theoretical in the latter half of the book. Although she takes care never to be patronising or belittling – this is a book that is fiercely anti-colonialist and opposed to any kind of lazy stereotyping – there is an inevitable arc that emerges in the depiction of how oppressed peoples came to worship often incongruous figures as gods out of a near-desperate belief to have something tangible to respond to. Whatever you think about Prince Philip or Haile Selassie, they were clearly there.
We like to believe that we are far too sophisticated in the modern era to worship totemic figures. Yet our perpetual obsession with celebrity, with status and with the trappings of financial and social success are in themselves a continual obsequiousness towards the falsest of gods. Perpetually “liking” pictures and statements on social media might seem like the actions of free will, but it is likely that a future chronicler will look at Western civilisation in the early years of the 21st century and wonder why we devoted our brilliant minds to an entirely different kind of deity. Accidental Gods, in all its flawed, fascinating glory, points the way to how we can expect to be regarded by our successors, and it isn’t pretty.
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