Ever since Columbus reported he was hailed as "a celestial being" in 1492, stories of unexpected apotheoses have haunted the modern age—arising particularly at times of imperialist invasion, nationalist struggle, and political unrest. From Haile Selassie to Prince Philip, men unwittingly turned divine have much to reveal about empire, race, and the relationship between politics and divinity, as HDS alumna Anna Della Subin argues in her recent book Accidental Gods. In conversation with Charles M. Stang, she will explore how deification has been both a means of liberation and a way to sanctify oppression; how accidental gods are present in the canonical texts of comparative religion; and how myths of European explorers mistaken for “white gods” imbued whiteness with a divinity still entrenched today.
Anna Della Subin is a writer, critic, and senior editor at Bidoun. Her essays have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Paris Review, and the London Review of Books. Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine was named a Book of the Year for 2021 in The TLS and an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times.
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Accidental Deification, a conversation with Anna Della Subin. February 17, 2022.
CHARLES STANG: Good afternoon, everyone. It's good evening to Anna Della. My name is Charles Stang. And I'm the Director of the Center for the Study of World Religions here at Harvard Divinity School. This afternoon I have the pleasure of hosting Anna Della Subin for a conversation about her new and first book, Accidental Gods on men unwittingly turned divine.
This event falls within the Center's new transcendence and transformation initiatives, about which you can learn more on our website. We have just about an hour with Anna Della so I'm going to keep my remarks brief so that there will be time for Q&A.
It's my great pleasure to welcome Anna Della Subin to the Center. Anna Della is a writer critic and senior editor. Oh, I just lost my area. A senior editor at Bidoun. Her essays have appeared in the New York Review of Books, Harper's, The Paris Review, and the London Review of Books. Accidental Gods was named a book of the year for 2021 by the TLS and an Editor's Choice by The New York Times.
Anna Della is also an HTS alumna, which I know because she was a student of mine over 10 years ago when I was a fairly new member of the faculty here. So it was a delight to hear from her again after so many years, to learn of her new book and what she's been up to in the meantime, since having left HDS.
I've asked Anna Della to describe how she came to write the book and what she thinks its significance is. But let me tell you that it is remarkably learned, full of great historical detail, and extraordinarily well written and engaging. So here's what our event page says about the book.
"Ever since Columbus reported that he was hailed as a celestial being in 1492, stories of unexpected apotheosis have haunted the modern age. Arising particularly in times of imperialist invasion, nationalist struggle, and political unrest. From Haile Selassie to Prince Philip, men unwittingly turned divine have much to reveal about empire, race, and the relationship between politics and divinity.
Accidental Gods explores how deification has been both a means of liberation and a way to sanctify oppression. How accidental gods are present in the canonical texts of comparative religion. And how myths of European explorers mistaken for quote unquote "white gods" imbued whiteness with the divinity still entrenched today."
So without further ado, Anna Delle, me invite you to join the screen, and I will disappear. There you are. So Anna Della, welcome. Thanks so much for joining us. And the floor is yours.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: No, thank you so much Charli. And it's great to be back at HDS. I actually had the idea for Accidental Gods only a year after I was your student. And I always think that your ideas in divine doubles must have somehow been implanted in me and led me onto this topic. So I thank you. So I'm just going to begin by reading what's really a teaser for the book, and then we'll have our conversation.
"In the beginning, it was the serpent who first proposed that man might become divine. 'Ye shall be as gods,' the creature advised as the fruit waited. Sorrow and shame and wisdom came into the world but whether a man was any nearer to godliness, who could say? With the fall from paradise, a new trap was set for humankind.
When might be shaped like a god, the same color as a god, imperious or violent like a god. When might just be in the right place at the right time, mistakes happen. A fleet of ships appeared on the horizon, swarming the boundary between heaven and Earth.
When Christopher Columbus and his companions anchored off an unknown coast, crowds of curious islanders gathered on the shore. 'We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven,' Columbus wrote in his diary on October 14, 1492 although he did not know a word of their language. Yet every time he stepped off the ships rowboat, Columbus seemed to walk on the clouds.
Again and again, he reported, he was hailed as a celestial being by the people he met. Conquest followed apotheosis, the altar of his divinity was the sand. Ever since the navigational accident that marked the alleged dawn of the modern age, this figure has haunted us. The man unwittingly turned divine.
The sailors, missionaries, and settlers who came in the footsteps of Columbus told of Hernan Cortes taken for the Aztec feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, of Francisco Pizarro as Viracocha, of the Miwok who freely handed over their land to Francis Drake believing him to be their god, of the ritual deicide in Hawaii of Captain Cook.
These foundational myths of the Americas seem to sanctify Europe's arrival in the new world as providential. In the high age of empire, as Europe spanned the Earth in quest of wealth, the stories poured forth of colonial officers, soldiers, and bureaucrats who in going about their administrative tasks were surprised to find themselves worshipped as living deities.
Or they saw deified counterparts of themselves manifest as colonial spirits in a constellation of spirit possession cults such as the hauka that stretched from the Ivory Coast to the Sudan. It was uncomfortable to see your own spirit run riot in a warm body other than your own.
With the rise of American imperium, General Douglas MacArthur became deified in four entirely different countries, in ways at once often an appropriation of his power to try to undo the damage the American military itself had wrought. As decolonization movements got underway, along come the politicians and activists, the presidents and prime ministers who strove for a secular authority, yet find themselves sacred instead.
Along come the anthropologists who encounter divine versions of themselves while doing fieldwork far from home. The accidental god has walked bewildered into the 21st century. From the unlikely godhood of Prince Philip on the South Pacific island of Tanna, to the economist Raj Patel, forced to dispel rumors of his divinity on his blog.
They have appeared on every continent on the map, at times of imperialist invasion, a nationalist struggle, and political unrest. They rise in acts of misfired devotions, gods only briefly unsuitably divine. Or they mark the births of new religions.
When it first happened to Haile Selassie, no one thought to inform him of his godhood or obtain his consent, or even send a telegram. In 1930, Rastafari Makonnen had crowned himself emperor of Ethiopia. He invited the powers of the Earth to attend his coronation in Addis Ababa for he was deep in a struggle for succession and needed to create a veneer of legitimacy on the international stage.
Reporters such as Evelyn Waugh describe the scene as unrehearsed chaos, the crown stashed in a cardboard box. But the American consul general was there covering the event for National Geographic and wrote of it in solemn biblical tones, alongside sublime color photographs. In one line he seemed to suggest that King George the 5th own son, the Duke of Gloucester, had paid homage to Haile Selassie on bended knee.
On the other side of the Earth, Jamaicans heard the news over the radio or saw the National Geographic issue, and several people had the same idea independently, that god was alive on Earth right now, and he was Black. On an island still under British colonial rule, facing daily injustice and oppression, it was a deeply transformative idea.
The teachings of Rastafari prophet such as Leonard Howell and Robert Hines, drawing on older occurents of Ethiopians thought seemed to subvert all existing hierarchies and point the way to an alternate future. If God resembled the faces in the crowd, everyone partook in his divinity.
'You are god and every one of you is god,' Howell said, according to the notes of a British policeman. By the 1950s, an anthropologist in Kingston reported men preaching with the Bible on one hand and a weathered copy of National Geographic in the other. A magazine that at the time was notoriously racist, publishing pieces in support of eugenics and Mussolini's attack on Ethiopia.
Yet as a powerful theology of Black liberation, the religion of Rastafari would transcend any paradoxes of its birth. Haile Selassie didn't consider himself Black, he identified as Semitic. And Marcus Garvey wrote off the emperor as a Black ally in the struggle yet found himself too swept up into Rastafari thought, becoming its reluctant John the Baptist.
After his coronation, Haile Selassie was his correct name, and the emperor would find anybody who dared to call him Rastafari. When he eventually learned of the new religion, as a pious Orthodox Christian, the emperor was dismayed and sent apostles to Jamaica on a failed mission to convert his worshippers to his own faith. He spoke the sentence that would become the refrain of the unwitting deity uttered by Gandhi at least five times, 'I am not God.'
But then again, compliance has never been an important attribute of any deity. A dictator against his own people, the worship of a distant autocrat became a profoundly emancipatory force.
By the 1970s, Jamaican politicians such as Michael Manley were incorporating ideas from Rastafari theology and helping to move the newly independent island towards Democratic socialism. The religion would spread as far as New Zealand, becoming a doctrine of liberation among Maori Rastas.
They live in the place where it is said Haile Selassie will appear when he returns, all his angels alongside him, at the first point of the Earth to see the light of each new day. If Rastafari would enter the ranks of the world religions, as they are taxonomies today, accidental gods were present at the conceptualization of these very categories themselves, especially a certain British godling who thirsted for brandy and cigars.
In 1809, as the East India Company attempted to invade the kingdom of Travancore, an officer by the name of Captain Paul was fatally wounded. He was found by a Tamil group of Shanaras who tried in vain to help him, then buried him in a desolate spot under a banyan tree. They searched his possessions and found brandy and cigars in his bag.
30 years later, the Anglican missionary Robert Caldwell arrived in Tinovelli and noticed a strange phenomenon. A shrine had been constructed in worship of Paul, who had undergone some kind of, quote, 'Demystification.'
Caldwell reported, quote, 'An ordinary Indian demon would have preferred blood,' he wrote, 'But the offerings made to this English officer consisted in ardent spirits and cigars. Near the pole altar, several obelisks were built for his spirit to rest on, for it was said the captain walked on air, never touching the ground.' It was alleged that Paul was the cause of all sickness and death, as Madame Laviska burned on her travels.
In the English parliament, the story was invoked by an anti-imperialist dissenter as proof that colonialism was so inhumane it could only be understood by the colonized as something supernatural.
Captain Paul was only one of numerous British officers turned posthumously divine. From William Cardin, who preferred sacrifices of hard boiled eggs, to Captain James Stewart whose severed head became enshrined inside a police station and who was said to notice when policemen slackened their weekly offerings to him.
Though the British were captivated by their own presence in Indian pantheons, there were only parvenus to a long tradition of deifying those who had died in sudden or tragic ways. Killed in battle or by grisly accident, the dead embody the violence they had seen. Deification was a way to mediate with their power, to reverse our universal defeat and turn it into a kind of salvation.
With boots on the ground advancing across the subcontinent by the hundreds of thousands, the Englishmen were only the latest to conspicuously perish. But they impose their own meanings onto what happened next.
Preserved in missionary reports travelogues and district gazetteers, the accounts of inadvertent deification became part of the raw data that Oxford theorists in the late 19th century, such as Friedrich Max Mueller would analyze, as they forged a science of religion in which Christianity alone grasped the cosmos with reason.
Even Queen Victoria attended some of his lectures. She had experienced deification herself in 1883 when British papers reported a sect in Erisa that not only worshipped her as an inadvertent goddess, but even extended reverence to an ornate silver dish she had presented to a regiment of troops.
In his landmark studies Primitive Culture and Anthropology, Edward Burnett Tyler told of the South Indian shrine to a British deity, quote, 'Whose voteries mindful of his tastes in life, relaying on his altar offering of cheroots and Brandy. The deified Englishman was grist for Tyler's theory of animism, a rudimentary stage on the spiritual evolution toward a monotheism ideally resembling Tyler's own faith.
The god's unfinished brandy was a remnant, an obsolete spiritual fantasy with no place in civilized religion. In his Modern India and the Indians, a text that did much to popularize the term Hinduism in common use, the Sanskrits Monier Williams, again, invoked the brandy and cigars as he attempted to define Hinduism, which in his view encouraged, quote, 'Hideous idolatry.'
He strove to create the authoritative Sanskrit English dictionary, believing it would facilitate the conversion of India to Christianity. Quote, 'The moral conquest of India remains to be achieved,' the scholar declared. At moments of defining religion and belief, accidental man gods were standing by.
Accounts of deification were used to paint a portrait of an irrational fanatical East contrasted with a rational Christian West, and mark the East as in need of further colonial rule. The righteousness of empire was legitimized through shards of proof, the Duchess of worship on a tombstone.
The ephemeral colonial gods were immortalized in encyclopedias. And the Scottish orientalist Edward Balfour's 1885 encyclopedia of India, the entry for Paul, comma captain appears directly above Paul cat, a species found in Tibet. Stories of apotheosis sanctified imperialism, and they also imbued whiteness with the divinity still entrenched today. The myth dream of absolute white supremacy brooks no opposition.
The poet monk Thomas Merton wrote not long before his sudden death. Quote, 'It is our collective daydream, made up of all kinds of common symbols and beliefs with which we are collectively at ease. Even when we think we are being nice and fair and just, we are living and acting out a dream that makes fairness and justice impossible,' the monk wrote.
Black power, among other things, is trying to tell us so. In the 16th century, just as myths of European explorers mistaken for gods were being recorded and ever retold, racial concepts with purity of blood and exclusion were imported from the Spanish Inquisition to the New World.
To preserve the precarious grasp on power, limpieza de sangre shifted in meaning from an idea of blood tainted with Cyrus and stain to a biological concept based on skin tone.
Race or raza, a word that had been used for animal breeds, ceased to lurk in the obscurity of what one's ancestors had believed, and became visible for all who were taught to see it. Friars preach the blackness of sin and set apart the Christian sacred as pure, unsullied, and white, forged in flesh and blood, and language gone astray. It became indelible, a fiction that deified whiteness. This thing we still call race.
In the fragile colonies of the New World, as Indigenous and enslaved people were converted to Christ, European settlers shifted in how they self-identified, from Christian to white. Stories of white gods such as the apotheosis of Henry Hudson allegedly deified by the Lenape as the God Manitou on what later became Manhattan were used to reinforce territorial claims or to prove that a European power had arrived at a certain land first.
For the natives had never seen men so different from themselves. Columbus was lowered from the heavens, Cortes grew scales and feathers, and Pizarro walked over the white foam of the sea. Yet peeling back the layers of these myths, they often hinged on problems of language with indigenous words mistranslated as god in the Christian sense.
With each retelling, from school textbooks to civil war era pamphlets, the stories of European godhood magnified the myth dream of white supremacy, becoming a foundational, if overlooked basis, for the white nationalist movements that claim America for the white race alone.
'There is coming a day when your race puts back on immortality.' Wesley Swift, a former Ku Klux Klan organizer and the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ Christian announced in a radio sermon in 1963. As a swelling tide of hundreds of thousands led by Martin Luther King jr. marched on Washington that same year, Swift holds of Quetzalcoatl and Veracocha. And of a future in which the white race would be bathed again in light.
He drew upon a spate of recently published histories with titles like Inquest of the White God, or Fair Gods and Stone Faces, a genre that had a revival again in the '90s. On the White nationalist forum Stormfront, among the earliest on the internet, threads evoke the pantheon of white men mistaken for gods as proof of the intrinsic divinity of the white race.
Quote, 'God is in our Aryan DNA so we must do everything to be eternal.' A user called Aryan 7314 god explains. Users debate and condemn the Black godhood of Haile Selassie, pointing out that even he refuted it. It all seethes and foments, becoming scriptural and material for the religion of whiteness.
So I leave off with a question, how do we deify what has been made divine? How do we kill the doctrine that has made gods out of white men? It may be the only way to fight old myths is with new ones, to wrest back the territory of the sacred, or what I call the space of mytho politics.
Wrote the poet Fernando Pessoa in 1913 on the Eve of war, 'We must loath hatred to sleep like a captive snake." That's the end. Thank you.
CHARLES STANG: Thank you, Anna Della. OK, well, wonderful introduction to the book. And I'm trying to adjust some of my questions accordingly. I was going to ask you a broad question, I think I still will. Although I think you in a sense just began an answer to it. So let me pose the question.
So in the introduction you say that accidental god-- the accidental god haunts modernity and that ideas of accidental divinity persist in hidden way in modernity, specifically in the modern concept of race. We've just mentioned that again.
So the broad question is this, what does the lens of deification allow us to see about Western modernity and what we might call the kind of Gordian knot of empire religion, race and gender? What does it allow us to see that we would not or do not, otherwise, see? What narrative of modernity emerges from all the fascinating case studies you've assembled here?
And in a way, I feel as if the final remarks you gave begin to answer that question in the sense that deification allows us to foreground the making of white men as gods, and then requiring almost, now that we can see deification operating that way, now requires deicide. How do we kill those very white gods? But why don't you take up the question and take it in whatever direction you wish.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Yeah, so I think on the most kind of profound level, divinity always describes a relationship to power. And so it's a really interesting way to look at histories of empire, look at histories of imperialism. Just as a kind of on-- a very basic level, there's the sense-- we have this myth that the modern world has become disenchanted.
One scholar whose work I'm really interested in is Jason Josephson Storm's book, The Myth of Disenchantment. This idea that science chased spirits out of the shadows, and Nisha announces that god is dead and who will wipe the blood from us. And that's still a very powerful myth.
I think it's less clear within a Divinity School context but it still does kind of reign as a myth. And so I think what the book is kind of trying to do on the most simplistic level is to show that modernity hasn't been about this so-called death of god at all, it's about creating new ones in all these completely unexpected ways.
And I think that kind of looking at deification, these kind of-- the focus on accidental deification rather than looking at like cult leaders or gurus or thinking about accidental deification, kind of lets us kind of get at something else, which is how politics itself is always caught up in mythological thinking and myth making. And so, yeah, I don't know if that begins to answer your question at all but--
CHARLES STANG: Very much, very much. So let me follow it up with another phrase from the introduction that becomes almost a refrain in the book, 'Is he always he.' In other words, this is a story decidedly about men unwittingly turned divine.
And even the female exceptions you include in chapter eight, almost seem to prove the rule. So why do you think this is the case? Why in the modern period is it only men who are deified?
You do mention that India, especially, has its own traditions of female deification. And you do briefly treat the controversial Indian tradition of sati, that is the self-immolation of widows that is understood by some to render them divine. But quite apart from sati, why did those Indian traditions of female deification not feature more prominently?
And I ask this in part because I don't know those Indian traditions particularly well, but also because we're hosting a series here at the Center this year on the divine feminine and its discontents. And so I'm interested in the claim that women are not deified in modernity. So--
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Yes.
CHARLES STANG: We'll do that.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: So I guess for the first half of your question, I didn't set out to write a book entirely about men. I really thought I was going to find more instances of accidental deification of women. I love EM Forster's novel, A Passage to India, and I thought I was going to find a lot of real life Mrs. Moors. And so you know, I have-- in the back of the book I have an index of inadvertent gods. And there are 86 figures, and only 10 of them are female.
And I think one reason is that you have to kind of look at who's writing down all these stories. And to ask who gets mistaken for god is to ask, well, what does a god look like? And for many of my storytellers who are Christian, often Christian missionaries or military officers or colonizers God is male, he's God the Father. And so they're encountering, especially in India, they're encountering all these other traditions.
And so in the book, most of the traditions in which women are deified do arise in India. So I think especially what I described in the introduction, this tradition of deifying those who had died in violent ways or by accident, there are all of these other traditions.
There in the book I touch upon Kumari very briefly and also the act of sati of the widow who emulates herself on her husband's pyre, which is kind of-- it's a kind of divinity that's built upon the accident of fate that your husband dies before you. And so there is a way in which I could have just written a book entirely about India and accidental goddesses in India.
But what I'm most interested in, in the book is actually how these narratives themselves kind of really fed into like our notions of masculinity itself. And so there's one figure who I didn't mention in my introduction, but he's the notoriously violent Brigadier General John Nicholson. He's probably the worst tempered god, wrathful god of them all.
He's a British war-- or he's of Irish descent but he's a hero of the British empire in India and is killed in the mutiny. And a religion forms around him calling themselves the Nikal Seyns. But Nicholson's legend gets picked up again and again in all of these texts which really teach generations of schoolboys how to be a man in the world.
So in the first edition of Baden-Powell's Scouting for Boys, the boy scout manual, you have a play where a boy acts out being John Nicholson. And John Nicholson, the archetypal man mistaken for god appears again and Kipling, he appears again in Samuel Smiles' text Self-help, just kind of a foundation of the genre.
And so he really-- this idea of, well, how should a man be? How should a man act in the world? Well, like someone who would get mistaken for a god, Mike, in the book I'm arguing that actually this idea kind of does get entrenched through the stories of these accidental gods who are constantly appearing in very formative texts.
CHARLES STANG: OK, thank you. And I want to return to the figure of Haile Selassie. So you begin the book with the story of how Haile Selassie and the Rastafarians who declared him a god. Black men deifying another Black man, although he, as you mentioned, did not understand himself as Black but rather a Semitic.
In any case, they deify him against his wishes and they seem to do so in order to defy and resist the violence of global white supremacy from the Caribbean, their Jamaican context to Ethiopia. So that's where the book begins.
And then the book ends in conversation with several contemporary Black thinkers who curiously are very well known to this audience. Anthea Butler just gave the annual Greeley lecture last week here. And Stephen Finley and Biko Gray, their book The Religion of White Rage was the topic of a panel discussion here last year. So they're all well known.
All three of them, and especially Finley and Gray are wrestling with the question that the Reverend Dr. William Jones posed in his 1973 book, is God a white racist? And Finley and Gray answered that question in the affirmative. Insofar as the sovereign state has absolute power to arbitrate guilt and innocence, life and death, it's a kind of god, and it's a decidedly white racist god.
So for Finley and Gray, it seems the answer to this dilemma is a kind of atheism, you deny the false god of the state. But here. I wonder about the ambivalence of deification that you've brought forth.
For the Rastafarians are claiming Selassie god was, and I assume still is, a means of resisting the very white racist god dressed in the finalizes of a sovereign state, and instead imagining and enacting another world with another god.
But for Finley and Gray, it seems it's high time to knock this sovereign God off its pedestal not with a new God but with an atheistic humanism. It would seem to leave no place for new gods, Ethiopian or otherwise. And suggests that perhaps the human all to human desire-- the human all too human desire to make men into gods is the very problem itself.
So I wonder where you are in all of this, what do you think of all this? Having surveyed all these men unwittingly turned divine, would you have us dispense with deification itself? Would you have us stop making gods?
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: That's a very great question. No one's actually asked me that before yet, surprisingly. No, but you know, so I found Finley and Gray's, I say, to be really brilliant, you know. Like, I hear my book nearly 500 pages, detailing how white men mistaken for gods have played into these histories of oppression, especially sanctifying anti-Black violence. Where do we go from here?
And I find their call for deicide against the white racist state as very compelling. Like, it's clear that we need a radical reappraisal of everything, whether it's the prison system or the militarized police. So I'm very-- I am completely there with them in this kind of act of deicide.
But at the same time, I think there is an ambivalence in my book, which I think is captured through the style of it. And style is just very important to how the book unfolds. But I've kind of tried on every page on the sentence level to kind of create this space, the suspension of disbelief.
So there is kind of an aspect of it, which sort of feels like it's playing out on a mythic plane a bit. And reviewers have questioned where do I fall in all of this. And I myself I think I can write about all of these different contexts with a kind of sensitivity because I feel these impulses an urge to deify him, like in a very-- myself, not to deify myself.
But I feel like I'm kind of like a seeker of transcendence around me as well. And so I kind of leave off in the book with this sort of utopian question of can we find divinity in one another and not just in white men.
And so, yes, it is ambivalent if that answers your question at all. I would say there are a lot of people I would deify, especially a lot of writers, you know. Herman Melville, for one, but that would be a different book.
CHARLES STANG: I have just two more questions. One, we've already discussed, it's the open ended one, and then one last one and then we'll open it up for others. So I was really struck by the chapter on Krishnamurti and Gandhi.
For those people who don't know this story, Krishnamurti was a young Indian boy, either adopted or kidnapped by the second generation of theosophysts named Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater were whose base of operations was in India.
And they identified this young Indian boy as the world teacher, a kind of, god, an emerging god would usher in a new age and raised him that way. And then he famously broke with them.
And the other is Gandhi who was sort of also has early interactions with the arsonists but ended up breaking with them. But then went through his own trial of forcibly deified by his own countrymen. So Anna Della has put these two in counterpoint. So really brilliant storyline of these two prominent Indian men, contemporaries.
So Anna Della, I want you to muse on what you were trying to convey by putting these two unwittingly deified Indian men together. And if you could, also speak to the appendix, to the book where you come back to Krishnamurthy and his final days.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Yeah, absolutely. So the deification of Krishnamurti and that of Gandhi are both unfolding, kind of, at almost the same moment. And each story kind of poses a different question of what should India's future look like. So both apotheosis become these kind of battlegrounds. In the case of Krishnamurti and Annie Besant.
Annie Besant had actually had her own children forcibly taken away from her in a custody battle when she divorced her husband who was a vicar. And it was claimed that she was unfit to mother a child because she was an atheist. And so one of the kind of really just tragic and poignant aspects of the story is that here's this woman who loses her own child and then kidnaps or adopts someone else's child and raises them as a god.
And so a custody battle unfolds between Krishnamurthy's father and Besant but the custody battle really becomes a kind of proxy for what the future of India should look like. So you have Besant kind of clung to this idea that she wanted India to have self-rule but she wanted it to still be part of a Commonwealth.
And she thought that the British empire was actually held together by bonds of love. And so she deeply believed in the Commonwealth and kind of raised Krishnamurti to kind of embody it. And he was kind of groomed to be both East and West at the same time, British and Brahmin.
And so in the custody battle, it was kind of Annie Besant's version of empire one which the Britain was this kind of mother figure, versus those who thought Krishnamurti should return to his father and India should have total independence to complete liberation. And so on the one hand that's a really interesting moment when all these possibilities for India's future being fought over.
And at the same time, you have Gandhi who briefly flirted with theosophy but found it's a cult mysteries to be against the spirit of democracy. So and he finds himself taken for a god on one of his railroads campaigns in 1921, where he's passing from town to town and it's just rapturously received as a god. And all of these miracles are circulating about him.
And it ends up leading to violence in which a police station is famously burnt down. And so you have the kind of god of nonviolence has provoked violence, so it's kind of deeply paradoxical moment. So, yes, so in the book I kind of set-- I set them together as this way of showing how history unfolds along fault lines of apotheosis that we might not think of.
And what you-- so what you were getting at about the appendix. So Krishnamurti famously renounces his divinity after a few decades. He can't cope with being a god. And in my book I'm describing what's the daily routine of living like a god like. And he after a while he just can't, he can't live as one. And when he renounces his divinity, Annie Besant is devastated and dies soon after.
And then Krishnamurti goes on to become this kind of incredible guru. I don't want to call him a guru, he wouldn't like that but kind of intellectual of freedom from religion, but of finding your own way through the sacred. And he claimed that he didn't remember anything at all about his boyhood as a god. And often refused to speak of it.
But then as he lay dying in Ojai, California, he recorded these tapes where he said people will never know this supreme power that has passed through me. They'll never, you won't see something like it again. And he gave all these kind of intimations that he had actually been the vessel for some kind of supreme being of some kind. So he remains this kind of deep enigma today.
CHARLES STANG: Fascinating. OK, final question for me and then there will be audience questions. So the book ends with a note of almost messianic longing waiting on the arrival of a kingdom imagined as an egalitarian republic that's just barely glimpsed in the 19th century New Orleans seance.
You write in your final lines, "We still have so far to go. Until race becomes a relic, White Divinity, a curiosity of a pagan past. Until the day someone catching sight of a woman will turn and say, the infinite suits you." So it's a curious way to end of the book, poetic, enigmatic, mysterious. And under the sign of a adverb, until.
We will not reach that republic until we dispense with what exactly? Race, sexism, paganism, and perhaps the very idea of deification itself. So my question to you is a familiar one to messianism. Will this imagined day come in time? And by that I mean two things.
First, will it come in time before we irreparably damaged or destroy ourselves? Or have we already done so? And second, will this imagine day come in time? Will it come in this time? In the time we measure with days and years or in some other time. In other words, what's the temporality that your until invokes?
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Wow, what a question. Yeah, I think that until is kind of operating on multiple modes of temporality. It is a kind of-- it does leave off-- I think I have at once the kind of optimism and a pessimism at the same time. And I think-- yeah, I think, I would say lot of this book was written with this kind of deep conflict or paradox within myself about deification.
How it liberates and how it oppresses. I think we're doomed as humankind. I think it won't come, it won't come soon enough, you know. I'm pretty deeply pessimistic but at the same time, I think just even in the past year since I wrote the book, because I actually wrote most of the book even before the Trump presidency.
I invoke Black Lives Matter but that was all kind towards the end of my process of writing the book. And I think a lot has actually changed. I decided I wasn't going to try to quickly catch up the book to QAnon or the Floyd protests. But there are-- people are interrogating questions like race, these histories, more than ever in a kind of mainstream way.
There was one review of my book in a British publication that said how much they enjoyed and found it intriguing but they spotted it, a ghost tapering in the margins of my book. And that was the ghost of critical race theory.
And I just kind of love that idea. Someone would not have written such a line, even a year or two years ago. So, yeah, I think things are going in an interesting direction, even if we won't be saved.
CHARLES STANG: All right. All right, thank you Anna Della. Well, we're going to open it up to some of the questions from the audience. First, a question. Have you been able to look into the John Frum cargo cult on the island of Tanna and Vanuatu? The cargo.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Oh, yeah. So there's actually a section about John Frum in the book because it's really the kind of ground that the Prince Philip cult emerges out of. And so what I'm doing in my book there is I'm really pushing back against the term cargo cult, which is this kind of pejorative term that's invented during World War I to kind of-- by this writer who was writing editorials of the kind of lock up your white daughter's sort of thing.
Just like deeply racist screed to kind of paint these movements that were arising in the South Pacific in response to the invasion of armed forces of Europe and America on their shores. But then this phrase cargo cult gets picked up by historians and anthropologists and kind of becomes this something that we see as a scientific category of study.
So I'm looking at John Frum kind of in that context and how the kind of worship of an American kind of American every man. And John Frum splinters off into the Philip movement as in many ways the John Frum movement starts and then suddenly American troops actually arrive on Tanna. But that disillusioned many from us and they turn their allegiances to a new figurehead in Prince Philip. So, yeah, there's definitely Frum in the book.
CHARLES STANG: Quit a bit on cargo culture, yes good. This is observation calling for comment. I'll just read it. "People of Asia," I think although this means East Asia. "People of East Asia never saw Europeans as gods, Europeans were not allowed to roam countries such as Japan and China and they were kept in a small area.
I don't think the idea of deification is as totalized as you describe. So maybe to pose that as a question, did China and-- do China and Japan and these policies of sort of restricting Europeans to certain areas, did that come up in your research? How did you handle that?
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Yeah, I would push back a little bit on that in the case of Douglas MacArthur because after Japan's defeat in the war when Emperor Hirohito is forced to resign his status as living god, MacArthur in many ways kind of starts to fill that space of divinity. And that's something that I discuss in the book.
Where suddenly in the kind of bewildering aftermath of the war, where people are kind of trying to make sense of these strange new circumstances of an American ruling over Japan and creating its Constitution, MacArthur starts receiving floods of letters and sacrificial offerings. Letters that refer to him as divine, in ways that the emperor had once been.
And their attempts to kind of slot him into different kind of divine rituals and practices that the emperor had once inhabited. And this is a kind of very brief moment in which MacArthur is deified in Japan.
It's short lived because he soon disgraces himself by making some deeply racist comments. But it was never really about MacArthur himself, I would say, it was kind of this sort of search for meaning at a time of just complete upheaval.
CHARLES STANG: Maybe we'll end with this question, an anonymous question. I'm going to paraphrase an add a little bit to it. Here's the question. Quote, "We are all god. How do you feel about this statement? Why is there a tendency to the opposite, to externalize and separate ourselves from divinity, to create some belief structure which denies the very nature of our being?"
Now let me add a little piece to that question, because I thought one of the things that was most interesting about the Krishnamurti case is that when he renounces his own divinity, if I'm not mistaken, it's because he wants to affirm the divinity of all. So is some sense it's not so much that he is denying deification, he's denying the sort of representative or singular deification.
He wants a more distributed deification. And I'm wondering where you-- yeah, so I'm riffing off this question. Did you come up against that tension elsewhere in the research where there's a human all too human tendency to divinize one man? All too often a man.
Where does the-- where do you see the impulse or inclination to affirm the deification of all? And is that relevant or does this only work in the service of empire white supremacy sexism if it's these sort of singular representative men?
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Yeah, it's so often it's kind of the deification of a single man who then opens the way for all of us to become divine, which sounds very Christ-like. And I think an interesting image to bring in here is the image in the Rigveda of Purusha, who is the sacred man who is-- which I invoke in the book, who is this man who embodies every part of human society.
So his mouth is intellectuals, his hands are craftsmen, his feet are our agricultural workers. And this becomes a very driving metaphor in India during which you have thinkers such as Vivekananda who drawn it to kind of capture this divinity that's in every man. And to kind of push back on the idea that Indians were worshipping the British. He says, you know, no, actually the first gods we have to worship are our own countrymen.
And he invokes the sacred man. And so, yes, so that-- but, yeah, there is this tension. And I think another kind of interesting way to look at it is just the chapter in my book where I actually go on a road trip with someone who himself was turned into a living god.
And I'm kind of asking him, well, what did it feel like to be a god? What was the experience like? What does it do? If you're mistaken for a god, like, how does it change how you feel about yourself or think about yourself? And for him, this is Nathaniel Tarn, he was a chapter in my book.
But for him it kind of really, really gets at this contradiction of that we all feel where some days you feel really depressed and you want to kill yourself and other days you want to live forever. And being a god kind of like straddles that contradiction.
And I think in a way these ideas of all of us partaking in divinity really kind of speak to that just existential aspect of the human condition. I don't know if that answers the question at all but--
CHARLES STANG: It makes me think of the recent movie, Dune, and the book on which it was based which is, of course, an extended exploration of what it means for one man to be acclaimed as a god. And what that means for race, religion, and empire. So there's a science fiction exploration of this very thing. Not so accidental but by design. Anna Della, thank you so much for writing this book.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Thank you for inspiring me.
CHARLES STANG: Oh, I can't take credit for any of that. But I'm thrilled that whatever we did at HDS, some of it trickled into this wonderful book. You're a beautiful writer. I won't embarrass you with all the comments that are in the Q&A to that effect. And even the way you're answering these questions, extemporaneous or planned, you have a way with words. So keep it up Anna Della, let's look forward to number two. We'll have you back.
ANNA DELLA SUBIN: Sorry, yeah. Hope to be back in person.
CHARLES STANG: Yes, in person, OK. Well, thank you all for joining us. And please do keep an eye out for the next event. Actually on February 28, and Klein from Rice University will be speaking at a theme very, very relevant to this.
Let me just pull it up here. It's called Divining the Feminine in Tibet, Saga and Saghana of Yeshe Tsogyal. So that's a 8th, 9th century Tibetan woman who was deified, I suppose. We'll find out more on February 28. Thank you Anna Della, and good night for you, and good afternoon to those of us who are here.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsor, Center for the Study of World Religions.
SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2022, the president and Fellows of Harvard College.