... riveting ... The book is replete with such astonishing details. Subin, who combines fierce analytic intelligence with powerful storytelling, has here synthesized vast amounts of abstruse information. While another might run the risk of prurient or condescending anthropological interest in such behaviors, Subin deftly places them in the broader context of imperialism ... The challenge Subin’s book presents—and for which it provides, in its last pages, a beautiful but idealized posthumous vision—is how to find a better array of myths.
Accidental Gods is one of those carefully researched books of nonfiction guaranteed to make you feel smarter by the end ... Underneath its fascinating parade of ideas and historical snippets, the structure and sequencing are truly elegant ... This is not a book formed around a single, facile thesis, but instead a complex stitching of evidence. And while many of these chapters make for satisfying stand-alone essays...the sum is much greater than the parts. With all this sacred ground to cover, Subin keeps a fast clip, sometimes verging on breakneck speed, keeping most of her sources in the notes to foreground the driving narratives. It’s a grand, cinematic style at first, but we get more close-ups as the chapters build upon one another, and the result is powerful and persuasive.
Subin, who studied at Harvard Divinity School, clearly delights in...curious details, and Accidental Gods is brimming with them—though in addition to the strange, almost scriptural stories she tells, she also has some connections and ideas to explore ... roving and ambitious ... If there is a pattern that emerges in this book, it has to do with divinization’s double-edge ... Accidental Godsmeanders at times, delineating some connections that are less plausible than others; but then the book is less a straightforward historical study than an irreverent bible in its own right, a sort of celestial thought experiment.
Who can make a god is as fascinating a question as who can kill one, and Anna Della Subin tries to answer both in her new book ... Accidental Gods is not so much a chronology as an atlas of deification ... If Subin’s book consisted of nothing except...biographical sketches, Accidental Gods would still be fascinating ... Subin is a subtle thinker and a stylish writer, but her account overlooks precolonial history...and here and there is cluttered with bric-a-brac instead: an incomplete abecedarian poem of lesser gods, occasional lurches into the present tense and the first person, an orphaned appendix that clouds rather than clarifies an earlier chapter. The most trying of these is an interlude that she calls 'The Apotheosis of Nathaniel Tarn'...whose story Subin relates credulously despite otherwise constructing her book around canny critiques of claims of this very nature from others ... 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 worshipped him as a rain god. And why shouldn’t they? This is the deep psychological mystery underlying the theological and political matters that animate Accidental Gods.
With a stylish, playful, at times almost biblical authorial voice, as well as a keen eye for history’s most revealing paradoxes and charming cul-de-sacs, Subin restores to view the lost tales of modern men (and a few women) transformed into gods before our very eyes ... As Subin assembles this dazzling pantheon of inadvertent deities, from Mahatma Gandhi to the zombie spirit armies of French colonial Niger, she also returns them to their proper place at the heart of modern histories of race, imperialism, and anticolonial resistance ... One way to read Accidental Gods is as a sort of guidebook to the various types of modern divinities one might encounter in the wild ... Subin notes that the history of modern god-making can also be told as a tale of resistance ... Perhaps more frequently than Subin would care to admit, the resistance made possible by godhood was more symbolic than physical. Yet while deification may not by itself have toppled empires, it did help fuel anti-colonial forces by offering new ways of thinking about authority—on heaven as well as on Earth.
... a work so singular as to be nearly phosphorescent ... her most ambitious and searching project yet, and it is also a writerly feat ... the narrative contained within this orderly structure cartwheels around time and space in a way that gives the impression of a rushing fever dream or a mystical vision. Yet Subin’s sentences are never blurry—they’re brisk, precise, and wondrously nimble, defying the staggering density of detail (historical, literary, weird, funny) that they carry. That Subin is so attentive to how she crafts her language is in keeping with her advancing of the argument that this system of signs is, in fact, what belief is made from ... the narrative starts to shimmer and shapeshift until the book takes on yet another, unexpected purpose, transforming from what at first might have seemed like an eccentric collection of historical footnotes into a bold retelling of the creation story of our current reality ... Hers is, ultimately, an optimistic message: if our genocidal world was created out of a half-believed linguistic maneuver, surely we can muster the will to disbelieve it, so we may write something better.
Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods is a philosophical and historical exploration of the phenomenon from Jesus Christ to Prince Philip and Narendra Modi, written with a poise and lucidity that allow full play to the comic aspects of her subject, while considering the frequently disastrous consequences ... Subin’s is a scholarly, footnoted work and she tells this story straight, allowing it to open up her broader themes ... Subin is too sweeping in her assertion that ‘profiteering and racism’ were ‘only ever loosely masked by lofty ideals’[.]
It’s a fascinating exploration of the paradoxes of humanity’s religious instincts—and the power of followers to deify flawed mortals against their will ... Subin is a gifted storyteller, especially when she dives into lesser-known tales of Indian colonial subjects plying the shrines of dead British officers with brandy and cigars, or a Japanese prophetess haunted by visions of Gen. Douglas MacArthur ... Subin deftly exposes the human urge to worship something, anything—especially forces we can’t understand. Underneath this rich narrative, however, lies a familiar formula and a long-standing debate about what religion really is ... There is no doubt that examining racism and political power is fundamental to understanding the history of religion. But sometimes these frameworks become reductionist ... Accidental Gods depicts a dazzling range of human religious experience, by turns moving and horrifying, familiar and gloriously weird. Subin does not wholly answer the questions she raises but invites a broader investigation of the ways humans make meaning and order out of suffering and chaos.
... phenomenal—erudite, provocative, scandalous, and comic and tragic by turns ... unsatisfactory, for all its brilliance. It is incoherent. Its chapters jump from subject to subject and viewpoint to viewpoint, and, as she acknowledges, several chapters have been previously published as stand-alone articles in specialist periodicals. But even if you read her book as a series of essays it is indigestible: too long, too muddled, overloaded with facts and lacking an authorial voice ... These drawbacks may rob her of the wide readership her learning deserves.
Subin writes about these concepts and events essayistically, flowing from historical narratives and case studies to flashes of epigrammatic insight. What seems like a symbolic resonance often enough turns out to be literal...and what sound like distant spiritual curiosities turn out to be disconcertingly close ... Thus we get the case of Prince Philip, the late consort of Queen Elizabeth II, known in the popular press as a sort of boorish caricature of useless aristocracy but worshipped in certain villages in the Pacific archipelago nation of Vanuatu as 'the son of the volcano god Kalbaben.' Abroad, this was taken as a comical footnote to Philip’s career, but Subin—without sacrificing the inherent humor—grounds it in the history of a colonized land ravaged by 'the chaos and dysfunction of the Anglo-French Condominium, or Pandemonium, as it was known,' and suffering from the suppression of its folk traditions by missionaries.
Structurally, the book staggers; it starts as a series of engaging vignettes, but then drags as it enters more theoretical territory. And Della Subin can herself tend to a quasi-religious tone that mutes the deliciously human detail of the stories she tells. After all, it’s the humanity of these gods that makes them interesting—the mortals they really were, and the very earthly needs of their worshippers that led to their deification.
The author assumes no prior knowledge, taking care to tell compelling stories in a concise and factual way. The book is elegantly written, flaunting the author’s mastery of theology to problematize the racist roots of present-day Christianity ... In my lifelong journey of decolonization, I am grateful for this book. It reinforced the emancipatory power of the decolonial imagination to both create and destroy ... For me, the most powerful testimonies are grounded in resistance and dissidence: how colonized peoples used apotheosis to their own advantage by reclaiming divinity.
It is fascinating stuff, and Subin marshals her enormous arsenal of facts to compelling effect, even if the sometimes florid prose requires a fair amount of readerly heavy lifting. All the same, her contentions are thoughtful and subtle, and for this reviewer it was the final section of the publication that proved most impactful.
At least two older white writers tell Subin about visiting an isolated community or tribe and being confused for someone celestial. What might just as well be traditional gestures of curiosity and hospitality...are written up by western travellers as signs of their own cosmic importance, and Subin accepts these accounts uncritically. That said, her portrait of the Rastafarian movement is wonderfully attuned to the transformative power of belief ... But the overarching thesis doesn’t quite impress. The problem with positing divinity as a defence against encroaching modernity is that it only reinforces stale dichotomies ... Subin may portray individual white gods as delusional narcissists and racists and imperialists, but white people, in the aggregate, still come across as oddly less deceived. Their superior scepticism is a myth that remains somewhat unchallenged in this otherwise subversive book.
Written in erudite, scholarly prose, Subin’s appreciation for these 'gods' is a vibrantly narrated yet overlong text richly embellished with generous illustrations. The author’s exploration captures mortals throughout history who were feted, shaped myths about power and influence, and were startlingly exalted into godly status. A colorful, exhaustive, occasionally exhausting contemplation of global history’s cavalcade of avatars.
... thought-provoking if overstuffed ... Subin draws intriguing and illuminating connections between race and religion, but the book’s various strands don’t quite cohere as convincingly as she suggests. Still, this is a stimulating and challenging look at a fascinating historical phenomenon.
