A review by buermann
Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine by Anna Della Subin

5.0

What begins as a series of fascinating meditations on modern and more-or-less well documented cases of mortal apotheosis -- from the movement in Jamaica to make Haile Selassie a god to the British and American soldiers worshipped across the swathes of their empires to the English Theosophists who made a god of an Indian child -- eventually turns back on itself to explore the accounts of European explorers and colonizers who fancied themselves deified by the mutually unintelligible natives they encountered, and how the mythologies of those encounters and the questions they raised about Christian universalism became embedded in subsequent theories of racial hierarchy, scientific racism, and other permutations of white supremacy.