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 objects, 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.” – newyorker.com/men-mistaken-for-gods

INVOLUNTARY APOTHEOSIS
https://granta.com/first-rites
https://lrb.co.uk/philip-s-people
https://lrb.co.uk/in-his-white-uniform
On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine, by Anna Della Subin
In His White Uniform / by Rosemary Hill  /  February 2022

Apotheosis​ can happen to anyone, although in the case of women it is rare. Men, however, are deified with astonishing frequency and their reactions range from bewildered irritation to dismay. While the idea of being godlike may be attractive, being an actual god is less so. One is at the mercy of one’s worshippers, who tend to be demanding, dictatorial and impossible to shake off. 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. Haile Selassie is the first and one of the best known of her case studies. The story of Rastafarianism is in many ways typical, not least because the object of its devotion resented it. Its emergence from a tangle of paradoxical paraphernalia is characteristic of many religions, including Christianity. Subin traces the history of Ethiopia as the semi-mystical site of Black liberation across the African diaspora, from its roots in the 18th century to the moment, at Haile Selassie’s coronation in Addis Ababa in 1930, when it appeared to have been realised. As a photographer from the National Geographic Magazine put it, ‘the centuries seemed to have slipped suddenly backward into biblical ritual.’ The fulfilment of this prophecy was recognised by Leonard Percival Howell, a Jamaican preacher. Taking the National Geographic of June 1931 as his text, Howell announced that a white prince (the Duke of Gloucester, who represented George V at the coronation) had bowed before the Black king. ‘We of the black race are now free.’ Haile Selassie was, he said, the Black Messiah.

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Events unfolded from this point in a way that becomes familiar as Subin’s book goes on. Howell was imprisoned by the colonial authorities and while detained wrote The Promised Key, the foundational text of the new religion, which throve on persecution and overlooked inconvenient details, not least the National Geographic’s openly racist and imperialist editorial stance. The magazine was warm in its support of Mussolini and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia, which forced Haile Selassie into exile. From an Italianate villa on Kelston Road, Bath, he protested against his deification. He found the use of his earlier given name, Ras Tafari, offensive, and did not consider himself to be Black. Meanwhile Marcus Garvey, who accepted Haile Selassie’s own account of his lineage as a descendant of Solomon and so considered him to be Jewish, discounted him as an ally in the struggle for Black liberation. Despite this, Garvey was taken up by the religion as a divinely inspired prophet, the John the Baptist of Rastafari. By 1940, he too was in England. Haile Selassie declined an invitation to meet him. Garvey died that year, a fact that many of his unwanted followers refused to believe, and since Haile Selassie’s reported demise in 1975 his own followers have awaited his second coming, which they anticipate will occur in New Zealand. The National Geographic article remains an important text. In A Journey to the Roots of Rastafari, published in 2014, Abba Yahudah Berhan Selassie gives a numerological exegesis of the article showing that the numbers in it add up to 360, signifying ‘infinity, completeness and perfection’. Subin’s is a scholarly, footnoted work and she tells this story straight, allowing it to open up her broader themes: imperialism, the invention of ‘religion’ as a distinct phenomenon separable from culture or politics, the amorphous nature of belief. Deification holds a mirror up to all of these.

It was around 1977 that Prince Philip became aware that he was a god. It had happened three years earlier when the Britannia moored off the coast of Aneityum (in what is now Vanuatu). Jack Naiva, one of the chiefs of Tanna, a neighbouring island, rowed out to the royal yacht. As soon as he saw Philip he realised that he was witnessing the fulfilment of a local prophecy: ‘I saw him standing on the deck in his white uniform,’ he recalled. ‘I knew then that he was the true messiah.’ This was all very awkward. The British Empire in a late phase of managed decline had no desire to extend its authority into the supernatural, to add to which Tanna was governed jointly by Britain and France in an uneasy condominium. In the event, Philip, known for what his friends called ‘gaffes’ and other people considered casually racist remarks, handled the situation with delicacy and respect for all concerned. The gift of a nalnal, or traditional pig-killing stick, was reciprocated with a photograph of Philip in a smart suit in the grounds of Buckingham Palace holding the stick in what he had been advised by anthropologists was the correct manner. In 2007 he received a delegation from Tanna at Windsor Castle. But his ‘accidental coup’ was not without the difficulties that accompany deification. The French were furious, accusing the British of exploiting the situation for political ends and pointing out, perhaps with a hint of pique, that ‘the French do not seem to get implicated in similar situations.’ When Vanuatu became independent in 1980, the islanders wrote to Prince Philip to complain that they now had to pay federal taxes. He replied that this was indeed necessary but his letter, on Buckingham Palace headed paper, was regarded as having talismanic properties and was waved in the face of tax collectors as evidence of exemption.

Whatever the real motives of British and French colonialists – Subin is too sweeping in her assertion that ‘profiteering and racism’ were ‘only ever loosely masked by lofty ideals’ – the efforts to Christianise the natives presented a severe challenge to the 19th century’s belief in its own ‘rational religion’, and nowhere more so than in India. Robert Caldwell, a young missionary to Tinnevelly (now Tirunelveli) in Tamil Nadu in the 1830s, was exasperated by the response to his preaching: ‘To every… argument they mutter in reply: “Who has seen heaven? Who has seen hell?”’ Their own religion was better documented and revolved around Pooley Sahib, the spirit of a British officer killed in a surprise attack at the Arambooly Pass in 1809. Caldwell’s parishioners left their god offerings of brandy and cigars, like those found in the officer’s bag, and worshipped him in a combination of local and Christian rituals that were, Caldwell reported, ‘intolerable… mangled members of our own noble confession of faith’. It was all but impossible to safeguard the ‘noble’ Christianity of the imperialists from local interpretation. In Bombay, a statue of Richard, marquess of Wellesley, was commissioned in 1806 on his retirement as governor-general. It rapidly became an object of devotion. An exasperated onlooker complained that the ‘Maratha simpletons’ imagined the East India Company had ‘kindly imported an English god’ and so began politely leaving offerings and performing pujas before it. But if Wellesley’s statue wasn’t intended as an object for religious worship, what was it? It was symbolic, metaphorical, calculated to induce certain thoughts and reinforce particular ideas. The difference between a statue and an icon might be one of emphasis rather than substance. This was an uncomfortable thought. The British dealt with what they saw as the chaotic nature of Hinduism as they dealt with the rest of the subcontinent, by attempting to impose their own bureaucratic systems. What Hindus needed, according to William Crooke, a magistrate in the North-Western Provinces, was ‘an acknowledged orthodox head… to keep up the standard of deities and saints’.

Of all the hazards of sudden deification, Subin explains, spirit possession is ‘the most physically uncomfortable’. It was most common in Africa and especially under the French in Niger, where in 1925 a group of spirits called the Hauka took possession of the inhabitants of the village of Chikal. The Hauka instructed the villagers to go into the bush, where they set up a parallel society that was a parody of the colonial administration. Holding imitation rifles made of wood, the spirits spoke through the villagers in the voices of soldiers, magistrates and bureaucrats; they marched in formation and vomited black ink, ‘the quotidian liquid’ of the French regime. The district commissioner, Major Crociccia, a Corsican, had the villagers rounded up and imprisoned. He personally beat a woman called Zibo through whom the Hauka had first spoken. ‘You see,’ he told his prisoners, ‘there are no more Hauka. I am stronger than the Hauka.’ By this point in Subin’s book it comes as no surprise to learn that as a result the Hauka were discredited and replaced by Corsai, ‘the Corsican’, who was none other than the deified spirit of Crociccia himself. With the aid of their new god, and much to his astonishment, his followers used their divinely inspired strength to break down the prison and escape. As the 19th century wore on, people in the northern hemisphere became increasingly aware that what separated the spiritual life of the colonisers from the colonised was not superiority of character or access to a higher truth. In distinguishing between the local religions and their own they were creating a distinction without a difference. But the century had another credo, science, and so the idea of world religions, and specifically the science of religion, was born. Its progenitor, Friedrich Müller, lectured on the subject to an audience that included Queen Victoria. She was so much engaged, Müller reported to his wife, that although she had her workbag with her, she ‘did not knit at all’. Müller’s theory was that religious belief, what William James called the ‘mystical germ’, was common to all humanity throughout time, but its manifestations were distinct. The project of rationalising and categorising these took the form of scholarly editions of the scriptures in the fifty-volume series Sacred Books of the East, edited by Müller and published by the Oxford University Press in 1879.


“The Kashmir Gate in New Delhi was damaged during the Indian Mutiny of 1857. British army officer John Nicholson died recapturing the city from the rebels — and was mourned by the local Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims who worshiped him”

As so often in the sticky matters of belief, the science of religion’s attempt at objectivity was absorbed into its own evidence and it ‘created what it purported to describe’. The theory of distinct religions with authoritative texts existed nowhere outside the academic apparatus of these editions. As applied in the field it was problematic. In India, the Hindu practice of sati, the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ pyres, was appalling to the British, but there was resistance to interference with religious practices. Müller, like some Hindus, argued that sati wasn’t a true religious obligation, so might be censured. After interventions in different states, Victoria banned it throughout India in 1861. Not long afterwards she became a goddess in Orissa, an event which she seems to have taken in her stride. It was the scientific reification of religion, taken to its extreme, Subin argues, that led to the catastrophe of partition in 1947. It divided the population of India into Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs as ‘impermeable entities’, quite alien to the experience of Indians themselves, unleashing the ‘violence and chaos’ that cost two million lives.”

A prince among men: on the island of Tanna, the Duke of Edinburgh was worshipped

WHITE DIVINITY
https://nybooks.com/apotheosis-now
https://prospectmagazine.co.uk/how-prince-philip-was-turned-into-a-god
https://theconversation.com/sadistic-british-officer-worshipped-as-living-god-in-india
https://washingtonpost.com/they-were-oppressors-they-were-treated-gods
Oppressors Treated as Gods
by Molly Worthen  /  January 28, 2022

John Nicholson was not most people’s idea of a god walking on Earth — unless it was the vengeful, Old Testament kind. The British army officer spent months as a prisoner of war in Kabul in 1842, then found the body of his brother mutilated in the Khyber Pass. At that point, his disdain for the people of South Asia hardened into hatred. Yet as he ascended the ranks of the army in northern India, observers noticed that his subjects did not merely tolerate their conqueror; they worshiped him. A devout circle of 250 Sikh sepoys trailed him everywhere, refusing government pay. They crept into his tent at night to prostrate themselves as Nicholson sorted through imperial paperwork and tried to ignore them. Some years later, a Hindu holy man began preaching that Nicholson was an avatar of Brahma, a god he called “Nikal Seyn.” Muslims claimed that he was the reincarnation of the prophet Muhammad’s martyred grandson. When this ecumenical mix of worshipers prayed at Nicholson’s feet, he ordered them whipped, which only increased the fervor of their devotion. The god-man died during the Indian Mutiny in 1857; some of his followers were so distraught, they killed themselves. The cult of Nikal Seyn is one of many stories that historian Anna Della Subin traces in her first book, “Accidental Gods: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine.” 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. From South Pacific islanders’ worship of Prince Philip in the 1970s to Captain James Cook’s brutal end in 1779 at the hands of Hawaiians who seemed to take him for a death-defying deity, her narrative leaps backward and forward in time and finds the same sequence again and again: imperial subjects who extend and twist the logic of domination, declaring the White man in uniform to be a god — although it is not always clear why. There are superficial deviations from this pattern: Jamaicans who marveled at National Geographic photographs of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie and built the Rastafarian religion around him; an 11-year-old Indian boy, Jiddu Krishnamurti, forced by White Theosophists to play messiah.

Crowds of Mohandas Gandhi’s followers elevated him to divine status — to the horror of the Raj and Gandhi himself. Reports circulated that merely invoking his name could help a devotee locate a lost wallet or multiply the livestock in his flock. “Despite his belief in sacrifice, renunciation and non-harm, the Mahatma became a wrathful, vengeful god in the tales of his acts, raining feces on a lawyer who defied his call for noncooperation,” Subin writes. But these cases, too, underscore Subin’s key themes: religion as a coping mechanism of the oppressed; White Protestant condescension toward colonized people deemed primitive; the power of followers to bestow charisma, regardless of a leader’s innate allure. 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. While none of these cults evolved into major religious movements (with the exception of Rastafarianism), they shed new light on the dynamics of colonialism and misunderstandings between Westerners and the parts of the world they sought to dominate, or at least comprehend and partially control. To declare a foreigner to be an avatar of a Hindu deity is not at all the same thing as accepting him as a new Jehovah or Christ; it is as much an act of assimilation as subservience.

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. “Accidental Gods” follows an ideological playbook popular since the mainstreaming of Michel Foucault’s ideas in the 1980s: one that reduces religious and cultural phenomena to a story about power, usually racialized power. “The political comes into being when we distinguish between men and gods, a line as primordial as that between friend and foe, and as old as Adam’s fall,” Subin writes. “Who decides who is a deity, and who is a man? Political power is the ability to create something out of nothing, just as God once labored to bring light and dry earth from the void.” The study of religion is what Subin calls “mythopolitics” — “how power is so often rooted in myth.” Pull back the curtain of complex rituals and mystical encounters, and you find merely another venue in which bad guys with power find ways to control good guys without it.


“Prince Philip sent pictures of himself holding a ceremonial club they gave him”

Religious practice is simultaneously at the heart of this book and a surface phenomenon: in the West, a pious varnish on imperialist prejudices, or in the East, a state of false consciousness that blinds believers to their own subjugation. Subin seems ambivalent. She defends these cults against Westerners’ mockery and insistence on putting unfamiliar ideas into Protestant boxes. Yet she also dwells on their tragedy, the agony of so much righteous energy channeled into worship of White male oppressors rather than revolution. It is telling that “Accidental Gods” does not follow a strictly chronological order but jumps around in time. Toward the end of the book, after we meet an Indian farmer who carries around an icon of Donald Trump, a final section called “White Gods” brings chronological whiplash: Subin takes us centuries back to Columbus, Cortes and Cook and the self-serving myths of conquistador godhood. The organizing principle of “Accidental Gods” is not historical but theological. It culminates in the unveiling of white supremacy as the original sin that explains all human experience. There is no doubt that examining racism and political power is fundamental to understanding the history of religion. But sometimes these frameworks become reductionist. Can they fully explain, for example, the bizarre cult of Nikal Seyn: why Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims chose this particular cruel and grumpy British officer — with no obvious charisma and, presumably, many equally grumpy and cruel colleagues — as their object of worship? “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.”

see also : DEICIDE
https://theparisreview.org/white-gods
https://frieze.com/things-to-believe-in
https://theguardian.com/how-to-kill-a-god-captain-cook
How to kill a god: the myth of Captain Cook shows how the heroes of empire will fall
extract from Accidental Gods by Anna Della Subin  / 18 Jan 2022

“In a type of neoclassical painting one might call The Apotheosis of X, the dead hero is bundled up to heaven by a host of angels, usually in a windswept tumult of robes, wings and clouds. A crowd of grieving mortals watches from below as their hero becomes divine. It’s a celestial scramble: in Rubens’ sumptuous Apotheosis of James I, heaven is chaos and James looks terrified at having arrived. In Barralet’s Apotheosis of Washington, the dead president has his arms outstretched in a crucified pose, while Father Time and the angel of immortality bear him up to heaven. In a mid-1860s Apotheosis, a freshly assassinated Lincoln joins Washington in the sky, and clings to him in a tight hug. In Fragonard’s Apotheosis of Franklin, the new god reaches back to Earth with one hand while a stern angel, grasping his other hand, drags him upward. In 1785, in a Covent Garden theatre, a spectacle premiered depicting Capt James Cook’s voyages in the South Pacific. During the final scene of Omai, or A Trip Around the World, at the words “Cook, ever honour’d, immortal shall live!” an enormous oil painting descended from the ceiling – Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg’s Apotheosis of Captain Cook, commissioned for the occasion.

Cook is carried up to heaven by the angels Britannia and Fame, but his gaze is directed back at the vertiginous earth, where ships and canoes are facing off in Hawaii’s Kealakekua Bay. His expression is queasy and his eyes seem to plead: “Don’t drop me!” Cook had been a revered figure among British seamen. “Wherever he goes he plants English gardens,” noted a Sri Lankan anthropologist, not without some disgust. Cook’s ship was an ark, heavy with sheep, cattle and potted plants, ready to domesticate any savage land he spied. Whenever he took possession of a new South Pacific island for the crown, Cook would sow seeds and set loose pairs of animals “almost in a loving fashion”. Among his crew, Cook was allegedly adored as a father, who cared deeply for his sailors’ health, and rarely lost a man. In England, he was renowned as the navigator who determined the boundaries of the habitable world, and was praised for his humane conduct in dark, faraway waters. But on his third voyage, on the quest to find the Northwest Passage, Cook had begun to drown in some unseen, interior deluge. He sank into a black mood, lost touch with reality and inflicted punishments on his crew at the slightest whim. He paced the deck and flew into rages that the sailors called heivas, after a Tahitian stomping dance. He spread terror across the islands, torching entire villages and carving crosses into natives’ flesh in revenge for petty crimes. Even before he became a god, Cook had staked out the true space of divinity: violence, of the arbitrary kind. After weeks at sea, as supplies of food and water began to run low, his ship, the Resolution, sighted a paradisal shore. Rather than landing, Cook insisted, for no reason at all, that they keep sailing, interminably, around the coast. As the unhinged captain circled the island, the year turned from 1778 to 1779.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Vh03dApR7U

Eyes watched from the beach. On 17 January, the Resolution cast anchor at last in a black-sand bay and a crowd of 10,000 gathered to await it. Five hundred canoes, laden with sugar cane, breadfruit and pigs, glided up to the ship. Histories narrate that for the people of Hawaii, the arrival of Cook was no less than an epiphany. “The men hurried to the ship to see the god with their own eyes,” wrote the 19th-century Hawaiian historian Samuel Kamakau. “There they saw a fair man with bright eyes, a high-bridged nose, light hair and handsome features. Good-looking gods they were!” An elderly, emaciated priest went on board the Resolution and led the deities ashore. Thousands fell to their knees as Cook passed by. The priest led the captain to a thatched temple, wrapped Cook in a red cloth and sacrificed a small pig to him, as the people recited lines from the Hawaii epic Kumulipo, a creation myth. According to the late anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, among others, Cook’s arrival marked an extraordinary coincidence. A ritual known as the Makahiki was taking place on Hawaii at the time, in which the god Lono is said to reappear from the distant land of his exile, and to seize power over the Earth from the king, for a period of time. As it circled the island in a clockwise direction, the Resolution had inadvertently traced the path of the effigy of Lono as it was borne in a procession around the coast. The idol is made of a pole and crosspiece with white cloth hanging from it, resembling a sail. And Cook, as if following the script of a myth he could not have known, had landed in the bay said to be the god’s home. His sailors reported that the captain was hailed variously as Lono, Orono, Rono, Eroner – “a Character that is looked upon by them as partaking something of divinity,” the ship’s surgeon related, echoing a biblical phrase describing Christ. Another word used to greet Cook was akuaa Hawaii term that was translated as “God”.

“engraving of a Hawaiian dancing for Captain Cook in 1788, after John Webber, 1844”

The Hawaiians fashioned a special idol in Cook’s honour, recorded the sailor Heinrich Zimmermann, but using “white feathers instead of red”. The mariner John Ledyard wrote that the natives “observed that the color of our skins partook of … the white from the moon and stars”, and concluded that the strangers must have some connection with the heavenly bodies. The white men remained on the island for three weeks. They dismantled part of the temple at Hikiau for firewood, and turned the rest into an observatory housing their astronomical equipment, which they would take out, now and then, to stare up at the sky. Each day the priests ceremoniously presented the British with a barbecued hog. The people would gather all the fruits of their land – sweet potatoes, coconuts, bananas and taro – for these gods from a heaven where food had run out. Can one become trapped, unaware, inside another’s myth? During the Makahiki festival, after the Lono effigy has sailed around the island, a ritual is performed known as kali’i, meaning “to strike the king”, in which Lono and the king fight a theatrical sham battle. According to Sahlins, Cook continued, unwittingly, to perform the Makahiki script. On 3 February, the Resolution departed Hawaii to continue its explorations in the north, yet was struck by a severe storm and forced to turn back. When the British anchored again in Kealakekua Bay, eight days after they had departed, a fog of suspicion and hostility settled over the island as the people attempted to discern the strangers’ reason for returning. The tension soon erupted into violence; two Hawaii chiefs were killed, and Cook decided to take the king, Kalani‘ōpu‘u, hostage. When the captain waded ashore, hundreds of warriors fell upon him with iron daggers and clubs. Following Cook’s death, the captain was accorded the traditional rituals for a vanquished chief. His corpse was dismembered, his flesh roasted and his bones separated and portioned out, with his lower jaw going to Kalani‘ōpu‘u, his skull to somebody else, and so on. Among Cook’s sailors, who had fled back to the Resolution, “a general silence ensued”, wrote the officer George Gilbert; it was “like a Dream that we could not reconcile ourselves to”. Two priests rowed to the ship with a bundle containing a large chunk of the captain’s thigh. Along with their charred offering, they brought with them “a most extraordinary question”. They wished to know when Cook would return to the vessel “and resume his former station”. Would it be in – a very Christlike estimate – “three days’ time?” The two men “shed abundance of tears at the loss of the Erono”, Lt James King recorded, and they asked, “what he would do to them when he return’d”. On shore, other islanders “asserted that he would return in two months & begged our mediation with him in their favor”, according to Mid James Trevenan. The German sailor Zimmermann recorded a prophecy: “The god Cook is not dead but sleeps in the woods and will come tomorrow,” as translated by an interpreter.

Over the following years, the idea seemed to persist that Cook would resurrect. According to the sailor Edward Bell, who visited the bay in 1793, Cook’s death had become the definitive frame for the Hawaii sense of time. “The Natives seem to consider that melancholy transaction as one of the most remarkable events in their History,” Bell wrote, and reported that they use it as a date to assist their calendrical calculations. “They still in speaking of him style him the Orono and if they are to be believ’d, most sincerely regret his fate.” The accounts by later British travellers to Hawaii emphasise the surprise and guilt felt by the islanders at Cook’s death, as if they had imagined it to be a play, with no consequence. “The natives had no idea that Cook could possibly be killed, as they considered him a supernatural being, and were astonished when they saw him fall,” reported the English explorer William Mariner in 1806; despite having killed him, “they esteem him as having been sent by the gods to civilise them” These stories, told and retold over generations, ignore one obvious fact: Cook was killed because he acted rashly and violently, slaughtering chiefs, kidnapping the king and giving the impression the British had returned to conquer the island. The fur trader James Colnett, who arrived in Hawaii in 1791, reported that ever since the British first appeared, the islanders had been constantly at war and devastated by strange, unknown illnesses, all of which they attributed to Cook’s revenge. Two volcanoes had awakened and burned night and day, the work, they contended, of the vengeful god. “They made strict inquiry of me, if ever he would come back again, and when I saw him last,” Colnett wrote. Then the first missionaries arrived in Hawaii from New England in 1820, they used the cautionary tale of Cook as a potent parable.

“How vain, rebellious, and at the same time contemptible, for a worm” – meaning Cook – “to presume to receive religious homage and sacrifices from the stupid and polluted worshippers of demons,” thundered Hiram Bingham, the Calvinist leader of the first evangelical mission. After six months at sea, the Calvinists anchored at the archipelago and found it beset by the “thickest heathenism”, its sun-drenched landscapes masking terrible despair. Viruses introduced by the British were killing off entire families and villages, and survivors had taken to drinking themselves to death. The great Kamehameha, founder and first king of the newly unified Kingdom of Hawaii, had died the previous year, and his son had recently abolished the tabu system, the strict codes that had structured daily life for centuries, and which had unravelled after the British arrival. A crisis of faith seemed to grip the islands, as temples fell into ruin and the totems of the old gods were destroyed. “The nation, without a religion, was waiting for the law of Jehovah,” according to one early missionary. The Calvinists blamed the rampant disease and malaise on the Hawaiians’ immorality, sexual promiscuity, idol worship and on their reverencing of Cook. Under the stern Calvinists, the Hawaii language was alphabetised, the Bible was translated and novel Christian concepts were mapped on to old Hawaii words. Schools and seminaries were opened and draconian morality laws introduced across the islands. The queen of Hawaii was among the first to convert, and much of the population followed her; a broom dipped in water baptised 5,000 Hawaiians at once. The myth of Cook-as-Lono lived on in the history books and school primers the evangelists produced, a tale that perpetuated the whiteness of divinity, while simultaneously affirming that Cook and all those who worshipped him were idolators of the worst kind.

“A 1784 engraving of Hawaiians bringing gifts to Captain Cook by John Webber”

Along with their indignations, the Calvinist missionaries brought with them a novel concept of private property, simply appropriating whatever land they desired. They were, after all, apostles of a God who possesses the Earth. “To the LORD your God belong the heavens … the earth and everything in it,” Moses had declared. Their children went on to establish enormous sugar plantations, securing international markets for their lucrative crop. “The world is to be Christianised and civilised,” the evangelist Josiah Strong would assert, capturing the mood of the century, “and what is the process of civilisation but the creating of more and higher wants? Commerce follows the missionary.” In 1840, with the looming threat of an invasion by France, Hawaii sought to clarify its ambiguous territorial status and seek nationhood. The king sent a delegation to the United States and Europe, and three years later Hawaii was officially pronounced an independent nation. However, the plantation owners, eager to sell their crop tax-free in the US, deeply resented the prospect of Hawaii sovereignty. During the US civil war, with sugar production halted in the south, the wealth of the white Hawaii oligarchy soared, enabling it to consolidate its grip on the archipelago’s economy, from banks, utilities and steamships to local commerce and trade. Beset by illness and poverty, the native Hawaiian population had shrunk to a fifth of its former size. The industrialists deemed Hawaii workers to be lazy and unemployable, casting them aside in favour of labourers from China and Japan whom they could pay even lower wages. In 1893, the sugar cartel, along with a regiment of US Marines, overthrew the Hawaii queen Lili’uokalani, in an act that even the US president at the time, Grover Cleveland, condemned as unconstitutional. The American military occupation of the archipelago had begun. In the American press, racist cartoonists deployed their anti-black arsenal of caricatures to sketch the Hawaii sovereign grinning as she heated a cannibal cooking pot. They claimed Lili’uokalani was the child of a “mulatto shoemaker”, who illegitimately lorded over her “heathenish” people. With such colouring, it was argued, she was clearly unfit by nature to rule. Along with the queen, the US occupiers arrested newspaper editors who supported her and clamped down on the opposition press. This meant that the only news that came out of Hawaii was delivered by the coup’s spokesmen, who announced that the queen had willingly surrendered her kingdom and her claim to the land. To this day, the myth that Hawaiians passively accepted the loss of their nation, without resistance, lives on. Historical accounts make little mention of the fact that 40,000 Hawaiians petitioned against the occupation and protested in the streets. A century later, in 1993, thousands of Hawaiians marched on the queen’s former palace in Honolulu, again calling for independence. Yet the American public imagination rarely questions whether Hawaii wants to be part of the US; there is the assumption that Hawaiians, in a distant paradise, must be content. Didn’t they venerate a white man as a god? Didn’t they prostrate themselves before him, dress him and feed him with all the fruits of their land? They killed him in a ritual but, not knowing what they had done, didn’t they, with guilty tears, impatiently await his return?

“defaced statue of Captain Cook in Melbourne, Australia, January 2018”

When news of Cook’s death finally reached London in January 1780, 11 months after the captain was killed, it was met not with a public outpouring of grief but a rather morbid fascination at the exotic details. The success of Omai, which starred alongside the Apotheosis painting 80 dancing “savages”, some in blackface, inaugurated a new European ritual of slaying Cook onstage. In 1788, the wildly popular Death of Captain Cook; A Grand Serious-Pantomimic-Ballet premiered in Paris, before going on to tour the continent, England, and the US. By all accounts, the ballet was violent, chaotic, “horrid”, overwrought with emotion – and a great triumph. Year after year, it was revived, and the captain’s death re-enacted, like a blood offering the imperial powers continued to make to guarantee their own ascendance. Cook was killed in Yarmouth, Bungay, Leeds and nine times in Norwich; he was bludgeoned to death in Dublin, clubbed in Quebec, speared on Greenwich Street in Manhattan and again in Charleston, South Carolina. Navy men got death-of-Cook tattoos and aristocratic women wore dresses inspired by “the Indian who killed Capt’n Cook with His Club”, as the society diarist Mrs Hester Thrale noted. By the mid-19th century, PT Barnum would joke that the celebrated blunt instrument had multiplied itself, securing a treasured place in every museum vitrine. The poet Anna Seward heaved the captain up to heaven in her 1780 Elegy on Captain Cook, To Which is Added, An Ode to the Sun. “To put it bluntly,” wrote the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere, “I doubt that the natives created their European god; the Europeans created him for them.”

An apotheosis can arise in an epiphany or in an act of prostration, and it can also happen through poetry and painting, through pantomime and translation. What word do you take for God? The Hawaiian syllables were akua, but this is misleading, for in its original sense the word could refer to any number of sacred beings, objects, or living persons – anything possessing immense power. So, too, with the word Lono: the crew of the Resolution was never able to figure out its precise meaning. “Sometimes they applied it to an invisible being, who, they said, lived in the heavens. We also found that it was a title belonging to a personage of great rank and power in the island,” Lt King recalled. Not only Cook but the Hawaiian king, too, was greeted with shouts of “Lono!” Misinterpretations create gods. Kamakau, the historian, wrote of the coming of Cook in his 1866 Mo’olelo or “History”, a text widely esteemed as the authoritative “native” account. It was eventually published in English in 1961, after decades of work by a team of translators that included the 19th-century Australian-born settler and former sugar plantation worker Thomas Thrum. In the English edition, the story was heavily doctored, ostensibly to conform to “western” standards of history-writing, as the Hawaiian scholar Noenoe Silva has shown. Before his description of the arrival of Cook, Kamakau details, over 17 pages, other foreigners who had already arrived by sea, some with pale skin, some with brown. The translators, however, omitted the entire section, transforming the narrative of the appearance of Cook and his ark into a magical, utterly unprecedented event. In the original, Kamakau emphasises the violence, fighting and hostage-taking that culminated in the killing of the captain, and concludes with a list. “The fruits and seeds that Cook’s actions planted sprouted and grew, and became trees that  spread to devastate the people of these islands: 1. Gonorrhea together with syphilis. 2. Prostitution. 3. The false idea that he was a god and worshipped. 4. Fleas and mosquitoes. 5. The spread of epidemic diseases. 6. Change in the air we breathe. 7. Weakening of our bodies. 8. Changes in plant life …”

“The best part of Cook’s visit was that we killed him,” the Hawaiian activist Lilikalā Kame‘eleihiwa writes. If man imagines that a god resembles himself, then the god, eventually, must die. Cook has been killed again and again, on the beach, in the theatre, on the page, but the myth of his alleged divinity lingers. With every new death, it lives on. Deicide is on my mind. How do you kill a god, if not by bludgeoning, stabbing, piercing, splitting, dismembering, boiling, roasting, distributing? Is it through rewriting history, by exposing the machinations beneath myths, by breaking open syllables so that whatever is sacred inside spills out? Is it by tearing down His image? In the 21st century, across New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii, statues of Cook have been defaced. Strutting across a pedestal in his breeches, telescope in hand, a defaced Cook wears a spray-painted bikini; around the neck of another Cook hangs a large, canvas sign that reads, simply, “Sorry”. The forecast calls for more. White gods will fall like raindrops. It feels as though the heavens are about to open up.”

PREVIOUSLY

GOD is AMERICAN
https://spectrevision.net/2007/02/22/god-is-american/
METEORITE WORSHIP
https://spectrevision.net/2017/05/03/meteorite-worship/
COW PROTECTION ARMY
https://spectrevision.net/2019/05/30/cow-protection-army/

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