About this item
Ever since 1492, when Christopher Columbus made landfall in the New World and was hailed as a heavenly being, the accidental god has haunted the modern age. From Haile Selassie, acclaimed as the Living God in Jamaica, to Britain's Prince Philip, who became the unlikely center of a new religion on a South Pacific island, men made divine -- always men -- have appeared on every continent. And because these deifications always emerge at moments of turbulence -- civil wars, imperial conquest, revolutions -- they have much to teach us.In a revelatory history spanning five centuries, a cast of surprising deities helps to shed light on the thorny questions of how our modern concept of "religion" was invented; why religion and politics are perpetually entangled in our supposedly secular age; and how the power to call someone divine has been used and abused by both oppressors and the oppressed.
About the Author
Anna Della Subin writes about sleepwalkers, grave worship, imperial Ethiopian court etiquette, visions of the flood, thirteenth-century oculists, occultists, cricket, ritualized mutiny, Dr. Death's childhood, dreams of 9/11, the politics of the afterlife, 300-year naps. She is a Senior Editor at , the award-winning publishing and curatorial initiative focused on the Middle East and its diasporas. Anna Della studied philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago and the history of religion at Harvard Divinity School. , a history of men inadvertently turned into deities, is forthcoming from Metropolitan Books / Henry Holt in the US and Granta in the UK.
