Shintoists once believed that the emperors of Japan were divine, and Confucianists in China regarded their rulers as sons of Heaven Egyptians worshipped the pharaohs as gods. In ancient Greece, only gods made other gods, mostly through procreation, but sometimes mortals were deified, too, in a kind of social climbing that could be accomplished through luck (e.g., Glaucus), feats of strength (e.g., Herakles), or marriage (e.g., Ariadne, Psyche, et al.). “Accidental Gods” is not so much a chronology as an atlas of deification, but Subin nonetheless begins by tracing a history of the idea of apotheosis. Setting Cook alongside the likes of Haile Selassie, Hernán Cortés, Prince Philip, General Douglas MacArthur, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and even President Donald Trump, she considers why some men are made into gods, by whom, and-the most interesting of the mysteries about Cook and all of his putatively divine kin-to what ends. 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: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine” (Macmillan). Was Cook killed because the Hawaiians finally concluded that he was not really Lono, or because they’d known that all along and decided that the reappearing foreign chief was a mortal nuisance who would never go back to his own kingdom? For every artist who engraved an image of Cook in the empyrean or playwright who staged a pantomime of him ascending from Polynesia into Heaven, there is someone else who insists that the English merely imagined that the Hawaiians deified Cook, a fiction that functioned as propaganda for a self-mythologizing empire that portrayed its agents as gods and its distant subjects as simpletons. The story among Christian missionaries, meanwhile, was that Jehovah dealt the fatal blow, punishing Cook for allowing the Hawaiians to worship him.īut whether anyone actually worshipped the explorer is unclear. Later, some said that a chief named Nuaa stabbed Cook with a knife in the chest, or maybe in the back others said that a chief called Kana‘ina struck him in the head with a shark-toothed club and still others claimed that attendants of King Kalani‘ōpu‘u killed him with stones that they picked up along the beach. When they tried to leave, a storm forced the Resolution back into Kealakekua Bay, and the Hawaiians attacked. Like Cook, Lono travelled by sailing vessel and, before landing, circled Kealakekua-a coincidence that, the sailors later concluded, led the Hawaiians to call the Captain by the god’s name, take him into Lono’s temple, carve a ceremonial idol of him, and serve the crew feasts every day for nearly three weeks.īy the end of their stay, however, Cook and his men had worn out their divine welcome, spreading venereal diseases among the Indigenous population, quarrelling about ships and supplies, and destroying part of a burial ground. When he returned, a year later, circling the islands for a few weeks before making landfall, the Hawaiians were celebrating Makahiki, a months-long harvest festival that honors Lono, a god who brings rain, peace, and prosperity.
Yet the passage of time did not clarify the matter: although thousands witnessed Cook’s death, exactly how he died is a matter of dispute to this day.Īccording to Cook’s journal, and to diaries kept by crew members aboard the Resolution, Cook first reached Hawaii in 1778, while searching for the Northwest Passage. “Dear Sir,” the letter from Lord Sandwich to the English naturalist Joseph Banks began, “poor Captain Cooke is no more.” That was about all the Earl or anyone else could say with certainty, since word of the explorer’s demise had only just reached England’s shores, nearly a year after he died on the black-sand beach of Kealakekua Bay, on the island of Hawaii, on Valentine’s Day, 1779.
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