APOTHEOSIS NOW: On Men Unwittingly Turned Divine

 

" Columbus also believed that the “Indians”regarded him and his crew as celestial beings. His earliest description of this, two days after landfall, was unsure: “We understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven.”But speculation soon hardened into certainty. Though the natives “were very sorry that they could not understand me, nor I them,”Columbus nonetheless confidently surmised that they were “convinced that we come from the heavens.”Every tribe he met seemed to think the same: it explained why they were all so friendly.

 Over the decades that followed, this notion became a staple of Europeans’accounts of their reception in the New World. According to the sixteenth-century Universal History of the Things of New Spain , compiled by a Franciscan friar in Mexico, Hernán Cortés's lightning capture of Moctezuma's empire in 1519 was made possible by the Aztecs’misapprehension that he was “the god Quetzalcoatl who was returning, whom they had been and are expecting.”The following year, while rounding the tip of South America, Ferdinand Magellan's crew encountered a giant native, “and when he was before us he began to be astonished, and to be afraid, and he raised one finger on high, thinking that we came from heaven.”The Incas of Peru initially received Francisco Pizarro as an incarnation of the god Viracocha, so one of his companions later wrote, and venerated the conquistadors because “they believed that some deity was enclosed within them.”

It was a popular, endlessly elaborated trope. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white men colonizing other parts of the world were hardly surprised anymore to encounter similar instances of mistaken deification. After all, the error seemed to encapsulate the innocence, intellectual inferiority, and instinctive submissiveness of the peoples they were born to rule. What's more, as Anna Della Subin explores in her bracingly original Accidental Gods , unsought divinity was a remarkably widespread phenomenon that spanned centuries and continents. "

more in the article by FARA DABHALWALA