The apotheosis of Mao

I was half-listening to an ABC News story last night about Chinese billionaires (and now I cannot find any link on their site. Help!) that mentioned one man whose mansion had something like a mosaic of images of Mao Zedong.

The reporter seemed bemused, since Chairman Mao (1893-1976) was after all a Communist.

Coincidentally, I was reading Jordan Paper’s The Deities are Many: A Polytheistic Theology where he writes of visiting China in the late 1980s:

[At that time] a new deity of wealth was needed, one that would be effective in the new economy. Who was the most powerful dead not yet with a divine specialization? Why, Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) of course! Small icons of his image, with a plastic version of a Chinese gold ingot hanging from it, were on sale everywhere. They were variously hung, such as from automobile rear view mirrors, including government vehicles. When I asked a bureaucrat, a member of the Communist Party, why it was hanging there, the answer was succint: “Ta shi shen” (He’s a Deity.)

The old Greeks had a word for it.