He is 18 million years old. He has spent the last 2,000 years hibernating in the Himalayas. He is a representative of a group of Venutians called The Space Brothers. His name is Maitreya, but he goes by the more prosaic moniker of … Raj Patel?

Well, no, says the author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing. Despite his disavowal, however, certain followers of a religion known as Share International believe that the 37-year-old author is the messiah prophesied by their leader, Benjamin Creme. According to an article in the Guardian (reprinted in today’s Globe and Mail), Patel began receiving e-mails asking if he was Maitreya following an appearance he made on The Colbert Report:

Patel’s background and work coincidentally matched a series of prophecies made by an 87-year-old Scottish mystic called Benjamin Creme, the leader of a little-known religious group known as Share International. Because he matched the profile, hundreds of people around the world believed that Patel was the living embodiment of a figure they called Maitreya, the Christ, or “the world teacher.”

His job? To save the world, and everyone on it.

Although Patel calls the whole thing a “case of mistaken identity,” his disavowal has merely fanned the flames among believers, since Creme also prophesied that Maitreya would deny being the world teacher.

In the Guardian article, Patel offers a fairly clear-eyed assessment of the whole matter:

“People are very ready to abdicate responsibility and have it shovelled on to someone else’s shoulders,” he said. “You saw that with Obama most spectacularly, but whenever there’s going to be someone who’s just going to fix it for you, it’s a very attractive story. It’s in every mythological structure.”

In the meantime, if his continued denial of his messianic status fails to convince his “followers,” Patel could always try showing them this: