You live and you learn, and today I learnt something new.
I had, before today never heard of a "cargo cult", but news about the 50th anniversary of once such cult in Vanuatu has made the BBC website today, and I now know what they are.
The BBC has even more information about cargo cults on their H2G2 site HERE.
And to think I thought most mainstream religions don't make sense.
This has been a public service broadcast. Norfolk Blogger - Educating the world !
3 comments:
It gets even more weird: one of the prophets venerated in certain Cargo Cults is the Duke of Edinburgh. (Yes him).
And cargo of a sort actually arrived thanks to a post 9-11 initiative from the USA (The Millenuuim Challenge Fund). A link here explains...
http://www.religionnewsblog.com/8317/cargo-cult-reborn-once-stingy-america-offers-cash-pot-to-deserving-poor
Thanks for this.
Edis has beaten me to it, but on the same island as the John Frum cult (Tanna), the Yaohnanen tribe worship Prince Philip as a god. The cult is an offshoot of the John Frum cult, they believe that John Frum had a spiritual bother who emerged from the volcano to take the form of a white man who later married a powerful woman. When the Royal Yacht Brittania visited the island in the 1974 they identified Prince Philip as their returning Messiah.
There's a very sweet picture here (http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=388901&in_page_id=1770) of some of the tribe holding signed pictures of Prince Philip that he has sent to them and some lovely quotes from the tribal Chief, "'We want him to spend the last years of his life here, because we believe that when he returns as our god, his powers will make our wrinkles disappear and we will have many wives to attend to our every need. He won't have to hunt for pigs or anything. He can just sit in the sun and have a nice time.' But what about the Queen? 'Oh, she can come, too,' says Chief Jack, generously. 'After all, she has a big family like me.'"
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