How We Believe_ Science and the Search for God - Michael Shermer [115]
THE CARGO CULT GHOST DANCE
One of the more curious versions of the Ghost Dance can be found in the Cargo Cults of the South Pacific. According to anthropologist Marvin Harris, Cargo Cults began centuries ago with Pacific islanders scanning the horizon for phantom canoes delivering goods. As the times changed so did the ersatz delivery mechanisms. In the eighteenth century they watched for the sails of sailing vessels, in the nineteenth century they searched for smoke from steamships, and in the twentieth century, particularly after World War II, they scouted for airplanes. The phantom cargo has evolved along with the delivery mechanisms. First it was matches and steel tools, then shoes, sacks of rice, canned meat, knives, rifles, ammunition, and tobacco, and finally it became automobiles, radios, and modern appliances. To the Pacific islanders who only ever saw, heard, or fantasized about the end product of a manufacturing process in some far-off land, the origin of the cargo was a great mystery. With no apparent cause, the airplane arrived with finished products. “The great wealth and power of the whites is a mystery to Melanesians,” La Barre concludes. “As far as they could see, whites did no work at all and made no artifacts, and yet got great stores of goods merely by sending out bits of paper, though meanwhile blacks must labor to produce gold and copra. The cargo ships were their link to that mysterious country and the obvious secret of their power.”
The Ghost Dance leitmotif intertwined with the Cargo Cults in places like New Guinea where the natives built a thatch-roofed hanger, a bamboo beacon tower, an airstrip manned twenty-four-hours a day by natives wearing simulated uniforms, and even an airplane made out of sticks and leaves. Long dominated by whites who seemed to possess the mysterious powers of the cargo, the natives envisioned the day when their ancestors would return with cargo for them. When that day comes, Harris notes, the natives believed there would be “the downfall of the wicked, justice for the poor, the end of misery and suffering, reunion with the dead, and a whole new divine kingdom.”
A wooden representation of a cargo plane sits next to a cross and a messianic John Frum, said to be a pidgin shortening of the phrase “John from America”—the carrier of cargo goods according to the Melanesian cargo cult.
Sociologist Peter Worsley, in his classic 1958 study of Cargo Cults in Melanesia, The Trumpet Shall Sound, points out that such movements are “by no means peculiar to that part of the world” and that there is in fact evidence that similar phenomena have developed “in most parts of the globe, even in some of the earliest records of civilization.” The reason this is important, Worsley adds, is that “the history of apocalyptic religions and of messianism is of special interest to people whose culture has included a central belief in One whom they believed to be the Messiah, who died for mankind and with whom they hoped to be reunited in Paradise.” He is speaking of Jesus, of course, pointing out that “this messiah, however, has not been the only messiah,” and that in addition to multiple Melanesian culture-heroes, spirits, and messiahs, “similar cults have occurred to a greater or lesser extent in other major regions of Oceania,” and that “Africa, North and South America, China, Burma, Indonesia and Siberia have also had their share of cults, and the history of Europe provides numerous examples.” Does the story of Jesus as the savior fit into this genre of messiah myths?
JESUS AS MESSIAH MYTH
Cargo Cults