Chris Weimer

If the entire Western World was wiped out in nuclear holocaust, what would future anthropologists make of the Prince Philip cult?

As far as the "celebrity hypothesis" espoused by one member of this board, and repeated in various forms by many here:

Somehow they endured forty years of not knowing his birthday.

In parallel to the John Frum cargo cult, and other cargo cults, it's real events that influence the religious collection, not fantasy. The "pure myth" theory doesn't have support from modern "primitive" cults, where this time we have irrefutable proof that their new "god" exists - just imagine how the early Christians would have coped without modern photography and with their god recently deceased!

Toto

Interesting, but it sounds like this particular cult started with belief in a spirit, and this spirit was later identified with Priince Charles. I don't see how this supports the historical Jesus thesis. Christianity might have started with belief in a spirit, and this belief later attached to a real person - but for instance David Koresh though he was Jesus.

If you do a survey of new religious movements, they always seem to start around a charsmatic individual. (This charismatic individual usually turns out to be mentally deranged and oftern sexually abusive.) But this individual is not always the god of the cult, or the son of that God, and I don't know what conclusion that would lead to about Jesus. In most of the modern cults, the cult leader lived a long time and built up the movement slowly and carefully, giving it an organizational structure and staying power.

I don't have time now, but it would be interesting to compare modern cults with Christianity.

Chris Weimer

There are three different levels here. Let me explain:

If we take Prince Charles and compare him per analogy to Jesus, then we have two beings: Supernatural and Natural. For the Prince Charles cult, they have their God, explained as a real myth (not just the legendary status that most "mythers" categorize him as, like Price and Wells), and when they see prophectic fulfillment (a light-skinned person coming with his bride) they associate the historical personage who only incidentally fulfilled the prophecy with their original belief in the mythic God. In that way, we have X supernatural being coming down into Y natural being, thus making, to them at least, also (and yet at the same time as the former) supernatural.

The same happened with David Koresh and Jesus. Since to us today Jesus is a myth*, David applied the same thing as above. It'd be no different than if some group thought that Gaius Marius would return and free us from the Republican rule (no cult of Marius survives).

*(This says nothing on whether there was an historical personage behind who we see as Jesus, but rather the limited and distorted lens that Koresh and his movement (and likely many people today) viewed Jesus, that is, they often neglect that he was an historical character. Historical personages ages apart often turn mythic in character in the understanding of the later ages - like Alexander, or even entities like Rome.)

I think that's a rather narrow survey of "new religious movements". Where was the charismatic individual for Wiccanism? Yet people still turn to Wicca, some without even knowing its founders!

Here again - is Prince Philip the cult leader? Was "John Frum (from America?)" around long enough to build up the movement slowly and carefully? Sometimes the movement of a cult is herded by the successors - sometimes, if the successors are poor managers, than the cult fails. Alexander the Great built up his empire rather quickly, and died soon afterwards, and his successors ended up dividing the empire among themselves.

aa5874

And in addition, Prince Charles does not claim to be the son of that 'mountain spirit'. Prince Charles is not a wandering preacher, in the island of Vanuatu, telling them of his 'second coming' and to repent of their sins.

And although it is claimed that these villagers are illiterate, they were smart enough to have some tangible evidence of their 'god'. Their 'god' is definitely an historical figure.

If those fishermen in the NT would have only made busts of their god, Jesus, and distributed them in and around the region in the 1st century, then maybe everyone would have known for sure that Jesus Christ was indeed a figure of history. Only problem, the busts might turn out to be the god Julius Caesar, but worshipped as Jesus Christ by fishermen.

ughaibu

In Kiribati the word matang means "god", while the word imatang means "a person with white skin", this comes from the initially visiting white-skins being confused with legendary white skinned gods. However, the Kiribatese realised fairly quickly that imatang are just people, it'll be interesting to see how the Vanuatans react to Phillip's eventual death.

jastity

I think some of you have switched princes.

Vorkosigan

Actually, this is an excellent example of how mythicism works, as Toto has already pointed out. The Cargo Cults arose in the 19th century and were constantly readapted and updated as western material possessions entered their world, incorporating real-world events, a mix of traditional and universal religious practices, and later, real people, especially after WWII.

The Prince Philip cult, however, is poor analogy. Christianity was discovered in the text of the OT by cultists who reinterpreted the text, and the body of its history is created in the form of popular historical fiction, both epistolary fiction and novel forms.

Weimer totally misinterprets the John Frum cult. According to this Smithsonian article, the cultists claim Frum first appeared to them in a dream:

• Chief Isaac and other local leaders say that John Frum first appeared one night in the late 1930s, after a group of elders had downed many shells of kava as a prelude to receiving messages from the spirit world. “He was a white man who spoke our language, but he didn’t tell us then he was an American,” says Chief Kahuwya, leader of Yakel village. John Frum told them he had come to rescue them from the missionaries and colonial officials. “John told us that all Tanna’s people should stop following the white man’s ways,” Chief Kahuwya says. “He said we should throw away their money and clothes, take our children from their schools, stop going to church and go back to living as kastom people. We should drink kava, worship the magic stones and perform our ritual dances.”

Or maybe he's deliberately made up, in interpretation number 2:

• Perhaps the chieftains in their kava reveries actually experienced a spontaneous vision of John Frum. Or perhaps the apparition has more practical roots. It’s possible that local leaders conceived of John Frum as a powerful white-skinned ally in the fight against the colonials, who were attempting to crush much of the islanders’ culture and prod them into Christianity. In fact, that view of the origins of the cult gained credence in 1949, when the island administrator, Alexander Rentoul, noting that “frum” is the Tannese pronunciation of “broom,” wrote that the object of the John Frum movement “was to sweep (or broom) the white people off the island of Tanna.”

Note the many confluences with the matrix of early Christianity -- colonialism and exploitation, the loss of local ways, the introduction of new religion, the loss of political power, the religion of a marginalized people....

Thanks, Chris, this is truly an excellent example of how deliberately constructed religious figures become historicized religious leaders. I've instanced Frum many times in showing how tradition is continuously interpreted and re-interpreted syncretically...

Vorkosigan

Chris Weimer

Michael Turton aka Vorkosigan shows that once again, he's clueless. Perhaps this is because he hasn't ever really studied the John Frum cult, or perhaps because all his information is torn out of context from a Smithsonian article. Either way, he's got gall to misrepresent the scholarly understandings of John Frum and then blame me for misrepresenting it, when in reality, his view is off.

First of all, he introduces the Red Herring that "mythicism" works by syncretisation. This is poor form by Turton, as a) it says nothing about mythicism, as historical core can still be found behind a syncretic movement - as I pointed out with Prince Philip; and b) scholars of early Christianity do not generally deny any syncretisation in the early Christian movement or their understanding of who the historical Jesus was. It was Jeffrey Gibson, whom is now apparently suspended/banned, who argued here that the birth narratives were in response to the Augustan divinity claim. It is an implicit strawman then that Turton has created.

He then goes on to assert, without any evidence backing up his position, that Christianity has formed (he asserts "discovered", though that is an abuse to the English language) by picking out bits of the OT, its "cultists" using both "epistolary fiction and novel forms" to do so. Besides his utter failure to demonstrate this, he also has failed to distinguish between those describing real history in a literary blanket, and creating it ex nihilo from the literary sources themselves. Time and time again we have given examples of real historical people and actions that were described using familiar language found in preceding literature.

Turton's objection then that my analogy to the Prince Philip cult is thusly built upon poor, unfounded assumptions.

On to the John Frum cult. I find it rather amusing that Turton takes the chiefs words about the origin to heart, or this article to be authoritative. Did it occur in the 1930s? If one reads the phenomenal paper "The Messiah in Indonesia and Melanesia" by Justus M. van der Kroef in The Scientific Monthly vol. 75, no. 3 (1952): 161-165, one learns the real history - it started during World War II (between 1940 and 1941) and since real American troops were there, it seems totally absurd that the islanders would totally fabricate the name "John" and apply it to their new messiah.

There's tonnes of evidence in favor of John Frum being an historical person - Frum itself coming from their word for broom is a stretch - the actual islanders there don't believe that, and in such a recent history one would expect that memory to have been retained. However, the common phrase "John from America" could easily lend itself to the misunderstanding in poor English speakers to "John From - America". Note that American troops occupied the area. Note that John Frum is hailed as the king from America.

Now have a look at parallel cults. Look at the Prince Philip cult. Turton's "fabrication" theory is totally unfounded by actual observation of real live cults. They pick a person, for whatever reason is theirs, and they name that person god. The Aztecs thought the Conquistadors were gods - they didn't just make that up. When mixing the historical and mythical worlds, we see bore out over and over again that small cults form around an actual person, not as mere quote mining, as Turton special pleads for.

But then again, what would one expect from Michael Turton? Reminds me of the Vedic commentator Śaṅkara, at whose time were women barred from learning, when commenting on "learned women" in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upanishad, stated that learned meant learned in domestic duties (even though it was applied to boys in the sense of intellectual studies), even as he claimed that the women discoursing on the Brahma, something traditionally reserved for the learned, meant that he was right that one didn't have to be learned to discourse on the Brahma!

Michael Turton's understanding of Christian history, of cargo cults, and I suspect other things as well is exactly paralleled. When faced with the obvious, he'll defend his own personal views to the point where he's twisting everything else to fit it as well.

Heads I win, tails you lose, at least according to Michael.

(via HTR 94.3 pp 353-68)

Sven

Ad hominen, anyone?

Jet Black

and that's how it happens. If I deleted the first post of this thread and got rid of the links, lots of people would think that there is a Cult worshipping the Son of God