richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

T H E ROOTS OF RELI G I O N 203
They build tall masts with wires attached to them; they sit
listening to small boxes that glow with light and emit
curious noises and strangled voices; they persuade the
local people to dress up in identical clothes, and march
them up and down - and it would hardly be possible to
devise a more useless occupation than that. And then the
native realizes that he has stumbled on the answer to
the mystery. It is these incomprehensible actions that
are the rituals employed by the white man to persuade the
gods to send the cargo. If the native wants the cargo, then
he too must do these things.
It is striking that similar cargo cults sprang up independently on
islands that were widely separated both geographically and
culturally. David Attenborough tells us that
Anthropologists have noted two separate outbreaks in
New Caledonia, four in the Solomons, four in Fiji, seven
in the New Hebrides, and over fifty in New Guinea, most
of them being quite independent and unconnected with
one another. The majority of these religions claim that one
particular messiah will bring the cargo when the day of
the apocalypse arrives.
The independent flowering of so many independent but similar
cults suggests some unifying features of human psychology in
general.
One famous cult on the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides
(known as Vanuatu since 1980) is still extant. It is centred on a
messianic figure called John Frum. References to John Frum in
official government records go back only as far as 1940 but, even
for so recent a myth, it is not known for certain whether he ever
existed as a real man. One legend described him as a little man with
a high-pitched voice and bleached hair, wearing a coat with shining
buttons. He made strange prophecies, and he went out of his way
to turn the people against the missionaries. Eventually he returned
to the ancestors, after promising a triumphal second coming, bearing
bountiful cargo. His apocalyptic vision included a 'great