Cults of Goods Cult: Exploring the Interesting Phenomenon
In World War II, while bombs and battles wrecked much of the planet, tiny Melanesian islands stayed quiet. The people there fished, gardened and traded - they had no factories, no shops, no radios. Then uniformed strangers landed with metal birds that roared across the sky, boxes that spoke and giant canoes that belched smoke. The islanders decided the visitors carried treasures sent by sky spirits or ancestor ghosts.
Because of that shock, new religions sprouted. Villagers called the foreign goods “cargo” and believed the goods came from gods. Preachers declared that the right song, the right dance or the right ancestor would one day tip a load of axes, rice and medicine onto the beach. A writer for Pacific Islands magazine first printed the words “cargo cult” in 1945 to label those faiths.
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To pull the riches down from the clouds, men carved headphones from coconut shells, built straw aircraft and marched in step with sticks for rifles. They thought the ancestors had sailed west long ago, learned the magic of factories and now tried to ship the products home - only the white soldiers blocked the way. If islanders copied every white detail, the road of goods would open.
The idea spread. In New Guinea, in Papua, in Fiji, on Espiritu Santo, people raised new gods - King George V, the mythical American John Fromm or any generous looking face on a leaflet. On Vanuatu, whole villages still set aside a day each year to sit on the beach, stare at the horizon and wait for John Fromm to step off a boat packed with radios, pills and tinned meat.
The war finished, the soldiers sailed away, yet the hope stayed. The movements survive as small chapels, painted flags and yearly processions. They show what happened when stone age lives met steel age war - people used prayer, drums and homemade runways to beg for a share of a world that had already forgotten them.
