John Frum-ism

[greasemonkey]

I smacked my left hand with a hammer Friday while helping my brother with some auto repairs (*hint hint* I'm fishing for a little sympathy ...wifey is still in the "you dumbass!" stage), so I've had to be content with just browsing around up till today (I finally got rid of the damned splint this morning).

 

Anyway (sob story over), I came across a link to this article while on a history channel forum topic about the possible non-existence of Jesus. Somebody pulled out the standard apologetic arguement about how "so many people wouldn't believe it if it weren't true," and some guy pulled this article out of his hat that packs a pretty strong case about the transition from something fairly ordinary to diety status.

 

I was really surprised that I had never heard of this before. I think most folks here who also haven't heard of this case might get a lot out of reading it...

 

I'll do the first page, but the rest can be found here

 

In John They Trust

 

South Pacific villagers worship a mysterious American they call John Frum - believing he'll one day shower their remote island with riches

 

In the morning heat on a tropical island halfway across the world from the United States, several dark-skinned men—clad in what look to be U.S. Army uniforms—appear on a mound overlooking a bamboo-hut village. One reverently carries Old Glory, precisely folded to reveal only the stars. On the command of a bearded “drill sergeant,” the flag is raised on a pole hacked from a tall tree trunk. As the huge banner billows in the wind, hundreds of watching villagers clap and cheer.

 

Chief Isaac Wan, a slight, bearded man in a blue suit and ceremonial sash, leads the uniformed men down to open ground in the middle of the village. Some 40 barefoot "G.I.’s" suddenly emerge from behind the huts to more cheering, marching in perfect step and ranks of two past Chief Isaac. They tote bamboo “rifles” on their shoulders, the scarlet tips sharpened to represent bloody bayonets, and sport the letters “USA,” painted in red on their bare chests and backs.

 

This is February 15, John Frum Day, on the remote island of Tanna in the South Pacific nation of Vanuatu. On this holiest of days, devotees have descended on the village of Lamakara from all over the island to honor a ghostly American messiah, John Frum. “John promised he’ll bring planeloads and shiploads of cargo to us from America if we pray to him,” a village elder tells me as he salutes the Stars and Stripes. “Radios, TVs, trucks, boats, watches, iceboxes, medicine, Coca-Cola and many other wonderful things.”

 

The island’s John Frum movement is a classic example of what anthropologists have called a “cargo cult”—many of which sprang up in villages in the South Pacific during World War II, when hundreds of thousands of American troops poured into the islands from the skies and seas. As anthropologist Kirk Huffman, who spent 17 years in Vanuatu, explains: “You get cargo cults when the outside world, with all its material wealth, suddenly descends on remote, indigenous tribes.” The locals don’t know where the foreigners’ endless supplies come from and so suspect they were summoned by magic, sent from the spirit world. To entice the Americans back after the war, islanders throughout the region constructed piers and carved airstrips from their fields. They prayed for ships and planes to once again come out of nowhere, bearing all kinds of treasures: jeeps and washing machines, radios and motorcycles, canned meat and candy.

 

But the venerated Americans never came back, except as a dribble of tourists and veterans eager to revisit the faraway islands where they went to war in their youth. And although almost all the cargo cults have disappeared over the decades, the John Frum movement has endured, based on the worship of an American god no sober man has ever seen.

 

Many Americans know Vanuatu from the reality TV series “Survivor,” though the episodes shot there hardly touched on the Melanesian island nation’s spectacular natural wonders and fascinating, age-old cultures. Set between Fiji and New Guinea, Vanuatu is a Y-shaped scattering of more than 80 islands, several of which include active volcanoes. The islands were once home to fierce warriors, among them cannibals. Many inhabitants still revere village sorcerers, who use spirit-possessed stones in magic rituals that can lure a new lover, fatten a pig or kill an enemy.

 

Americans with longer memories remember Vanuatu as the New Hebrides—its name until its independence from joint British and French colonial rule in 1980. James Michener’s book Tales of the South Pacific, which spawned the musical South Pacific, grew out of his experiences as an American sailor in the New Hebrides in World War II.

 

My own South Pacific experience, in search of John Frum and his devotees, begins when I board a small plane in Vanuatu’s capital, Port-Vila. Forty minutes later, coral reefs, sandy beaches and green hills announce Tanna Island, about 20 miles long and 16 miles at its widest point, with a population of around 28,000. Climbing into an ancient jeep for the drive to Lamakara, which overlooks Sulphur Bay, I wait while Jessel Niavia, the driver, starts the vehicle by touching together two wires sticking out from a hole under the dashboard.

 

As the jeep rattles up a steep slope, the narrow trail slicing through the jungle’s dense green weave of trees and bushes, Jessel tells me that he is the brother-in-law of one of the cult’s most important leaders, Prophet Fred—who, he adds proudly, “raised his wife from the dead two weeks ago.”

 

When we reach the crest of a hill, the land ahead falls away to reveal Yasur, Tanna’s sacred volcano, a few miles to the south, its ash-coated slopes nudging the shoreline at Sulphur Bay. Dark smoke belches from its cone. “‘Yasur’ means God in our language,” Jessel murmurs. “It’s the house of John Frum.”

 

“If he’s an American, why does he live in your volcano?” I wonder aloud.

 

“Ask Chief Isaac,” he says. “He knows everything.”

 

It's about 5 pages long, but worth the read!

[♦ nivek ♦]

Facinating.. Thanks man!

 

Where's my damn DC-3/C-47????

 

kL

[greasemonkey]

Facinating.. Thanks man!

 

Where's my damn DC-3/C-47????

 

kL

 

heh

 

...wonder how many people actually pretended to be "gods" for those "cargo cults?" I find the thought to be a little creepy, but given that some of the tribes were cannibals...

 

I guess I can see where Jebus might have actually been pretty popular with those folks come to think of it! I can see the aboriginal new revised standard now: "These are my missionaries... take and eat of them!!!"

[All Gods Fail]

The whole cargo cult thing is pretty fascinating, and does illustrate how quickly someone can become a religious figure. Doubtless there was no real, single man named 'John Frum', but rather he was a composite made of many different soldiers and officers.

 

He came to life around the campfire while the people were discussing the war days, and ways to get that influx of modern supplies flowing again. A story here and an observance there, and before you know it you've got a G.I. volcano god.

 

Also, here's an evil thought - what if you were rich and decided to fuck with those poor tribes and started bringing shitloads of cargo again, saying you were John Frum's messenger?

[Ouroboros]

What's even more fascinating is that it has its own political party, and not only that, the Jon Frum movement is split up in different groups too. Not even 100 years, and it already have heretics!

 

http://philtar.ucsm.ac.uk/encyclopedia/westoc/jonfrum.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Frum

http://www.nthposition.com/thelastcargo.php

 

 

All across the region, colonial governments cracked down hard, rounding up the cargo prophets and imprisoning them. Planters and other Western commercial interests, who coined the term 'cargo cult', saw it all as madness which demonstrated the ignorance and superstition of their workforce. More liberal whites attempted to explain to the locals that cargo wasn't produced by magic, but by hard work and the product of generations of technological progress, and the only way in which Melanesian societies were going to become rich in cargo was by working and earning it. To the locals, the subtext of this explanation was clear: the whites were politely refusing to give up the secret of their cargo.

They even fought against explanations and persisted in blind belief of the delusion!

 

 

Okay, here's a really, extremely, weird thing. You know about "speaking in tongues", right, but did you know this:

It's this flag-raising which still forms the ceremonial centrepiece to John Frum Day. Shortly after dawn, the day is blessed with a service: a hundred people crowd into a small hut on the edge of the parade ground and sing some of John Frum's hymns which have been 'channelled' over the years, some of them miraculously in tongues unknown to the receiver.

Aint' that sometin'?

 

 

More quotes:

The strains of these unions and contradictions have frequently told throughout the history of the John Frum movement, and its various prophets have rarely sung from the same hymn sheet. John has been black and white, man and spirit, Tannese and American. Cargo has been imminent for some, a metaphor for others. But this year has seen a schism on a grander scale than any before, one which has split the village of Sulphur Bay in two. One of its chiefs, Isacwon, has decamped half a mile up the hill into the forest, taking several dozen families with him. Their village, now six months old, seems well-established, and its first John Frum Day finds it festooned with flowers and decorations. But it has no central parade ground, and no marching John Frum army: its celebration is a return to kastom in the time before the missionaries.

 

It's hard to get anyone to talk about the split, beyond assuring outsiders that the reasons for it aren't politically serious. It's doctrinal, a question of spiritual emphasis, perhaps just a case of one prophet too many.