When it comes to all things spiritual, mystical or new age I tend to be as curious as I am skeptical. So when I signed up for an eight-week astral travel course, I was excited and also a little wary of what I was getting myself into. The mystical rabbit hole I fell through over the course of those eight weeks is difficult to describe.
A couple of weeks ago, we ran an article about the “cargo cults” that live on the Pacific Island of Tanna. The cargo cults are semi-religious tribal groups whose members believe that if they perform rituals in honor of their idols—namely imaginary American WWII soldier John Frum and real-life racist monarch Prince Philip—a bounty of “cargo” (guns and stuff) will rain down on them from the sky. Oh yeah, they also believe that when this happens, everyone else in the world will die, leaving them behind as its sole proprietors.
And to be honest, all that sounded relatively harmless, if a little insane. But away from the relatively cuddly cargo cults of Tanna, events took a sinister turn in Papua New Guinea recently, where rumors began to circulate that members of a similar cult had murdered and eaten seven people.
Cargo cults, like just about any other cult, are completely fucking insane. They originated in early 20th century tribal communities on a number of Pacific islands. Their followers believe that either an American WWII soldier named John Frum, or everyone’s favourite generational racist, Prince Philip, will somehow come into possession of all the food, clothes and guns that the West currently owns and deliver it all to them. The cargo cults believe that, once that’s happened, the remaining population of the world will disappear, leaving them in control of what they believe is rightfully theirs.
