In the 20th century, anthropologists fell over themselves to study the “cargo cult” phenomenon in the South Pacific. But was it really a new religion—or just a Western fantasy? ---- ONE DAY IN 1900 OR 1940, or at some point in between, a man whose name was John Frum—although he might not have been a man, and his name might not have been John Frum—arrived on Tanna island, in an archipelago that was then called the New Hebrides but is now called the Republic of Vanuatu. He came, someone told me, in a plane that could somehow land in the bush without needing an airstrip, but I also heard that he simply walked up from the sea, and that he appeared, mysteriously, in a village one day. His home might be on Tanna’s tallest mountain; or nearby, inside of the island’s active volcano, which shoots lava and smoke into the sky every night; or in my own country, the United States, thousands of miles away. He may have appeared first as a tiger, although Tanna is deep in the South Pacific, where no tigers live. Then again, that may have been only a dream, and the tiger also could also have been only a cat, and John might have appeared first as a black man with a mustache, before finally returning in his final form, that of a white man who could magically speak the native languages of the island. Anyway, he came, and that much almost everybody agrees on.
Todd Brizendine