Cargo Cult (from English "cargo cult" — worship of deliveries), Religion of Airplane Worshippers, Cult of Heavenly Gifts — a term used to describe a group of religious movements in Melanesia (from Ancient Greek μέλας and νῆσος — Black Islands), a collection of island groups in the Pacific Ocean whose indigenous inhabitants speak neither Polynesian nor Micronesian languages and are also dark-skinned. Melanesia is located to the northeast of Australia.
Nature of the Phenomenon
Cargo cults hold that Western goods were created by ancestral spirits and are intended for the Melanesian people. It is believed that white people obtained control over these goods through dishonest means. Cargo cult practitioners perform rituals that imitate the actions of white people in order to bring more of these goods.
Background
Cargo cults — and the John Frum cult in particular — are the subject of an entire chapter in the book The God Delusion by the noted scholar Richard Dawkins. Dawkins himself, in describing cargo cults, refers to Sir David Attenborough, who sailed to Tanna in the 1950s specifically to study these religious beliefs.
"...My main source of information on cargo cults is David Attenborough's book Quest in Paradise, kindly given to me by the author. All the cults — from the earliest ones in the nineteenth century to the better-known ones that arose after the end of the Second World War — followed the same pattern. In every case, it seems, the islanders were profoundly struck by the miraculous objects belonging to the white newcomers — administrators, soldiers, and missionaries. Perhaps they had fallen victim to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.'
Origins
The islanders noticed that the white men who possessed these marvels never made them themselves. When items needed repair, they were sent away, and new ones arrived as 'cargo' on ships and, later, airplanes. No one ever saw a white man engaged in manufacturing or repairing anything; moreover, white men did not engage in any productive activity whatsoever (sitting at a desk and shuffling papers was clearly some kind of religious ritual). The supernatural origin of the 'cargo' was beyond doubt.
As if to confirm this hypothesis, some of the white men's activities could only be interpreted as religious ceremonies: they erected tall masts and strung wire between them; they sat and listened to small boxes that blinked with lights and emitted mysterious sounds and muffled voices; they persuaded the local population to put on identical clothing and march back and forth — a more pointless occupation was impossible to imagine. And then the natives hit upon the solution to the mystery. All of these incomprehensible actions were the rituals by which white men persuaded the gods to send 'cargo.' If a native wanted to receive 'cargo,' he too needed to perform these actions.
Spread
Remarkably, similar cargo cults arose independently on islands that were remote from one another not only geographically but also culturally. David Attenborough writes that anthropologists documented two separate instances in New Caledonia, four in the Solomon Islands, four in Fiji, seven in the New Hebrides, and more than forty in New Guinea — and as a rule, they emerged entirely independently of one another. Most of these religions hold that on the day of the apocalypse, a messiah will arrive together with the 'cargo.'
John Frum Guarantees It
On some islands, militarized cults emerged with their own deity named John Frum — a name apparently derived from a garbled version of the American greeting: "I'm John, from America."
According to the cult's beliefs, John Frum will return to the island on February 15 of some unknown year, emerging from the crater of Mount Yasur at the head of an innumerable army of deceased ancestors, and will bring peace, food, refrigerators, and prosperity.
Every year on that day, colorful processions are held on the island: painted torsos, woven grass helmets, wooden rifles, and American flags. Remarkably, in 1987, as if rewarding the faithful, adherents of the cult received a package from their deity. A hurricane swept through the region, and the island received tents, food, and medicine as humanitarian aid. The aid had been gathered in the United States, and the boxes were marked: "From the American People." No force in the world could have convinced the islanders that these gifts were not from their deity.
As one of them put it, explaining to relief volunteers the advantages of the John Frum religion over Christianity: "The Christians' God hasn't sent them anything in 2,000 years, but we didn't have to wait nearly that long for gifts from John Frum…"
Thus was born one of the most remarkable religious cults — "Cargo": the natives pray to tinned-meat cans and believe that more will soon be delivered to them from the sky.