Worship of Philip may shift to Charles
A tribe in the South Pacific that worshipped the Duke of Edinburgh as a living god will likely transfer their allegiance to Prince Charles, a leading anthropologist says.
The Duke has for decades been worshipped as a spirit or god by a group of villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, formerly an AngloFrench colony known as the New Hebrides.
They would be saddened by his death and are set to respond to it with ritual wailing, ceremonial dancing and the drinking of the mildly narcotic drink kava, said Kirk Huffman, an authority on what is known as the Prince Philip Movement.
“I imagine there will be some ritual wailing, some special dances. There will be a focus on the men drinking kava — it is the key to opening the door to the intangible world.
“On Tanna it is not drunk as a means of getting drunk. It connects the material world with the nonmaterial world,” said Cambridgeeducated Huffman, the honorary curator of Vanuatu’s national museum.
Prince Charles visited Vanuatu in 2018 on a trip to the Pacific and was appointed an honorary chief. He drank kava and met some of the tribal leaders of Tanna.
One of them took back to the island the coconut shell from which the Prince of Wales had drunk.
“He told me he would build a shrine to it, almost as if it was a holy grail,” Huffman told the Telegraph.
“I suspect the beliefs of the islanders will continue with Prince Charles.”
The worship of Prince Philip as a god is a result of the melding of traditional customary beliefs — known in pidgin English as kastom — with some of the tenets of Christianity, including the idea of the second coming of Christ, which the Tannese learned from missionaries.
The Duke’s cult-like status received a boost when he paid a state visit to the New Hebrides, as it was then known, in 1974.