COSH ON A DEVOTED TRIBE,
The worldwide obsequies for the late Duke of Edinburgh received a jot of punctuation on Monday as a BBC correspondent reported to the outer world from the Melanesian island of Tanna, famous as the home of the so-called “Prince Philip movement.” This religious sect may now be the most famous of the Pacific island “cargo cults” documented by anthropologists in the wake of the Second World War. It is sometimes said that the movement worships Philip as a god.
If you read the anthropological literature on the Philip cult, itself the product of a handful of very confused foreigners, you know that this is an oversimplification. To the Tannese, Philip seems to be, at different times and in different ways, a messiah and a sorcerer. He is thought to be a Tannese soul, a sort of lost elder brother, who somehow migrated spiritually from the island to Europe, successfully scheming to seduce a future queen and amass power over a great empire.
All this he did in order to protect indigenous Tannese values — on a higher plane — from its perpetual enemies, missionary Christianity and capitalism. The island, its country of Vanuatu, and its region all have other cults like this, but the Philip movement is unique in having glommed onto a real, identifiable person as its prophet/patron. And the great mystery of the cult, one beyond the powers of anthropologists to solve, is that the prince played along.
Tannese traditionalists have always told messiah stories, often competing ones, and since their original run-in with Captain Cook, these often involved prodigal saviours with creepy pale skin. When official photographs of the Queen and her husband began to appear on Tanna in the 1950s or thereabouts, something in Philip’s appearance or his uniform struck the Tannese as being significant, almost like a code. The royal pair visited Vanuatu in 1974, but did not get to Tanna and were not yet aware of Philip’s special status in the island’s deep hinterland.
At the time, the future independent Vanuatu was still the New Hebrides, a colony governed by a (rather appalling) French-english “condominium.” The British resident commissioner soon learned of the Prince Philip movement and wrote to Buckingham Palace, suggesting that the Duke might like to send his worshippers a friendly token. He forwarded signed photographs, but the Tannese had long experience with people with titles like “resident commissioner” and were suspicious. They gave the commissioner a Tannese club used to kill wild pigs and asked them to forward it to Philip.
And he, perhaps typically, did the damnedest thing: he posed for a photo with the club and sent that back to Tanna.
If you’ve studied history you know that new religious movements, however odd, are no joke. Millennial cults have often swept over parts of Vanuatu, leading to violence and self-destruction. This friendly gesture by Prince Philip strikes one now as playing with fire. Fortunately, it seems to have had no ill effects. It may have genuinely helped the traditionalists resist modernity, as they have continued to do with remarkable success.
The Royal Family has carried on the bizarre game over the years, perhaps enjoying their alternate identities as descendants of a Tannese messiah. The Princess Royal and the Prince of Wales have visited Tanna, sampling its psychoactive ritual drug kava, and Tannese visitors were received personally by Philip at Buckingham Palace in 2007. The big book on the Prince Philip movement is Man Belong Mrs. Queen, published in 2013 by the television writer and critic Matthew Baylis. It’s an odd, delightful little thing without an ounce of travel-memoir padding. As a young lad growing up on Merseyside, Baylis became something of a Philip fanboy himself; he thought it strange and unfair that the old Duke’s occasional laconic remarks were always interpreted in the worst possible light by the British press (which may now be compensating for its bad conscience with histrionic funerary ululations).
Later, as an anthropology undergraduate, Baylis learned
OUR THING ISN’T LIKE THAT. IT’S ALIVE AND IT’S MOVING.
about the Tannese Philip cult and became obsessed with it. His professors could yap endlessly about the general phenomenon of cargo cults, but they knew nothing about the Prince Philip movement, and they eventually began telling the kid to shut up about it already.
The only thing for Baylis to do was to see it for himself, which he did in 2005; the book is basically the humorous story of his failure to penetrate the mysteries of the cult. About half Baylis’s problem was linguistic — even in this column I have had trouble, no doubt apparent to you, with finding one English word to describe Philip’s status among his Melanesian worshippers. The other problem is the old quantum-measurement issue in anthropology: even in the 21st century, a white man can’t just arrive in a place like Tanna and observe passively like a camera.
In the end, just as he was preparing to leave Vanuatu, Baylis had a chat with one of the “big men” of Tanna’s interior, the famous Chief Jack. Shown Baylis’s tape recorder, the chief expressed contempt for the author’s desire to “write things down and put them inside little engines.” Baylis had failed to find any trace of formal ritual surrounding Prince Philip, and the Chief reassured him there was no such thing to find. “We don’t sing songs to Prince Philip,” he said. “We don’t go into a special house . ... Our thing isn’t like that. It’s alive and it’s moving.” The men parted forever, still not quite understanding one another.