Status: Strange but true
Poor Prince Philip never seems to get that much attention, overshadowed as he is by his famous wife, the Queen. But he can console himself with the knowledge that the residents of Tanna, a volcanic island in the Pacific, worship him as a god. UPI reports
Members of the Yaohahnen tribe have developed their own form of cargo cult, belief systems dating to World War II, when U.S. military planes dropped boxes of supplies by parachute that some Pacific islanders believed had come from the gods. The tribe, who live on one of the islands in the archipelago country of Vanuatu, decided that Prince Philip, consort of Britain's Queen Elizabeth, brings prosperity. The islanders realize that the prince, who celebrated his 85th birthday Saturday, is not immortal.
"We want him to spend the last years of his life here, because we believe that when he returns as our god, his powers will make our wrinkles disappear and we will have many wives to attend to our every need," Jack Naiva, the Yaohahnen chief, told the Daily Mail. "He won't have to hunt for pigs or anything. He can just sit in the sun and have a nice time."
Philip has sent the tribe pictures of himself. But Buckingham Palace said the prince is not planning to move to Tanna -- or even to visit.
It's the line about wrinkle removal that gets me. Are the Yaohahnen especially concerned about their wrinkles? And why would they think Prince Philip would be able to remove them, given that he's not exactly the smoothest-faced person in the world?
On the subject of cargo cults, Smithsonian Magazine
ran an interesting article a few months back about them, specifically a group of South Pacific islanders who worship an American named John Frum.