While discussing a completely unrelated topic on my way back from a lovely tea shop in Salado, it occurred to me that many of us Westerners are engaged in “cargo cults“. We typically associate this phenomenon with “primitive” peoples, but is it really?

For those of you who haven’t heard the term, “cargo cult” is a derogatory term that somehow made its way into anthropological usage. It describes a group of people who adopt the forms of another culture in the hopes of gaining esoteric power that will return physical benefits.

For example, there are reports of Melanesian islanders building mock airstrips, complete with control towers and wooden airplane statues and using these facilities to conduct elaborate, military-style drills as part of a ceremony. Examples of this type of ritual mimicry of Western technology and habits have been reported in a number of different places around the world.

Interestingly, as in the case of the “John Frum” cargo cult, many of these movements are less about “cargo” (material goods) and more about restoring power and autonomy to traditional social structures. The “cargo”, while often desirable to the locals, is a sign of esoteric power, not of cultural correctness. Often Western ideas about money and property are rejected by the believers- the goal is to attain plenty within the context of their own culture by hijacking the spiritual technology of their invaders.

While I still struggle with the desire to find a better term than “spiritual technology”, in this case the phrase is apt. In many an animistic and/or polytheistic worldview technology is spiritual. Your computer, your stove, the telephone company’s router, a jet fighter- all of these have a form of consciousness and agency.

Our abnormal Western view instead holds that technology is somehow separate from the spiritual. Certainly, we can use technology to disrupt the esoteric landscape- few would debate the impact of bulldozers upon a forest. But believers in a traditional cargo cult also recognize the esoteric capacity of technology, or even a facsimile thereof, to have positive impacts as well.

Unfortunately, and this is the derogatory part of the phrase, these belief systems generally do not produce the desired results. While ethnographers, writing from a position of privilege, typically assume this is purely the result of a mechanistic, materialist universe- I disagree.

Certainly, if the believers constructed fully-functional aircraft in the Western style, they could fly. But that isn’t the point- power over the believers’ own circumstances is.

Cargo cult practitioners mimic the systems of Western technology and militaries, but they do not understand them in context. Those technologies are not part of their world view-  and thus the esoteric power of the technologies is unavailable to the practitioners.

Conversely, I have encountered numerous examples of Westerners engaging with technology to powerful effect. We are raised with it, steeped in it, even literally filled with it. Most of us don’t even realize that we are deeply engaged with the spirits of technology and ignorantly negotiating with them for assistance.

How often do we resort to begging our computer to work? Have you ever noticed that some people get better results than others when they do?

That said, I return to my point- most Western religious practices either are, or are in serious jeopardy of becoming little more than cargo cults.

By this I mean that we are mimicking earlier rituals or techniques in complete disregard for their context and without a functional context within which to successfully employ them.

For example, what is the esoteric value of Communion (Eucharist) in most Protestant churches? Catholicism retains much of its spiritual technology (often stolen from earlier Greek or Roman rites), but many Protestant churches eschew human-initiated esoteric action altogether. They instead hold to a sort of pseudo-mechanistic Deism in which a benevolent deity exists but rarely if ever wants to deal with humans except at arm’s length.

One of my core reasons for abandoning the United Methodist Church was their complete lack of even enough ritual tech to invoke their deity on a semi-consistent basis. I’m not a Catholic and have never taken the Eucharist at one of their masses- but I cannot recall a single mass I’ve attended in which Someone was not paying attention.

That doesn’t get Catholicism off the hook, of course. But, their insistence on a dedicated priesthood subjected to initiatory learning and maintaining a continuous liturgical tradition has allowed them to at least keep some level of esoteric functionality. It’s also led to a lot of serious problems, but that’s not the matter under discussion.

Almost none of us understand the context of our rituals.

When a Neopagan goes to a sweat-lodge ceremony in Cleveland, are they getting the same results as a Lakota undertaking said practice within their own culture and tradition? Almost certainly not!

Are there European sweat traditions? Absolutely! But unless we were raised in certain areas around the Baltic Sea, we probably have no context in this life for them. Even the folks born and bred to the region are not practicing these as their pre-Conversion ancestors would have. They have suffered the disruption of their traditions by outside forces bent on erasing native spiritual practices.

Similarly, we have evidence of spiritual sweat practices in ancient Ireland and Greece- but these were much more fully erased from those cultures. Roman and/or Turkish baths also probably held more spiritual significance than they are today accorded.

I mentioned elsewhere the Wiccan “Great Rite” and its roots in pre-Romanization Celtic kingmaking rituals. While the underlying premise of feminine receiving masculine and generating positive outcomes (symbolic “fertility”) is retained, the fuller context is often sandblasted away.  When practicing the “full” Great Rite (as opposed to the “symbolic” version), many modern practitioners actively take steps to inhibit one of the significant and intended outcomes of similar ancient practices- pregnancy.

I’m not suggesting that Wiccans should start popping out babies. I’m saying that a fertility ritual designed to create babies is perhaps not the best basis for a modern ritual designed to create generally positive outcomes. Indeed, if ancient sources are to be believed, in the absence of a properly-wed sacral king (“Rí”), no amount of fertility work by the rest of us would amount to a hill of beans.

This, of course, flies in the face of our modern, Western sensibilities about individuality and equality- so we typically ignore it.

But is this repurposing of spiritual technology from outside of our own context leading us into a blind canyon, both spiritually and esoterically? Are we, even when we are willing to accept personal gnosis, struggling more than necessary because we are mimicking the forms of ancient traditions without understanding instead of framing underlying truths in a culturally-relevant context and building ritual technology atop that?

Given our lack of intact traditions to communicate those underlying truths, can we even do the latter?

In my efforts around esoteric landwork, this is a huge stumbling block. The extant traditions that seem to have a clue are closed and/or culturally-incompatible and the older traditions that seem more compatible are broken, mostly-erased, and still culturally distant.

-In Deos Confidimus