Prince Philip Movement: the tribe that worshipped the Duke of Edinburgh
Faith is a strange thing, right? The whole point of worshipping something is that you don’t know for sure whether it exists or not, but you feel so sure that it does that you put all your belief in its reality.
Not because it helps you out in any meaningful way, but because it gives you the strength and inner peace to help yourself out. Most of the time, the thing you worship is something utterly inhuman. Something that you cannot comprehend. Whose glory you cannot fathom and whose power makes it fundamentally alien to us. We can only show our fealty to whatever it is and use its teaching to benefit ourselves and the people that mean the most to us.
There are some strange things that have been the object of people’s worship. Many ancient pieces of hair or tooth that supposedly belonged to holy figures. A few fictional concepts and characters, like Jedi or, in some deeply troubling online spaces, Harry Potter’s potions master, Severus Snape. Despite all that, imagine the short straw you must have drawn in life to find yourself worshipping the erstwhile Duke of Edinburgh, Prince Philip Mountbatten himself.
It sounds unfortunate. Honestly, it sounds like a joke on Reddit that got out of hand, but it’s true. In the Republic of Vanuatu in the South Pacific, lie the islands of Yaohnanen and Yakel. A number of the inhabitants of these villages belong to a cargo cult that stemmed from an old tale of the area. So the tale went, a mountain spirit left the island to search the world. One day, he would return, but only after marrying a powerful woman.
One imagines that several people were labelled as the original spirit, but only one actually stuck.
Was Prince Philip actually a Pacific islander mountain spirit?
In 1974, Queen Elizabeth II visited the island with her husband, Prince Philip, in tow. According to some reports, the islanders were able to see just how much deference the colonial officials of the island showed Lizzie. A few things seemed to click after this. This was a very powerful woman, and now there was a man who was arriving at the island, who had married her.
Clearly, a few people reasoned that Philip (of all people) was the mountain spirit in question, and no one had any better ideas.
Thus, the Prince Philip movement began earnest. The Duke of Edinburgh became a literal icon to a few residents of this village, who would gather around pictures of him and celebrate his birthday with the same enthusiasm they’d save for any tribal elder. Several years after the Royal visit, the British Resident Commissioner of the New Hebrides, John Champion, brought this phenomenon to Philip’s attention, who was amused and bemused by this newfound reverence.
Credit where it’s due to the crotchety old fuck, he took it in his stride. He never managed to visit the island, but he sent them a signed photo of himself, and when the sect sent him a traditional pig-killing club called a nal-nal, he sent back another photo of himself posing with it. All this culminated in 2007 with the Channel 4 documentary Meet The Natives, which took five men from the Prince Philip movement to England for a private audience with the man himself.
It might sound sad to know that a group of people were worshipping a man as resolutely unworthy of their worship as Old Phil, but such is the nature of worship. The person or thing you’re worshipping has very little to do with it. It’s about having something that gives you the strength to get to the next day and support your fellow man to do the same. If anything, I’d say giving joy and hope to a community like this might just be the most worthy thing Philip’s ever done in his life.
It hasn’t been felt by anyone in his own country, that’s for sure.