The Cevin Who Would Be King

Cevin Soling is the co- or sole owner of most of The Satanic Temple’s various corporations but goes by the pseudonym “Malcolm Jarry” when associating with TST in public, including—alarmingly—on many of their legal documents.

We’ve talked before about how before and during the early years of the Temple, Soling (as “Cevin Soling”) was visiting the South Pacific island of Vanuatu, filming  a documentation about himself as a would-be cargo cult messiah, fulfilling a prophecy of “John Frum”.

And we’ve shared before that photographer Jon Tonks and writer Christopher Lord were on the island at the same time as one of Soling’s trips, sharing some of the articles about the book they published.  

• [Guardian] ‘There was a prophecy I would come’: the western men who think they are South Pacific kings 
• [Blind Magazine] How to Be a King: a Beginner’s Guide 

From the second link:

“I think as soon as we had met Cevin, we realised that that was the interesting thing,” says Tonks. “And we knew that if we spent a long amount of time there we would see all sorts of people doing the same thing.”

But, until now we never had the full context for Tonks’ and Lord’s visit to Vanuatu or why seeing Soling arrive was so important.

We’re sharing that excerpt below, but if you’re interested and want more about the island, the John Frum movement, and other would-be messiahs, check out their book The Men Who Would Be King and Tonks’ website.

For our narrow interests, the text suffices but the book it comes from primarily visual and covers several other would-be cargo cult messiahs as well as the communities those men visit, so if the below sparks your interests, pick up a copy.  

---

Suddenly the South Pacific [Pages 99 – 114]

<Photo of Cevin Soling, a white man, sitting outside in a chair wearing khaki pants, a green, long-sleeve shirt rolled up to the elbows, and a baseball cap. He leans back to hear a Ni-vanuatu man dressed in military fatigues say something in his ear from behind. Several more men in military fatigues are behind Soling, and sitting beside him is Isaac Wan, an older Ni-vanuatu man in an admiral’s uniform and cap.>

[End of Page 99]

<Photo of goat standing alone in vegetation>

<Title card “Suddenly the South Pacific”>

[Page 100-101]

The Yank Who Became a God

We thought that Sulphur Bay would be a small, smoky village with pigs darting about and a few locals in bedraggled army uniforms. In fact, it is a bustling settlement of several hundred people with a central parade ground and a large collection of huts down the hill sheltered by coconut palms.

On the morning of the John Frum ceremony, athletic young men with sweat-glittered faces had been stamping out dance routines on the soggy dirt for hours, as an overloaded PA system blared out jangly guitar music. The women of Sulphur Bay, meanwhile, were sat in the shade on the periphery, holding down the hems of their beige dresses and swatting at their ankles.

In the centre of the village was a large nakamal, a woven palm leaf structure found throughout Vanuatu where men gather to eat, drink, and tell stories. Behind it, a flagpole with the Star-Spangled Banner fluttering against the overcast sky, and a row of elders and tribal chiefs watching the dancers in silence. The chiefs wore a mishmash of military regalia: jaunty side caps, gold-brocaded jackets, green berets.

Overnight, the hills had turned sodden. We hiked up one at the edge of the parade ground. Hundreds of Ni-Vanuatus stood or squatted there, waiting for something to happen. This lot were not Frum believers but Christians from nearby villages who had come along for the spectacle. Also milling around were 15 awkward-looking Westerners. One particularly enervating Austrian journalist in an akubra hat trailed behind Jon and I — “Who are you working for?” he asked, as if we were rival spies encountering one another in the field.

There was no answer to his question. We had traveled thousands of miles uncertain what we would find, looking for something like authenticity or belief. And now, watching the twirling dancers and the Westerners making aloof small talk with each other, pausing only to stick their iPads in a performer’s face, we suspected we might actually be just like them —

[Page 102]

travelling around the world looking for something odd or original to recount back home. Quite a few of the foreigners we learned were freelancers hoping to flag a story or a picture or two. There was a sense that something solemn was about to happen, which we had no part in. What were we all doing here?

Just as Jon and I were grumbling at this, the PA system burst into life. A military drum rattle followed and a column of soldiers came marching into the parade ground. They wore pressed military fatigues and each carried over one shoulder a long shaft of bamboo with the end sharpened to a point, daubed in red paint.

Their bare feet bounced in unison on the black earth. The dancers scattered to make way.

At the same moment, a pickup truck tore into the centre of the parade ground. It swerved to avoid the soldiers and stopped in front of flagpoles. The doors popped open and three Western men scrambled out: they had video cameras on their shoulders, with lenses on a short white man in beige trousers with baseball cap who shuffled out of the passenger seat.

He was met by two villagers in camo gear and jackboots. They marched the foreigner up to the row of chiefs, who each in turn shook the man’s hand before he was shown to a seat at the end of the row, next to the chief of Sulphur Bay, Isaac Wan, a wiry man in a sailor’s hat.

We watched all this from the grassy hillock with the other unbelievers. The Ni-Vanuatus were as puzzled as we were: “We heard someone from the White House was coming,” said one. Surely the ambassador wouldn’t show up in khakis. There was conferral and consternation and plenty of shrugs among friends before a man exhaled in resignation. “I’m afraid we have no idea who this man is.”

The marching soldiers halted. They shifted their bamboo muskets to the floor, saluted first the elders, then the American flag. Chief Isaac

[Page 103]

Wan stood and spoke Bislama into a microphone: the faithful had gathered according to ‘John’s Promise’, he explained, and because they had kept their faith John had returned.

“Born of America,” the chief said, “the last man reveals the destination of our movement.”

Isaac then gestured to the white man, and explained that “Mister Cevin” had given them new uniforms. “It was known that he would come to show us the door to the last land, to lift up our movement and carry us through it.”

Mister Cevin had his hands clapped to his thighs. He looked pensive, with the furtive manner of a guinea pig sniffing the air for trouble. When the chief finished speaking, one military-clad villager leaned over and thrust the mic into Cevin’s hands.

The village called Sulphur Bay fell silent.

“America is a nation founded by people who left Europe to practice their beliefs and customs,” said Cevin, in a slightly nasal East Coast accent. “When colonial powers tried to control the people of America, they fought back and won their independence. Since then, American ideals have been based on honouring the culture and ideals of others.”

He went on like this for some time. An unseen translator spelled it out line by line in Bislama. “I too am following the spirit of John Frum by coming here to strengthen the bonds between America and Tanna,” Cevin said, then thanked everybody, clapped nervously and sat back down. There was just a moment of too long silence before the jangly guitar music mercifully resumed.

We couldn’t believe what we’d just witnessed — had this American led the chiefs to believe he was, in fact, John Frum?

“Apparently there was a prophecy that I would come,” Cevin told me.

“That you would come?”

“That I would bring cargo and this would be part of building a bond between America and Tanna.”

“How were you described in the prophecy?” I asked. “Did they actually say a man called ‘Cevin’ would come?”

“I haven’t pushed it that far to ask.”

Our exchange was filmed by one of Cevin’s film crew; a burly American in an Old Glory bandana. The crew had been hired to make a documentary called

[Page 104]

<Photo of Cevin Soling in a shiny, fire-retardant suit, standing with hands on hips>

[Page 105]

<Photo of Cevin Soling in a shiny, fire-retardant suit, standing with hands in air>

[Page 106]

John Frum He Will Come, later described as ‘[Chronicling] Mr. Soling’s attempt to become an island god’. Over three successive trips to Vanuatu, the cameraman explained, Cevin had brought hauls of domestic goods — the cargo! — to the local chiefs: salad spinners, gas cookers, handheld torches, fishing tackle for a community that doesn’t fish.

We looked back at the chiefs, who conferred rapidly in Bislama. Cevin, meanwhile, still had his baseball cap on. He glanced between their faces, the floor, the flag. “I mean, if you’re into your British awkward humour,” the cameraman said, “there’s your man.”

[Page 107]

Cevin Soling lives in Boston with his wife and child on a street where the American flag hangs from most porches. He is wealthy, Harvard-educated; his father was an architect who made a fortune building in New York City. But Cevin told us he hated the uniformity of his own suburbia, which was indicative of the narrow-mindedness of contemporary America. “It looks like a big machine just spat each house out, splat!” he said, stood on the closely-cropped lawn. “Over and over again, street after street.”

Jon and I visited Cevin at home a few years after our first encounter in Vanuatu. He had sent us a rough cut of his documentary, John Frum He Will Come, which had had a mixed reception. “There was some violent backlash and screaming at me when I showed the film in Arkansas,” he told us. “The impulse is to infantalise the tribe and assume I was being exploitative. It was nearly a riot.”

Cevin was affable, enthusiastic about his rare Beatles records and the exoticism of his adventures. He showed us photographs from when he hiked across bandit country in northern Uganda so as to film a local tribe putting on a production of A Christmas Carol, at his direction. On another trip, possibly Borneo, he said he was gifted a bag of shrunken heads by a local tribe but thought against trying to smuggle them back to America. In his stories, he was the intrepid if slightly bungling adventurer tramping through landscapes of the mind, excavating weirdness and esotericism in far-flung dangerous places, ever ready to tweak the nose of good taste.

We’d been struck by a scene from Cevin’s John Frum documentary in which he’s seen handing out necklaces with his own face on them. There’s also a long sequence of our protagonist cavorting about the lip of Mount Yasur in a fire retardant suit, demonstrating his semi-unflappability in the face of the lava’s explosions.

With us, Cevin was happy to have a receptive audience but was at the same time guarded, suspicious in case we were there to hatchet job him. We took him for lunch at a Polynesian restaurant on a dusty highway outside Boston, opposite a branch of Hooters, where he ordered the lobster and after a couple of cocktails started to loosen up.

[Page 108]

“It’s a sad, sad time we’re living in,” Cevin said, “when status is founded on the degree of how offended you are and the greater virtue you can claim.” He blamed, in part, America’s ‘postmodern’ campus culture.

The audience for Cevin’s films tends to be as niche as his subject matter. (He once made a film about the practice of drilling a hole in one’s head in pursuit of enlightenment.) But he did attract national attention in 2009 for a documentary about the evils of the US education system and was invited onto Stephen Colbert’s talk show. Cevin laughed nervously at the host’s irreverance and tried to get across his point that American schools indoctrinate kids and kill their creativity.

John Frum theory travels along similar lines — the missionaries brought the schoolhouse, which was the ideological apparatus for shattering Ni-Vanuatu culture. Therefore most ardent Frummers, in communities like Sulphur Bay, think kids shouldn’t go to school.

Cevin said he’d stressed to the chiefs of Sulphur Bay that kids should be educated but only in the village nakamal, not the missionary schools. He praised the spirit of resistance that the John Frum villages showed to our deadening world.

“I’m really proud of my relationship with the people there,” he told us. “I wanted to see the best outcomes for them and I believe that my contact with them was beneficial and I’m proud of that and to have my contributions recognized.” He’d been honoured as a member of the tribe, and given great swathes of land, but was keen to stress that he’d never claimed anything divine about himself; he only helped realise some facets of the John Frum prophecy so as to see how the believers would respond. It wasn’t so simple; the government regarded him as a troublemaker, and he’d had to pay off

[Page 109]

local men who took umbrage at his quest. He also spent a sizable amount of money sourcing and shipping the cargo out there.

Was it worth it? He equated his adventure in derring-do to climbing Everest: “If there was a specific recipe, if the rules were firm and rigid and all you had to do was XYZ then anyone could do it. But it takes someone special to do it, and I actually did it. It makes me exceptional, not divine — except in their context. But only if that’s what they decide.”

He was a man in pursuit of a story, one in which he himself was at its heart.

Scores of anthropologists have, like Cevin, dedicated study to Vanuatu’s ‘cargo cults’ because they found in it some reflection of their own worldview.

The leftist theorist Peter Worsley saw John Frum as the last gasps of an indigenous unity in the face of imperialism — the same urge, he believed, that inspired the Native American Ghost Dance in the 19th Century, reviving long-dead ancestors, or the apocalyptic visions of the Taiping Revolution in China amidst its so-called Century of Humiliation by foreign powers. Cargo cults were, in Worsley’s view, a plea for divine intervention, a desire to hit reset on a culture careening toward oblivion.

In his speech to Sulphur Bay, Cevin said that America’s Second World War experience in Vanuatu represented for him the best of his country. Benevolent protectors of the Pacific — dashing, victorious, welcomed. Where in the world is America, or the West in general, still viewed that way? Where else do white faces still get a warm wave from the roadside? Perhaps Cevin’s desire to realise the John Frum story was his own Ghost Dance, a kind of ancestor worship for an America that had run off the rails, been stultified by postmodernism and political correctness.

Or that may be too high-minded.

After the war, Americans were fascinated by being received as gods and kings in faraway lands. Take, for instance, an issue of the 1960s men’s magazine ADVENTURE that has the coverline, ‘The Yank who became an island god!’ and features an illustration of a strapping sailor being fought over by amorous Polynesian girls. It was reprinted in a recent book by Sven Kirsten, a visual anthropologist and the world’s foremost authority on

[Page 110]

Tiki, America’s mid-century craze for the South Pacific, which often had undertones of the deified castaway in its aesthetic.

“It’s the epitome of being welcomed into a foreign culture,” Kirsten told us by phone from California. “This was the Americans’ experience during the Second World War.”

Back then, America and the Western world still felt itself to be at the centre of the global narrative, the heroes of the story. After all, they’d fought off the Japanese in the Pacific and rescued the Old World from European tyranny. Simplistic self-belief, yes, but intoxicating all the same. This was before Vietnam, Nicaragua, before the Middle East invasions of the 2000s. “When you’re liked you like other people back,” Kirsten said. “But that has certainly changed.”

Today, experience weighs heavy and power is shifting to new centres.

In Vanuatu alone, we watched over each successive visit as more and more Chinese money drifted into the archipelago, made manifest in new roads, rumours of a military base (denied by Beijing), and a very angular expo centre in the capital.

China sees Vanuatu as a strategic outpost in the Pacific. In return, it pledges prosperity and protection, particularly from those who wronged Vanuatu in the past.

Self-mythologising is a powerful force. It was at work when Europe’s own empires were expanding, too. Orientalism, as Edward Said viewed it, was about imagining the Other so as to conquer and control. But the way the West imagined itself proved to be just as potent. Exotic stories about ‘civilising’ explorers like Captain Cook being received as gods fired European imaginations at the very moment they were casting their eyes hungrily around the world. Owning the story could mean shaping reality. What is the message of Robinson Crusoe if not that Man Friday was willing and grateful of his own subjugation, and that Crusoe became a better man by ruling him?

As the world rebalances, the legacy of Europe’s imperial iniquities is unpacked but old relationships linger on uncomfortably. However well-intentioned Cevin may be, his tale makes the notion of the so-called ‘White savior’ queasily literal.

[Page 111]

In the hours after our first encounter with Cevin at Sulphur Bay, Jon and I fulminated about the American in the baseball cap strutting around like God. We expected our shock to be shared by Ketty Napwatt, the Ni-Vanuatu woman from the night before in Hugh’s hotel. But she just shrugged, disappointed that we hadn’t found a profound cultural experience in Sulphur Bay. “We always have these crackpots showing up,” she said, wearily, then turned to the same rosy-cheeked expats from the night before who had now reconvened for lunch on Tanna Lodge’s veranda. “You see, the foreigners are not even watching our ceremonies anymore,” Ketty said. “They’re just watching each other.”

Hugh, already shirtless, concurred there were crackpots: he told us about a New Zealander who had shown up a few years earlier and gone round the John Frum villages saying the prophet’s arrival was imminent but that he was just waiting for a decent enough hotel to stay in. Oh, and it had to be one with a landing pad, because Frum was going to come from outer space. (The man’s driver later confirmed this detail for us: ‘Moon men’, he said.)

A few chiefs were convinced to hand over cash and, incredibly, work actually began on a structure before the foreigner was deported on some misdemeanor. One of Hugh’s staff took us out to all that remains: a septic tank and a ghostly structure of nailed-together plywood, teetering in a wind-swept coconut grove.

There were others. Ketty told us how in 1980, just months before independence, the British and French armies sat around gripped by indecision as the islands were on the brink of war. A group of Las Vegas property developers wanted to create their own independent libertarian tax haven in Vanuatu, and had funneled money to a charismatic community leader called Jimmy Stevens, sponsoring a cult-like secessionist uprising with echoes of John Frum. They went far enough to mint money and print passports

[Page 112]

for their new nation before their scheme was routed. Jimmy spent the rest of his life in prison, while the libertarians sloped off into the sunset.

All this, unfortunately, gives an impression that Ni-Vanuatus are gullible people, too trusting for our corrupt world, exploited for kicks by foreign opportunists. But that is not the whole picture.

Many communities on Tanna believe to some degree in the John Frum movement. The legitimacy of their leaders rests on the promise that Frum will deliver prosperity. Internal island politics and inter-tribal feuds can be upended by the arrival of a man like Cevin offering to fulfill part of the prophecy for one group, especially if they come with the goods. In a version of Cevin’s documentary, there’s a long scene in which the chief of Sulphur Bay, Isaac Wan, is examining the boxed-up foreign wares that Cevin has brought — pleased that the ‘cult’ is working, one could say, because the fabled cargo had started to arrive (It just happened to have been shipped by a wealthy American filmmaker). One anthropologist who had done field work in Vanuatu explained to us that it can be expedient for tribal leaders to cultivate foreign contacts, even in some cases to indulge or humour their whimsies, if it gives them greater right to rule.

A couple of days after John Frum day, we returned to Sulphur Bay and found Chief Isaac Wan crouched in the palm leaf nakamal. Rather than his admiral’s outfit, Isaac had on a shellsuit that clung to his frame. He was clearly fed up of dealing with the many foreign reporters who have come and gone over the years with their notebooks and dictaphones to hear him retell once more the tale of John Frum. “Pikanini i no go long skul,” he railed at us, eyes blazing like two pieces of coal.

Isaac’s son, clearly high on kava, joined us and stood at the door paraphrasing his father’s diatribe about the perils of education. We shifted the conversation to Cevin Soling. “Yes, Cevin is a friend of Sulphur Bay.

[Page 113]

He is rebuilding a bond between Tanna and America.” But, we asked, was Cevin John Frum? To this both were dismissive, despite the grandiloquence of the ceremony speeches, and would not give a straight answer.

Isaac got to his feet and with a wave of his hand, wandered down a dusty mud verge to a small clearing in the coconut palms. We followed him, and came to a circular platform of cracked stone upon which sat four kids, no more than six years old, their cheeks stuffed with freakishly large clumps of leaves, dribbling juices into coconut shells.

In ritualised form, the kava root is chewed first by pre-pubescent boys and spat out, creating a particularly potent pulp that imbues the drinker with a sense of wellbeing.

Shells of the stuff were passed round as more men from Sulphur Bay gathered. We were half-heartedly offered one but declined. The air was thick with the drinkers’ need for silence. They wanted to be left to their slurping. Isaac occasionally cackled, and the others showed deference to him. There was a strange aggro in the air.

Watching this arcane scene, now the army uniforms were off and the journalists gone home, we were aware how cloistered this community of believers was. The notion of an outsider believing they could ever truly become part of it, and in doing so help these people in their mission, seems woefully picturesque.

On the drive back to our hotel, a torrent of rain blew over Tanna. Hugh’s driver, we thought, must have had a nip of kava because he steered with a persistent grin, unfazed that the windscreen wipers were useless and none of us could see the road ahead.

Tanna is an eerie place after dark. When it rains, the bush gurgles and the insects writhe and channels of muddy water work their way to the coast. Even in the dead of night you encounter men trudging the pitch black pathways, going to or from the kava shacks dotted around the island. These tiny bars light a coloured lantern at their gate when the brew is ready.

We got stuck in mud at the top of a hill. Fortunately, there were a few passersby, looking for kava. We all gave the jeep a shove. The rain continued to pour down. Beyond our flickering headlights we could see the southern side of Tanna stretching to the ocean in a black, spiky expanse.

[End of Page 114 – end of section]

---