New book confirms The Satanic Temple’s co-founder Cevin Soling was among the “crackpots” trying to be a cargo cult messiah on a small Pacific island

In Vanuatu, there are people who say a messiah will one day arrive from a distant land, bringing the islands the prosperity they were denied by their former colonial rulers, Britain and France. In anthropological parlance, such beliefs are often labelled cargo cults — a term fraught with condescension, framing these spiritual movements as religions constructed around the material wealth, the “cargo”, of the western world. Over the past 50 years, though, a steady stream of westerners have acted out such prophecies in the hope of gathering believers. As Ketty Napwatt, a Ni-Vanuatu activist and former politician, told me in 2014: “We have these crackpots showing up all the time.”

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The fantasy of being revered by people on the far side of the world is an old one. Early European explorers such as Captain Cook were supposedly received as divine beings by the local people whose lives they would upend. The dream endured from Robinson Crusoe to colonial fiction such as Kipling’s white rajahs in the Kafiristan of The Man Who Would be King — a deeply rooted idea of the west’s divine right to rule.

We happened across our modern-day prophets by accident. Tonks and I had gone to Vanuatu in 2014 because we’d read about villages there where the locals believe God is an American soldier.

“The western men who think they are South Pacific kings” by Christopher Lord for The Guardian

In the mid-2000s, future co-owner and founder of The Satanic Temple Cevin Soling (a.k.a. “Malcolm Jarry”) visited the South Pacific Island of Tanna to try to convince them he was returned messianic cargo cult figure John Frum as part of a project for Soling’s company Spectacle Films. This is already known.

• Quick explainer
• Longer explainer

As a tease for the book The Men Who Would Be King by Christopher Lord and Jon Tonks, this article for the Guardian is really effective.

But this is not a book about Soling, just how he fits into this larger pattern, so in the article, we don’t get more than these brief anecdotes:

In Tanna, Tonks and I saw platoons of men marching under the midday sun. We also met Cevin Soling, a documentary-maker from Boston who for years had brought strange cargo — salad spinners, fishing tackle for people who don’t fish, medical equipment — to John Frum believers in Sulphur Bay.

“Apparently there was a prophecy I would come,” said Soling, wearing white chinos and a baseball cap. Indeed, in a speech to believers, the chief of Sulphur Bay described him as the “last man” who would reveal the destination of their movement. Soling had tried to turn the whole endeavour into a documentary, and even made necklaces with his own face printed on them.

Outsiders might think Ni-Vanuatu are gullible people, easily taken in by foreign soothsayers. But that’s not the whole picture. There’s a scene in Soling’s film where one of the John Frum chiefs is examining the goods the foreigner has brought, pleased the cult appears to be working — it just so happens the cargo has been brought by a wealthy American film-maker, not Frum. In our conversations with the chief, he evaded the question of whether Soling was the man they’d been waiting for.

“People tend to forget there is a huge amount of local politics on these islands,” says Kirk Huffman, who worked as an anthropologist for the post-independence government in Vanuatu and was curator of its national museum. “One level of analysis is that these chiefs are using outsiders for their own benefit.” Many communities believe the Frum prophecy and the arrival of a man like Soling, weighted down with offerings, can bolster a tribe’s standing. “Something similar happened in Fiji in the early 19th century, with white people being asked by traditional chiefs to become their allies. These local leaders would use the outsiders, not least their arms and ammunition, to political ends,” Huffman says.

“The western men who think they are South Pacific kings” by Christopher Lord for The Guardian

Having not seen more than the trailers, what we didn’t know previously was that this was not a one-off event but apparently a years-long investment for Soling to try to be recognized as a cult leader to the islanders by bringing them gifts and attempting to fulfill a prophecy while shooting a movie about it centered on himself.

Frequent gifts sent by Americans who have visited the village only reinforce the cult’s conviction that one day Jon Frum will return, bringing with him American munificence.

“This is how far we have to go right now to find a country which loves and respects America,” said Cevin Soling, a film maker from New York and one of the few foreigners to witness yesterday’s celebrations.

“America still the land of gods for island cargo cult” by Nick Squires for New Zealand Herald (Feb. 15, 2007)

If Soling first visited in 2007, which would be that trip he’s quoted in above, he continued to go there until at least 2014 when he ran into the book/article authors Christopher Lord and Jon Tonks. So, already fully into the swing of “The Satanic Temple” stateside by then.

Soling’s involvement may have lasted even longer given the presumably satirical $525 million “nuclear power plant fundraiser” and accompanying video Soling released to promote the second version of the film in 2017.

Still, it’s interesting that — along with not listing himself as owner of The Satanic Temple and related front companies —when he’s self-promoting under his own name, Cevin Soling doesn’t seem to think it worthwhile to remind folk he attempted to fulfill the prophecy of John Frum and make a movie of it.

Exhibitionist colonialism in the service of trying to manipulate naïve people into glorifying you is not exactly the best look. Then again, “trying” turns out to be the operative word in this case.

One more thing: the second chapter of Joe Laycock’s book about The Satanic Temple, Speak of the Devil, includes this anecdote from David Guinan, the director of what would become Mr. Cevin and the Cargo Cult (emphasis added):

[Cevin Soling] was discussing Bush’s Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives with his friend and filmmaker David Guinan during an international flight in 2007. They discussed how the public would react if someone demanded federal funding for a “Satanic soup kitchen.” [Soling] thought about requesting federal funds for a “Satanic youth outreach center for troubled teens” that would bring teenagers off the streets by giving them Ozzy Osbourne and Judas Priest albums. He told me, “I have a way of making things happen when I get a crazy idea like that.”

Joseph Laycock, Speak of the Devil, Chapter 2, “Origins and History of The Satanic Temple”

While that’s not definitive, everything about that account from 2019 would align with Soling and Guinan coming up with the idea for their own US-based Satanic troll group — one that would evolve into The Satanic Temple — while traveling together on the first long, international flight to the South Pacific for their project about turning Soling into a cult messiah figure.

You can take as much time with that one as you need.

Another, perhaps happier moral to all this could be that if a person is going to try to do some religious grifting, it turns out it’s a lot harder to pull one over on people who know you’re underestimating them and use that to their advantage than it is to do the same on folk who think they’re too educated and smart to ever fall victim of a grift or into a cult.

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The Cevin Who Would Be King