Cargo Cults and World Building with Magic
Header Art: John Frum Cross Tanna (1967) Tim Ross
Magic is strange. There is no explanation for it, no matter how hard we might try to come up with something. Magic is fantastical and odd, following its own rules and sometimes not even following those rules. While we might try to research and learn more about it, we’ll never be able to explain everything about it. At least, in most fantasy worlds, no one will be able to understand everything about magic. Vecna will never understand the magic of love, just like Harry Potter will never understand the power of becoming an immortal lich-wizard.
Cargo Cults
This brings us to cargo cults. For those who are unaware, cargo cults are a Melanesian belief system where adherents attempt to attract ‘cargo’ by erecting airplane landing strips in their jungle, believing that powerful ancestral spirits will deliver them ‘cargo’. This began in the late 1880s, but came to public attention during World War II when the Melanesian islands were under occupation first by the Japanese and then the Americans.
The indigenous population of the islands would see large cargo planes landing in airstrips, airdropping crates of cargo, and more - bringing all sorts of wondrous equipment with them like military uniforms, modern medicine, plentiful food, ammunition, and so much more. They believed, by watching soldiers perform drills, wave flags and lights to signal to airplanes where to land, and more, that the way to gain access to this ‘cargo’ was to perform these same practices. So they built their own airstrips and use flag symbols, perform drill practices, and more - hoping to use the same ‘magic’ that soldiers used to call forth those cargo planes.
A False Belief
Obviously, if you are exposed to the internet, you can probably guess that the ‘magic’ that the islanders were performing wasn’t going to work. There were no ancestral spirits sending cargo planes of goods to the soldiers, modern nations aren’t stealing the cargo planes that are supposed to go to the islanders, and building airstrips, fake TVs, or wooden headphones isn’t going to bring untold wealth down from the sky.
And let me be clear before I continue, the phrase ‘cargo cult’ has negative connotations to it. When we say ‘cult’ you are already using a weighted word that fills the mind of foul and evil ideas, and the idea of these islanders just wanting ‘cargo’ isn’t true either. They aren’t just a materialistic society looking for riches and treasures, they are looking to attract the attention of their ancestors and earn the blessings that they believe other nations are stealing from them. These blessings aren’t necessarily things, but rather good fortune, good health, greater spiritual fulfillment, and yes, material objects to help increase the quality of their lives like modern medicine.
Societies and Magic
I don’t want people to think that I’m making fun of those who might practice the belief of cargo cults. I simply want to use this as an example of how people might treat things that they don’t fully understand but desperately want to understand. Cargo cult practitioners may have been taken advantage of by cult leaders, by foreigners who lied, or simply because they lacked the education that many of us take for granted.
But let’s look at our worlds and how magic might cause strange things to happen, and how a population might respond to that. Not every commonfolk is going to understand magic, and even if someone does understand something about magic, it doesn’t mean they understand everything about magic. Sometimes programmers add in ‘dead code’ or ‘cargo cult code’ because they aren’t sure if it is required, but they should do it anyway cause it may not work without that code.
If you have floating mountains in a single region of the world, what might the people make of that? How do they incorporate those floating mountains into their worldview? Their way of growing their cities? Do they build their cities across these motes of floating rock? Do they have stories about how created these rocks? Are there rituals they perform to ensure that the rocks stay afloat (and do these rituals actually do anything or do they merely do it because if they don’t and it does matter that they do the ritual, the consequences would be dire?)
Creating Understandings
When people encounter something they don’t understand, they are going to create rituals or protections against it. For a long time, people thought tomatoes were poisonous because they looked similar to the fruits of the very dangerous nightshade plants. Many intelligent people feared that tomatoes were poisonous and that the side effects far outweigh the benefit of eating a freshly ripe tomato.
So what does this mean for your world? Well, if you have a strange magical phenomenon in your world - now is the time to think about how such oddities affect your world and the people who inhabit it.
If you have an always billowing plume of smoke coming out of a mountain, perhaps the locals attribute the smoke to a great god working their forge beneath the mountain. Every time there is an earthquake, it is the hammering of the god as it works. If the mountain were to ever explode and expel lava, they could claim that the god was angry over someone stealing their work, or that the god was furious at a servant, or that they failed in their craft.
A strange desert exists within an area of the world that should, geographically, be rich in food or lush jungles. Some might believe that there is a great curse on the lands, and that the way to break the curse is to find the source of power cursing the land. Then again, it could be that there was an ancient battle between great wizards that blasted the land, and that the villagers believe that performing a ritual that a ‘druid’ taught them every year for a hundred years will restore the land to its original glory. (That druid may or may not be a trickster fey spirit laughing at the absurd ritual the villagers perform.)
An infinitely deep lake sits on the top of a mountain. Many have tried to fully explore its depths, but none have been able to reach the bottom and many die in the attempt, devoured by the foul inhabitants of this mountain lake. The villagers believe that this is a direct connection to the Plane of Water and that the water is the purest of its kind. They take special care of their lake, adding flakes of silver and claiming it has healing properties, selling it to nearby cities and distant kings.
A wizard has erected their tower near a small village, but to avoid having to talk to the ‘peasants’, they have cloaked their tower in an invisibility field. Unfortunately, at high noon with the burning sun and no clouds to obstruct it, the invisibility field sometimes wavers, the illusion magic not powerful enough to fully hide the tower and so the tower glistens into view for just a few minutes on clear sky days. The local villagers have no idea about this wizard and believe that the tower is actually a glimpse at heaven and believe that this is a sign that they are special. Somehow they began to believe that the tower will one day fully form outside their village, and when it does that, it will be the end of days. To ensure that the tower never fully forms, they remain pious, sticking to strange rules and beliefs that outsiders find very hard to understand or follow.
The Unexplained
We have so many things that we, as a civilization, have feared and misunderstood - and we don’t even have magic! There are all sorts of oddities that magic creates, and all sorts of answers people can ascribe to magic. Your world is ripe to include these eccentricities, people performing odd rituals because they believe that is what is required for the magic to be performed, and believe all manner of odd things to try and understand their world!
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