Martians, Melanesians, Mormons and 'Murcianos'. Notes on Anthropogalactic History

Abstract

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), higher priest of all things apocalyptic and titanic that remain in our present time, and his Mediterranean nemesis, the Spanish cinematographer Luis García Berlanga (Valencia, 1921), ultimate practitioner of the lost baroque-Spanish art of the courtesan jester, are gathered together in this paper for the good cause of revisiting the most absurd and funny of all anthropological research topics: cargo cults. These are Millenium movements whose believers invest enormous amounts of ritual work to invocate of embodied ancestral Gods. They ask their gods to land their cargo spaceships loaded with high-tech mana at their bamboo airports. The craziest avatar of this spiritual saga, so-called UFO religions have begun the theoretical exploration and practical exploitation of the fundamental cargoist -i.e. economic-analogy between ordinary visits (of conquerors, missioners, ethnographers or tourists) to anonymous places and extraordinary visits (of Gods or extraterrestrials) to spiritual centers. The fast global-cinematic diffusion of the modern myth of the flying saucer reveals a close anthropo-historical connection between the rise of this specifically post-industrial variety of cargo cult and the tourists' validation of the megalomaniac techno-economic dreams of aboriginal tribes living in the Stone Age. We conclude sketching an analytical caricature of one of the most stupid cargonomical ‘pilot' in galactic anthropohistory: the so-called ‘Spanish economic miracle'.