The Strange Story That May Have Been One Big (But Hilarious) Joke

The Strange Story That May Have Been One Big (But Hilarious) Joke

A Rabbit Hole You Never See Coming

Some stories don’t need embellishment — you just need to read them slowly and let the weirdness wash over you.

This is one of those.

You know how every family has that one person who’s impossible to explain?

The royal family had one so admired that they’re still worshipped as a deity to this day by a remote tribe. It wasn’t the Queen or one of the royal children — it was someone even more unlikely.

Here’s a hint:

We all just want to know what he’s looking at. Image credit: ABC News

Yes, seriously.

You can spend years studying history and still get blindsided by a sentence like “A tribe believed Prince Philip was a divine being.”

If you’re thinking, this has to be a joke, well — you might be right. The entire thing might be the world’s funniest joke, a way for the villagers to troll…well, the rest of us.

The story presented to us is this:

On the island of Vanuatu, the Yaohnanen tribe believed Prince Philip — the same man whose greatest accomplishments seemed to include walking behind Queen Elizabeth— was a divine figure connected to their own ancient beliefs.

The whole thing started in the 1950s — the tribe’s home was once a British colony, so villagers saw plenty of photos of Queen Elizabeth and her husband. Their oral tradition talks about the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit who traveled across the sea to a distant land, married a powerful woman, and would one day return. The more they learned about the British royal family…the more the villagers connected the story to Prince Philip.

They built a huge — and I mean huge — shrine around a framed picture of the Prince and began praying to him for crops, health, and protection.

You get the feeling the dude on the left knows something we don’t. Image credit: Wikipedia

Prince Philip knew about it. He even sent the tribe autographed and (hopefully fully clothed) pictures which they treated as sacred objects. They hung them on the wall and whispered to them.

They’d found their messiah.

Or — they were just punking everybody.

There’s a theory that says the tribe might’ve used this strategically. By claiming they worshipped a powerful British ruler, they may have been reclaiming some of that colonial autonomy. A middle finger to colonialism, if you will.

Kirk Huffman, an anthropologist who has been working with the tribes since the 70s, has long maintained that local cultures used the worship of Western figures as a strategic, calculated mechanism.

Journalist Dan McGarry said the Yaohnanen tribe definitely used Prince Philip as a subversive move, a way to take back colonial power.

They now think the whole “we worship Prince Philip” thing might’ve been a clever way to reframe the British colonial presence and heavy Western influence.

Philip died in April 2021, and when news of his passing reached Yaohnanen, the women burst into tears and the tribe began ritualistic wailing to express grief. Everyone behaved like they were devastated and immediately commenced a 100-day mourning period.

Yeah. It’s a little much.

It’s a great image to have in your head, though: a group of people screaming and crying, maybe throwing themselves to the ground, all over Prince Philip.

With Philip dead, the tribe’s adoration didn’t die with him — it just shifted to Charles III. They now see him as the bearer of that lineage.

Charles looks thrilled to be taking his dad’s place as the man we’ve all been waiting for. Image credit: The telegraph

At some point, you realize that the whole thing is either history’s strongest example of two cultures looking at the same person and coming to wildly different conclusions, or it’s the funniest instance of real-life trolling ever to enter the public consciousness.

If nothing else, it’s solid proof that first impressions can get out of hand.