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alt title(s): Mistaken For Gods "Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES!"
The heroes (or their enemies) encounter a less technologically advanced society whose members take them for deities, either because of their advanced technology or due to a coincidental resemblance to a figure or figures in the local religion.
The subsequent plot frequently requires that the heroes convince the "primitive" culture that they (or their enemies) are not actually divine beings. If they don't make the effort, there is usually a Torches And Pitchforks moment once the natives finally figure things out themselves.
May be used to set up An Aesop about lying/taking advantage of others. In this scenario, the characters exploit the natives' mistake and enjoy a brief pampered existence until it's revealed that the natives plan to sacrifice them to appease another god, or send them into battle against a deadly foe.
The trope name comes from the documented effect that World War II military forces had over natives of various South Pacific islands. It was not an example of this trope, however — the fully human American (and Japanese) soldiers were almost never considered to be gods, but instead believed to have tapped into the power of the natives' ancestors, their technology stubbornly misinterpreted as a ritual with the aim of drawing power from symbols. Sixty years after the war, some tribes in Vanuatu are still building elaborate fake airfields and praying to idols shaped like DC-3 cargo planes. There is, however, a mythical character they call "John Frum", who they believe to be the source or harbinger of their prosperity (some anthropologists think this may have been the result of American soldiers introducing themselves as "John, from [America]"). Interestingly, it has helped prevent many older traditions of the islanders being wiped out by conversion to Christianity.
Many Cargo Cults are distinguished by a syncretism of native spiritual systems with elaborate economic rituals, as capitalism has come to replace military power as the face of the developed that is most heavily felt and appreciated in daily life. Such rituals similarly have the aim of appropriating what the natives perceive as the westerner's "power" from his symbols, such as money or materials in addition to just technology.
Compare Mighty Whitey and Insufficiently Advanced Alien. Contrast with Sufficiently Advanced Alien. If the religion worships technology itself rather than as a means to an end, you have a case of Ave Machina. See also Humans Are Cthulhu, and A God Am I.
Unrelated to Cargo Ship.
Examples:
Anime and Manga
- In One Piece, the villainous Enel uses the electrical powers granted to him by the Goro-Goro Fruit to enslave the citizens of the flying island of Skypeia by convincing them (and himself) that he was a god. Note: this makes more sense to native Japanese speakers, as the word "lightning" literally translates to "heaven-energy". In addition, Enel's phrase "ware ga kaminari" has a dual meaning of "I am God"/"I am lightning".
- Then later on, Bartholomew Kuma teleports resident living skeleton Brooke to an island right in the middle of a satanic summoning ritual. Given that he is a walking, talking skeleton, they mistook him for the demon they meant to summon and ask him to smite their enemies. Of course, the first thing he does is see a young lady and request to see her panties. And then he starts composing a song while the (male) cultists show him their boxers, apparently desperate to get him to do some smiting.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann had an underground village that worshipped a "face-God", a Ganmen that had fallen into the village long ago. At the end of the episode, it was revealed that the high priest knew what it really was, and only used the religion to help enact the harsh rules that were vital for the village to survive.
- Nausicaa in the Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind manga.
- Also, the atomic-powered, biomechanical Humongous Mecha are refered to as "God Warriors", and the Master Computer that's been running things behind the scenes has a cult that worships it.
- In the second-season Pokemon episode "Meowth Rules!", Team Rocket's Meowth ended up on an island where the natives worshipped a giant golden Meowth. Naturally, he wasted no time taking full advantage of this. When Jesse and James arrive, he has them tossed out. But after the natives discover he can't use his money-making ability and throw him into impossible fights to make him learn it, they save him. Awwwww.
- In the opening chapters and episodes to Full Metal Alchemist, Edward and Alphonse Elric stumble upon a small town that worship a new religion founded by an out-of-town priest, who seems to flagrantly violate Alchemy's "immutable" laws.
- In one of the episodes of the first season of Vandread, the Nirvana crew descends upon an aquatic planet who mistakes them for their "god" and prepares for sacrifices for them. They don't mind the crew too much when they mentioned that they weren't the gods, but they do mind when the aforementioned crew was "hurting their true gods". The gods that they refer to? The machinelike Harvesters, the same ones that the Nirvana crew have been fighting for at least 5 episodes, who came there for the people's spinal cords (which they knew and willingly offered as part of the religion).
- One of Kino's journeys takes her to a country calmly awaiting the imminent apocalypse, as foretold in their holy book of prophecies, which is revealed later in the same episode to actually be the stream-of-consciousness work of a great but grief-stricken poet whose mind snapped when his wife died in childbirth.
Comic Books
- In the Franco-Belgian comic Thorgal, the last survivor of a group of Atlantis uses Psychic Powers to pose as a god in the eyes of pre-Columbian cultures.
- In the Marvel Universe, the Eternals are an immortal race of super-beings (not aliens themselves, but created by aliens) who are worshiped as gods. The original series was a riff on books like Chariots of the Gods, which started the Ancient Astronauts trend.
- Later comics show the Ancient Astronauts, the Celestials, are Gods, who keep the universe running.
- In Ultimate Marvel, the alien Energy Being called the Phoenix Force is worshiped as a god by a Scientology-esque cult.
- Speaking of Phoenix, in the canon run of the mutant titles Shi'ar renegade Deathbird once came knocking with her own Cargo Cult method of drawing power from a divine entity called "Phalkon". It turned out to be Phoenix. The Phoenix Force had manifested in the Shi'ar galaxy long before it ever got involved with anyone from Earth.
- The backstory of the Micronauts says that before their ancestors settled the Microverse, they made a pit stop on ancient Earth, where some of them were mistaken for the Hindu gods.
- The Cloudcuckoolander villainess White Rabbit became the goddess of a primitive tribe in the Savage Land.
- Storm of the X-Men was worshiped as a rain goddess by African tribes.
- Captain America's nemesis Baron Zemo escaped to the Andes after WWII, where he was regarded by natives as a god.
- Back when Green Lantern Kyle Rayner had become the godlike Ion, there came a moment when Superman admonished him for already having his own religion.
- "The Tower King", a strip that ran in the British comic book Eagle, was set on an Earth that had collapsed into anarchy when a malfunctioning solar-powered satellite somehow bathed the Earth in radiation that made the production of electricity in any form impossible. A cult worshiping electricity set itself inside a power station, carefully maintaining the generators and pretending that electricity still existed.
- Kamandi had this, with Ben Boxer having to prove that he was "The Mighty One" to a tribe of intelligent apes. Ironically, the legends of "The Mighty One" were a Future Imperfect version of Superman!
- In Watchmen, some of the Viet Cong prisoners who surrender to Dr. Manhattan appear to consider him a god. Given his god-like powers and interest in creating life, this could be a subversion.
- Played straight in the movie where some people in America start referring to him as God.
- He's called a god in comic too.
Film
- In Star Wars: Return of The Jedi, Robot Buddy C-3P0 was mistaken for a god by the Ewoks (with a little extra help from Luke's Jedi powers), because he was really shiny.
- Upon realizing this, Threepio actually said "It's against my programming to impersonate a deity", which makes one wonder what happened to get that requirement into the programming standards.
- A calculator took over a small tribe and demanded they not count higher than 99999999 </joke>
- He was built from scrap and programmed by Darth Vader as a child. It's entirely possible it's the local equivalent of "Do not become Skynet."
- He was made by Anakin, but I doubt he was programmed by him. Given his function, that program was likely an existing one that Anakin scrounged from somewhere. It isn't a unique design.
- C-3PO says "It's against my programming", so it's quite possible that one or more of the individual actions required to achieve the goal of impersonating a deity conflicts with some programming block which doesn't obviously associate with the task. For instance, a robot may be programmed not to lie, or not to impersonate anyone. The basic things you'd program a robot not to do (if you don't want to end up with a Skynet, that is...).
- Programming droids to be incapable of lying is, at the very least, a common procedure in the Knights of the Old Republic games, and a small amount of hilarity can ensue after the Ithorians on Citadel Station remove this prohibition from a droid's programming.
- The Expanded Universe has General Grievous being worshiped by his own people.
- In The Gods Must Be Crazy, a careless pilot throws an empty Coke bottle from his aircraft. It lands in the middle of a Bushmen community, who decide it must be a gift from the gods. However, it only causes jealousy and inequality and it is decided that, yes, the gods must be crazy, and a member of the tribe is sent to throw the object off the edge of the world. Much of the humour of the film comes from the lone Bushman interpreting the things he encounters from his stone-age perspective.
- The Man Who Would Be King with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Two ex-British soldiers take over an isolated, mountainous country when one of them is mistaken for a god descended from Alexander the Great. It's based on the 1888 short story by Rudyard Kipling.
- Which is in turn based on the real-life Kefir tribe of Afghanistan, who consider themselves long-lost descendants of Alexander the Great.
- In An American Tail: Fievel Goes West, Tiger is worshiped by a tribe of Native American mice because he bears a striking resemblance to a rock formation.
- Ice Age: The Meltdown has a similar situation with Sid and a race of mini-sloths. Subverted in that the mini-sloths are the only ones who know the scientific reason for the impending ecological disaster. Ironically played straight, in that their solution is to sacrifice their fire-king, Sid, to a volcano.
- Captain Jack Sparrow, at the start of Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, has been captured by the Pelegostos tribe, who believe him to be a god and wish to worship him by eating him.
- In Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, Max happens upon a tribe of youngsters (the two "tribal elders" are almost certainly in their late teens), where they believe him to be a messiah-like man named Captain Walker. To hear them tell it, Captain Walker was in charge of a "sky raft" (commercial jet plane) that got brought down by a "gang called Turbulence" after the "pocky-klips" (apocalypse). Walker and some of the others who weren't "jumped by Mr. Dead" formed a rescue party and set out for parts unknown, with him promising that he would return one day to lead the others to "Tomorrow-Morrow Land" (ironically, the world as it used to be). At the end of the story, a painting of Captain Walker is revealed by the story-teller, and Max looks just like him. Though they don't have a "pitchfork party", the tribe is quite disillusioned when they learn that Max isn't Walker.
- The 1989 John Milius film Farewell to the King fits this trope to a T. Nick Nolte, playing a marooned US soldier evading the Japanese, is captured by natives on the island of Borneo. He is saved by tattoos he had gotten in a drunken stupor in the Philippines, which the natives consider to be marks of a god.
- Also seen in the full-length animated feature The Road To El Dorado, where con artists-cum-explorers Tulio and Miguel allow the residents of the titular city of gold to believe they are incarnations of the gods that built the city. Rather heavily based on the Real Life treatment the Spanish got when they encountered the Aztecs (see below).
Literature
- In Will Self's novel The Book of Dave, a contemporary London cab driver's diary has become holy writ five hundred years in the future, with savagely satiric results.
- Mildly subverted in Dune with the Bene Gesserit's Missionaria Protectiva, wherein false legends were implanted in various cultures all over the galaxy by a cult specifically so that its members could fulfill them to take advantage of the natives in an emergencies. Then massively subverted when Arrakis' version of the Missionaria Protectiva turns out to be right.
- In a Galaxy of humans using enhanced perception to guide their future, the Fremen — whose name, almost certainly, was chosen originally to denote their status as Free Men — were Islamist settlers who were driven out and "denied the Hajj" in religious warfare. When they hid in plain sight on Arrakis, the combination of their culture, their ecology, and their stumbling on the Bene Gesserit methods of foresight and accessing the lives and knowledge of previous generations of women (and men, in certain cases) allowed them to not only ride out the Missionaria Protectiva, it allowed them to gleefully await the entire Galaxy painting itself into a corner!
- Outright subverted in the Discworld book The Colour Of Magic, when a Cargo Cult works.
- Also with Hex the magitek computer. Even its builder noticed, since there's no obvious reason for most of the components but it stops working without them.
- Dream Park, by Larry Niven and Steven Barnes, features a virtual reality-enhanced live-action roleplaying session based around the real-world Cargo Cult.
- In the Enid Blyton adventure story The Secret Mountain (published in 1941) this is how the main characters escape from the titular mountain. They find out that there's to be a solar eclipse the next day, so at the appropriate moment their father throws his hunting knife off the mountain. The lights go out and the tribe think he's killed the sun, at which point the "big white bird" turns up to carry the heroes to safety before the tribe realise they've been had.
- Given that the royal family from the Book Of Amber can walk across the The Multiverse as one of their powers, is it really surprising that they've chosen to go to worlds where they just happen to resemble the local gods? (This includes both for reasons of in a little private A God Am I time and to recruit huge, fanatically loyal armies in an attempt to claim the throne.)
- The Multiverse in question is "Shadow," the vast number of worlds radiating away from Amber, the True City. The Amberites' ability to walk between worlds is half-blurred into creating these worlds to order. Which is to say, the natives may have a point in this case. The Amberites themselves don't really know, either.
- Ringworld by Larry Niven. The main characters deliberately use their advanced technology to make the primitive inhabitants think they're deities — a technique they call "the God Gambit".
- Unfortunately it backfires because Louis can't keep a straight face.
- Christopher Moore's Island of the Sequined Love Nun uses the WWII setup of cargo cults. An American doctor and his beautiful but greedy and evil wife use the beliefs of the natives (who worship the pilot Vincent and his plane the Sky Priestess) in order to harvest their organs. The main character is being used by Vincent to settle a bet Vincent made with Jesus, Buddha, and Moses.
- The Store-living Nomes in Terry Pratchett's Bromeliad worship Arnold Bros (Est 1901) who built the Store. The Floridian Nomes worship Nassa, the god who makes clouds. The Nomes living on the streets of Blackbury seem to have been too busy trying to survive to come up with a religion, although the way they treat the Thing comes close.
- Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination has the Scientific People, the descendants of a research team that crashed in the asteroid belt, and whose rituals are built around the scientific paphernalia of the ship. Notably, they don't actually worship or deify the main character at any point.
- Although in the end they consider him a holy man...and they might be right (in a sense).
- In Isaac Asimov's Foundation, the people of the Foundation provide prosperity to their neighbors while keeping them dependent on the Foundation. This is done by reducing the operation of technologically advanced equipment to rituals governed by a religion operated by the Foundation.
- In the Prose Edda, the Norse gods are Trojan warriors who used their superior technology to convince the Scandenavians they were divine.
- There was that Jules Verne novel where they go across Africa in a hot air balloon and at some point the natives decide it's the moon; the characters escape just as the real moon is about to rise. Hence, Older Than Radio.
Live Action TV
- This trope can be found in almost every incarnation of Star Trek.
- Star Trek The Original Series. In the episode "The Paradise Syndrome", an amnesiac Kirk is mistaken for a god by transplanted American Indians on a distant planet, and in "Who Mourns for Adonais", an actual surviving Greek God reveals he's just a powerful alien who had become too used to being worshipped by mortals. In "The Omega Glory", Spock is mistaken for The Devil due to his resemblance to a picture of Satan in a book.
- The Star Trek The Next Generation episode "Who Watches The Watchers?" features a specific discussion of this trope: that is, how do you talk a race out of this without destroying them?
- Star Trek Voyager. In "False Profits", a couple of Ferengi are mistaken for gods thanks to their magical replicator, whereas the far better "Muse" has B'Elanna crashing on a planet and being mistaken for an 'eternal' (a powerful being of legend) by a local poet, who uses her logs to write a play. There's a certain amount of give-and-take (the poet needs inspiration for his play which he hopes will turn his fickle warlord patron away from war; B'Elanna needs help repairing her shuttle) before the two gain a mutual respect, with B'Elanna even providing a literal Deus Ex Machina at the end.
- Star Trek also subverts this, to a degree, with the Federation's Prime Directive — since it's all-too-easy to get a swelled head from being called a "god", the Prime Directive forbids starship captains from interfering in a lesser-developed culture, to protect both captain and alien from the effects of pseudo-godhood.
- Does it count as a subversion if it's ignored whenever the plot finds it convenient?
- "If"?
- Seen repeatedly in Stargate SG-1 (as well as the original Stargate movie) — usually, anyone who comes through the Stargate is automatically assumed to be a god. (This is perfectly in tune with the plot, however. The Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who stole the gates have invested a lot of energy in making this happen; it's less a Cargo Cult than somebody else's Path Of Inspiration.)
- Doctor Who: "The Myth Makers", "Underworld", and many others.
- A variation appears in "The Face of Evil", where the Doctor is instead mistaken for The Evil One (and the resemblance is not a coincidence).
- In the Doctor Who serial "The Aztecs", Barbara is mistaken for the Aztec god Yetaxa and tries to use her position to change the Aztec Empire.
- Used again in the new series episode "The Fires of Pompeii", wherein the Doctor and Donna become the household gods of a Roman family they rescue from the titular Doomed Hometown.
- Subverted in "The Time Monster" (Pertwee Doctor). The Master materialises his TARDIS in Atlantis, convinced he'll easily dupe these primitives into thinking he's a god, but the wily king sees through his charlatan's tricks and laughs off an attempt to hypnotise him. To add insult to injury, as the Master is being led off by the guards he runs right into the Doctor and Jo Grant whom he last saw in his inescapable Death Trap. The Master is so speechless with fury that Jo has to provide his retort: "How about: Curses! Foiled Again!"
- Subverted, sort of, in "Genesis Of The Daleks". The Daleks originally come from the practical necessity of the Kaled race needing travel machines and life support systems to cope with the results of the mutations caused by an ongoing nuclear war; their creator, Davros, actively attempts to set himself up as a God, leading a race of machine creatures built partly in his own image to conquer the universe. He neglects to realise that, in practice, the genocidal racism he instils in his creatures (as a way of inspiring them to conquer other worlds) also extends to him and the Daleks gun him down at the first opportunity.
- Played with in the Expanded Universe novel "Shining Darkness", where the natives of one planet VERY eagerly collect and cast off cargo cult religions like they were baseball cards.
- In The West Wing, a reporter reveals that he was once mistaken for a god by a primitive tribe.
- Though since he was flirting at the time, this may have been facetious.
- In the British children's program Roger And The Rotten Trolls, all one needed to do to become king/god of the trolls was to stand in the middle of an abandoned quarry and yell "Roger was here", as the trolls had an ancient document (graffiti on the wall of the quarry) that said those exact words.
- The Red Dwarf episode "Waiting For God" reveals that the race of humanoids that evolved from Lister's pet cat discovered his plan to move to Fiji (which they called Fuschal) and open a hot dog and donut stand, and built an entire religion around it. They decimated themselves in a holy war over what color the silly hats for the wait staff would be, and then the survivors left to search for Fuschal using star charts left behind by "Cloister" — the old laundry list used by Lister to line the original cat's bed. (The colors fought over were red and blue. Lister, however, intended them to be green.)
- In the novelization, the cats are waiting for "Cloister", who has been frozen in time, but will one day reemerge to lead them to "Bearth". The other cats believe exactly the same thing, except he was called "Clister". Naturally, they nearly wipe out their own species in religious war, then leave to find the promised land.
- Later again subverted by Red Dwarf: Through a twist of fate, Rimmer ends up on a world where, somehow, he spawns a new civilisation from clones of himself and installs himself as their god-leader. He defines perfection in looking and acting exactly as he does (being a snivelling coward, for example). His followers are so fanatical, however, that he himself is deposed for being "imperfect" and gets thrown in a dungeon.
- In the Farscape episode "Jeremiah Crichton", John Crichton gets marooned on a planet which turns out to have religious iconography drawn from contact with the Rygel's race, the Hynerians. Surprisingly for the usually shallow ex-monarch, while Rygel expects to be treated like royalty, he is actually profoundly offended that his ancestors would allow themselves to be taken for divinity.
- In Smallville, a Kryptonian visitor to Earth became the basis for an Indian tribe's religion, and a prophecy about him (or someone like him) returning some day to save the world.
- In the Angel episode "Over the Rainbow", Cordelia is made a princess by the people of Pylea, as the result of her visions. Unfortunately, the power behind the throne is a Religion Of Evil.
Tabletop Games
- In Exalted, certain characters can take on a cult of people who worship them as gods, granting them an extra boost of power. In fact, the Lunars, as part of their social-engineering long game, are not above posing as gods to influence the development of a burgeoning culture.
- Mind you, many of the Exalted can fight the creators of the universe and win, so it's not that huge an imposture.
- And considering that Gods and Exalted literally differ only in that Gods are immortal and Exalted aren't, it's even less of a stretch.
- Warhammer 40000's Imperium of Man combines this with Ancient Astronauts in an interesting fashion, as the overwhelming majority of the technology they use predates the incident that put the Emperor on life-support, and maintenance has become more of a religious ceremony than anything else. There's also a counterexample. According to some of the fluff, there is an actual, genuine reincarnation of the Emperor of Mankind walking around somewhere in the universe, and he has no idea. He's unable to access his powers and memory because his old body is on life support in the Golden Throne. If any person actually claimed this, he would be shot dead as a heretic. Then, everyone who ever met him. And the guy who shot him. And everyone who ever met him.
- It Gets Worse. Also in the works is the Emperor's renewal plan. In his long long span before the life support, the man fathered kids, lots of them. They have no psi at all, but do have his insanely long lifespan and a rather strong potential. One of the Emperor's Children learned of the priestly clan's plans to feed the kids into the Life-furnaces and thereby renew the Emperor to full health. He promptly turned traitor, taking his whole Legion with him.
- As a milder example, a man once saved by Ciaphas Cain, HERO OF THE IMPERIUM, founded a cult worshiping him as an embodiment of the Emperor's will. Cain isn't aware of this.
- Then there's the Orks, who's weapons and vehicles often do not actually have functioning parts, but instead work because the entire race has psychic powers and believes they're real. And that painting vehicles red makes them go faster. It actually does — for them.
- In the Ravenloft setting, the Barovian church of the Morninglord was founded by a semi-addled priest who, as a young boy, had been rescued from certain death by the vampire elf Jander Sunstar. Although the faith resembles the Forgotten Realms' worship of the god Lathander, artwork and tales of Barovia's version depict this deity as resembling Jander Sunstar.
Video Games
- Skies Of Arcadia features the Native American-inspired land of Ixa'taka. When the player's party arrives, the natives mistake the silver-clothed Mysterious Waif as their goddess, due to an ancestress of her technologically advanced people helping subdue a thousand foot rampaging monster millenia ago. Subverted in that, even though she tries to convince them she's not a goddess, by game's end, only the king and main priest believe her. Everybody else happily continues to treat her as a deity.
- While not exactly a cult of any form of supernatural beings, This Troper had been left thinking when he encountered the inhabitants of planet Taris' Undercity from the Star Wars game KotOR. As living in conditions that are comaprable to that of the poorer African countries or India's slums, they believed in a "Promised Land" (which in truth was most likely just some other part of the sewers with higher hygene standards), a place they were destinated to find and begin a new, better, life. Plus, they refer to anyone who cames there from the upper level as "Upworlders" or "Those from above", which means they didn't even have an idea how their planet was named (or if it even was a planet?) or what exactly was above. Brings on some similarities to the primitive and/or isolated tribes of the undeveloped world... And puts things into perspective, when the Sith begin their planetary bombardement. What were these people thinking when their world shattered around them for reasons completely unknown to them?
- In Fallout 3, the town of Megaton has an undetonated atomic bomb in the town square, and much of the early development was done with the help of those who came to worship the bomb. Oddly enough, disarming the bomb seems to have no noticeable effect on the cult (but then again, you can't really tell an armed nuke from the unarmed kind until they blow.)
- Fallout Tactics also featured a cult of Ghoul's worshiping a nuclear weapon, which they named Plutonius.
- Project Eden has the earth people, who live on the ground (everybody else lives in really tall skyscraper) and mentioned they would be scared to live so high up, in case they fell down like the rubbish they collect.
- In The Journyman Project 2, one of the possible game-overs is the result of the player creating a time paradox if he gets himself discovered while time traveling to a pre-Columbian Mayan City. The Have A Nice Death screen reveals that, because of your time travel suit, the natives mistake you for a god, and shows them building a statue dedicated to you.
Webcomics
- Schlock Mercenary sorta subverts this trope. While the primitive natives of a backwater planet do revere the mercenary company, they view Schlock as... the excrement of a huge and very sick pack beast. Aforementioned natives also throw their mercenary-given robot messiah into a volcano, so you know that they don't have the proper viewpoint about things.
- Subverted even harder in Order of the Stick, when Elan visits an island filled with primitive orcs. At first, they treat him like any other human... until he brings out Banjo, when they start bowing in supplication. That's right: the orcs thought that Elan's kooky hand-puppet was a god.
- Of course, Elan also thinks Banjo's a god. He's actually pretty stoked that someone else is acknowledging it, although he's not so happy that the orcs won't give Banjo back.
- Lampshaded by Vaarsuvius when V says that Elan being worshipped as a god by a primitive tribe would indicate that the webcomic had lost its last shred of originality.
- In Yamara, the titular protagonist had ascended to godhood for a storyline, and accidentally had a religion grow around her by the time she returned to normal — except for the three wishes she was granted as a "parting gift". She finally tries to talk her followers out of it with a heartfelt and humble speech — which she ends by saying "I wish you all the finest things in life" when she's on her last wish. An audience member says, "Whatta kidder!"
- In Girl Genius, the Villain's Beautiful Daughter, Lucrezia Mongfish, is worshipped by the Geisterdamen. No one really knows why. Doesn't stop her from using them as highly convenient minions when she turns Big Bad.
Western Animation
- Appears in the Hi Hi Puffy Ami Yumi episode "Kaz Almighty".
- In the Futurama episode "Godfellas", Bender ends up drifting in space, where he becomes deity to the Shrimpkins, a race of miniature people who end up settling on his body. His bad advice results in the Shrimpkins wiping themselves out through nuclear warfare.
- At the end of Beast Wars, the resident Chew Toy Waspinator is shown being worshipped as a god by the protohumans.
- Even earlier in the Transformers mythos, the G1 second-season episode 'The God Gambit' follows the second variant by having a tribe of Rubber Forehead Aliens on the moon Titan worshipping a statue that looked vaguely Transformer-like, before actual Transformers crash-landed there.
- Lisa, in one Treehouse of Horror episode of The Simpsons. An accident with her science fair project creates a race of miniature people, who think she is a god for stopping Bart destroying them.
- There's an ep of Josie And The Pussy Cats In Outer Space where Melody is mistaken for a God.
- In the animated series Stormhawks, the inhabitants of the Terra Vapos just happened to have a legend depicted on a series of murals that had Finn as a great hero that would save them... by being eaten.
- In one episode of Teen Titans, Raven crash-lands on a planet inhabited by tiny aliens, and is worshiped as a goddess simply for being more than three inches tall.
- In the Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers episode "Kiwi's Big Adventure", a tribe of Kiwis worship the Ranger Plane as a deity and expect it to give them back their ability to fly.
- In "The Case of the Cola Cult", a large group of mice in tunics worship a soda brand.
- In the Jonny Quest episode "Pursuit of the Po-Ho", the tribe takes the Quests' plane to be their sky god when they hear an amplified voice coming from it and speaking their native tongue. A later scene where a berry-dyed Race Bannon rises from the water and shouts at them in English, though, strains credibility a bit.
- In the Franco-Japanese series The Mysterious Cities Of Gold, the lead character is believed to be a god by various New World tribes, partly ripped from the 16th-century headlines and partly due to his hereditary MacGuffin.
Real Life
- As mentioned above, the fateful meeting between the Aztec and the Spanish. The Spanish certainly fit the role of gods to the natives: pale and bearded men, clad in metal, mounted on strange beasts, and could summon fire and thunder at will from ships mistaken for floating towers, not to mention arriving at a prophesied time after a wave of bad omens. While not outright worshiping these "gods", the Aztecs instead were plagued with indecision and fear, and this allowed the Spanish to set up a base of operations, ally with the Aztecs' sworn enemies, crush the Aztecs' allies, and be let into the Aztec capital and hold the Emperor Montezuma himself as a prisoner in his own home before the Aztecs finally struck back. Of course, the Spanish eventually prevailed and destroyed the Aztec Empire at the height of its power. As a final insult, before the Spanish counterattack (helped by surprise Spanish reinforcements), a plague brought by the Spanish invaders struck the Aztecs, killing most of them and causing the survivors to believe that the invaders' God was more powerful then the Aztecs' gods. Such is the cruel and twisted hand of fate.
- They were less like "sworn enemies" than "other tribes killed by the Aztecs for their sacrifices". The Aztecs were bloodthirsty warlike people. Only people who never met them want to preserve that culture. There is a reason why the Toltecs worked with the Spanish.
- The Prince Phillip Movement. The Yaohnanen tribe of the island of Tanna in Vanuatu believe that Prince Phillip of the British Royal Family is a god on earth. For centuries, they had a legend of the pale-skinned son of a mountain spirit travelling across the seas, looking for a powerful woman to marry. After colonization, when portraits of Phillip and Queen Elizabeth II became common, he became associated with the spirit. When Phillip himself became aware of this, he sent them a signed picture, and they sent back a traditional nal-nal club, with him sending back a picture of himself posing with it.
- In a similar vein, Rastafarianism, despite originating as your fairly run-of-the-mill religious sect dedicated to sacramental mind-expanding drugs, somehow embraced the belief that Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie was the Messiah.
- And that Elizabeth II was the devil.
- And/or the Pope, The President of the United States, and/or western society in general. It's a very diverse belief system, especially what with having a lot of emphasis on personal interpretation.
- As mentioned, the John Frum cults. Frum himself is a sort of amalgamation of Uncle Sam, Santa Claus, and John the Baptist; the name is believed to be a corruption of "John from America", though another theory holds that it's based on a letter "from John". They believe he will return on a February 15th, celebrated each year as John Frum day. In some circles, John Frum is considered to be Prince Phillip's brother.
- A National Geographic reporter asked a John Frum cult leader how he could still keep a cargo cult going despite the modernizations that have come to his island. The leader replied "We've only been waiting for our prophet for 60 years. You've been waiting for 2,000."
- Happened to Nicholai Miklukho-Maklai
 . Tribals considered him to be a divine entity, and he could put an end to a war with a single word.
- In Middle Congo and Gabon, in the 40's and 50's, some people held a cult to a divinity named N'Gol, which statues pictured him with a tall, tube-like head, his mouth wide open and both his arms raised high. A Lovecraftian divinity? Nope. Actually, it was the General de Gaulle.
- Essentially, the whole point of Erich von Däniken is that even the "high cultural" religions (especially Mayan, Aztec, Mesopotamic, Egyptian and Judeo-Christian) are but Cargo Cults — only that those were triggered by prehistoric visits of space-travelling aliens.
- James P. Hogan's Giants Trilogy of science fiction novels includes as one of its premises that all Earth's religions are Cargo Cults deliberately started by a different, extraterrestrial branch of humanity in order to retard Earth's cultural and scientific development.
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