I understand.
When I discovered kava, I discovered cargo cults at about the same time. I knew about both of them for a long time, but didn't understand their true power.
I had to also come to grips with the nature of biology. Isa and Madang Short really helped, being more primitive kavas. I also had the benefit of Ray Comfort saying that his favorite plant, the banana, was evidence for his favorite deity, and having an epic Interwebs fail, because he failed to understand the Cavendish cultivar wasn't "the Banana as God Intended."
As my spirituality/religiosity became more and more informed by kava, and my knowledge of kava increased with my natural aptitude towards the subject of botany, my definition of "ancestor worship" changed from an "honor thy mother and thy father" to something best catagorized by an actual quote I mined directly from Richard Dawkins, "We are, in any era, the organisms that live contain the genes of an unbroken line of successful ancestors. It has to be true. Plenty of the ancestors’ competitors were not successful. They all died. But not a single one of your ancestors died young, or not a single one of your ancestors failed to copulate, not a single one of your ancestors failed to rear at least one child."
I've never been comfortable with the concept of "worship" meaning blind obedience. Perhaps because I am autistic and therefore perseverate, my worship takes the form of study. My love is a love of learning and of the things I learn. "The Ancestor's Tale" is designed to be such a pilgrimage, a pilgrimage of learning that takes one back through one's individual ancestors to the last common human ancestors to the ancestors of 39 other taxa all the way back to the Last Common Universal Ancestor. Such a pilgrimage shows that we are related, not only to all of each other, but to the kava we drink, the bugs we must protect our kava from, the fungus that attacks our kava, and even the bacteria that fix the nitrogen in the kava's soil. We all share, at some point, the same ancestors.
And by keeping to Kastom and honoring these ancestors, we'll be rewarded with cargo.
