I’m not sure what to even call this other than a motif or theme, but I’m fascinated by stories or novels or theories or etc. where something normal is misunderstood or viewed through a cultural lens and then worshipped, feared, or so on.
The best example I can think of is the James Tiptree Jr. short story, “The Man who walked home.” The basic gist of the story (and it’s been years, so forgive whatever errors I make) is that an astronaut is caught in some sort of gravitational timewave or something, and as a result becomes stuck in a sort of time loop where he appears in the same spot, briefly, every 10 years or so. The story takes place over centuries as entire villages and different culturess rise and fall, all based around the “miraculous” appearance of “the monster.”
A similar example is in Lord of the Flies, where the “beast” that the wild children fear and worship is actually the corpse of a paratrooper that was sent to rescue them; his “wings” are the parachute, and so on.
I’ve heard all sorts of (mostly crackpot) theories that invoke this idea in relation to historical events or artifacts - that the Ark of the Covenant may have been some sort of piece of alien technology that was just misunderstood by the people of the time, or that Jesus himself was an alien but appeared miraculous to the people of his era, and so on.
What are some other fictions - short stories, novels, movies, whatever - that use this idea or motif? What about real-world historical theories (no matter how tinfoil hat they may be) that apply this idea to historical events, people, or artifacts?
Philip K. Dick wrote a neat little story in the '50s called Roog.
It’s told from the POV of a family’s dog. Like he does every week, the dog is awaiting the arrival of the Roog – a behemoth that lumbers along the alley while its evil attendant blatantly steals the table scraps and other valuables that the family keeps secured in a shiny protective cannister and feeds it to it. The dog knows that it is courting death by challenging the Roog, but it’ll do anything for its family, in spite of being hampered by a length of chain and the lamentable fact that no one listens to its most earnest warnings!
I’m not sure if this quite counts, but in Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen, gunpowder was thought to be a miraculous substance given to his priests by the god Styphon.
In Heirs of Empire the “Voice of God” was the voice of a Fourth Empire battleship’s AI. The maintainance robots were considered “holy servitors”.
In Code of the Lifemaker, a lost wrench was recovered by sentient robots, and taken to be a holy icon.
In Footfall religious wars are fought over a monolith left by the predecessor race to the fithp; some think the complex markings on and in it represented the face of the species that built it. In reality, it was a representation of the magnetic field for a Bussard ramjet ( interstellar drive ).
IIRC, elephant skulls in ancient Greece were thought to be the skulls of cyclops, and the pre Greek ruins built by them ( because surely no mere humans could build better than them ).
In The Gods Must Be Crazy, a Coke bottle falls from a plane and lands amongst a tribe with no experience of modern technology at all; never having seen blown glass before, they assume it’s a tool of the gods and eventually decide to return it to them. Really good movie, and pretty well-known.
In the original series Star Trek “A Piece of the Action” a book on Chicago mobs becomes a holy book transforming a civilization.
(In an issue of the 1970s comic book “Kamandi”, Jack Kirby has a future society of monkeys that has discovered the Watergate Tapes, and based a society on them. Truly surreal.)
Not exactly what you’re looking for, but in the old Twilight Zone episode caled (I think) “The Old Man in the Cave” people worship a computer.
In Beneath the Planet of the Apes the underground mutants worship The Holy Bomb.
I came to mention the Gods must be crazy, but I also came to think of The Return of the Jedi, where the Ewoks treat C3P0 as a divine being. He might not be normal to us viewers, but he seems to be of standard fare to the humanoid characters.
The novel Dream Park revolved around a cargo cult though the actual people were constructs of a game and actors.
Sharon Shinn wrote a couple books (Archangel and Jovah’s Angel) about a Biblical era world of humans and angels who, unknown to them, have an orbiting starship as their deity. The whole Spaceship = God thing doesn’t really play into the first book at all (and could be safely ignored without detracting from the plot) but it central to the second book. To be fair to the people and angels involved, the ship does present itself as a deity in its communications so it’s not exactly like worshipping a refridgerator.
Well, in the book of Acts Paul and Silas get mistaken for Mercury and Jupiter, respectively, when they go around preaching the Gospel and doing miraculous healings.
Later on, they get run out of town by the very same people, probably because Paul manages to convince them that he isn’t a god.
Doctor Who had a tribe of savages descended from the survivors of a crashed starship, who worshipped its still-functioning computer as a god. (One of the Doctor’s companions, Leela, was a member of that tribe.)
Men In Black II (yes, I paid money to see it) had a society of tiny aliens who had based their society around marketing slogans for a video rental store, discovered on a membership card they found. “Two For One on Wednesdays! Large Adult Section in the Back!”
Another (very strange) episode of Star Trek had the inhabitants of a planet worship the US Constitution. In Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” stories, the foundation deliberately creates a religion based around its advanced technology for the benefit of its less technologically advanced neighbors.
I can remember reading an illustrated novel about archeologists from the future investigating a house from our time (well, from the eighties, I suppose) and completely misinterpreting what they find. The interprete the television as an altar because everything in the room is pointed towards it, the lid of the toilet as a ceremonial collar and the toilet brush was also seen as religious equipment. Can’t for the live remember the title of the book.
Check out By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benét, who gives us a few clues about what we knew the Place of the Gods as before it was holy ruins.
Also, and I’m sure someone else will have more detail, but IIRC in Red Dwarf there’s an episode where The Cat finds out that his peoples’ religion is founded on Lister somehow.
I forgot the title and author of the story, but I recall a short story where the main character is blasted back several thousand in time by a lightning strike (ok, it’s a lame plot device, but it was a good story). He was a U. S. soldier stationed in Norway. He finds a village that is being threatened by raiders from the mountains, becomes friends with them and when the raiders attack, he fights alongside them, using the .45 automatic he carries. Everyone thinks he is throwing lightning because they have no concept of a firearm. After the fight, he gets zotted back to the present time.
He then realizes that he has become the basis of the Norse god Thor. His .45 has been transformed into Mjolnir, the hammer of lightning.