Bob Marley's birthday was February 6, a couple of weeks back, and it got me thinking again about the reach of Rastafarianism in popular culture and about how if you really want to find out about what Rastafarianism is and does, it's not easy. It used to be, before GoWesting.Com, that if you searched my name on Google, the only contact you could make with me was by way of a seminar on Rastafarianism I helped to organize when I was at Harvard Divinity School called "Kingdom Rise, Kingdom Fall." That process was interesting in itself, and spoke to the different types of people who have been affected by Rasta beliefs, and about what they want to perpetuate as the legacy of Rasta.

 

These days you can search Rastafari and you'll come up with a few decent and basic information sources on the religion's origin, history, beliefs, and sects. But the best scholarly work on them is still The Rastafarians by Leonard Barrett, which was published in 1977 and is at times incomprehensible. Not to mention that it pre-dates the worldwide impact of Bob Marley and the appropriation of Rasta identity by whites all over the world. The book is valuable but it's not satisfying.

If you research Rasta you'll come up with a fairly standard information set. It has its roots in Kingston slums and dates from sometime after the coronation of Ethiopian King Haile Selassie I, the Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah , in 1930. It is heavily influenced by the teachings of Marcus Garvey, who preached black supremacy and re-patriation of Africa. It is also influenced by African religion or Jamaican "bush" religion, and by religious tent revival culture, which exploded in Jamaica around the time Rastafarianism emerged. The first great leader of the Rastafarian movement was Leonard Howell, who was institutionalized by the Jamaican government after founding and ruling a Rasta encampment between Kingston and Spanish Town for almost 30 years. He is reported to have had thirteen wives.

Rastafarians believe that the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, whose tribal name was Ras Tafari, is the re-incarnate Christ, the God-Man, and that he will lead the brothers and sisters out of Babylon back to Africa and reign in eternal triumph. They also believe that God is manifest in humanity, that heaven is on earth, and in this sense they can claim to be a Gnostic sect. The third primary tenet belief is that the Black African, those living both in Africa and in the diaspora, are the Israelites of the Old Testament. This belief may or may not include elements of Black supremacy, or for that matter, of White evil.

There are three main branches of the Rasta religion: Bobo Shanti, Nyabingi, and Twelve Tribes. These categories are pretty dangerous if you're a student of anthropology, but they are almost always cited. Bobo Shanti are the most "orthodox" sect and still adhere to black supremacy as a tenant. They trace their ethnic identity to the Ashanti tribe of Ghana, from whom it is rumored many Jamaican slaves were descended. The Bobo Shanti wear their heads wrapped in cloth. Nyabingi is the original Rasta sect, basically the ancestral name of Leonard Howell's brand of rasta. The name comes from the 19th century Queen of Uganda who resisted colonial oppression. The Twelve Tribes are the newest and "most liberal" sect. This is the sect that flourished throughout the world in the 1970s. Bob Marley was a convert to teh Twelve Tribes from Nyabingism and is considered its greatest prophet, Tuff Gong.

 

As my dad would say, the historical classification of Rastafarianism and a dime will get you a cup of coffee. Which is to say, rasta is most interesting as a live, oral, syncretic belief system whose practitioners ritually smoke weed and who believe that spoken language is consecrated. You say wha say?

The key to approaching Rasta is understanding the concept of the I and I. Namely that God is firmly embedded in humanity and vice versa, and paradoxically, that there is tension between God-hood and humanity that must be treated with wisdom.

Wisdom can be attained by listening to wisdom sayings, by observing nature, by experiencing song and rhythm, all under the influence of ganja, the wisdom weed, the holy herb sprung from the grave of King Solomon, the One Holy Prophet of Wisdom. It is not coincidental that the most used Biblical sayings in the Rasta cult (and in most Christian cults) are from the Biblical books attributed to Solomon: Proverbs, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Job, Song of Songs. Both Exodus, Samuel, and Kings are also quoted heavily, as King David is the Biblical  paradigm for the realized man as an earthly ruler, the Conquering Lion.

I and I then, which is how a Rasta refers to him/her self, recognizes unity in dualism, and in the total potential for divinity of the human being. When you say "I and I" you are saying a prayer that affirms your quest to attain your own divinity. Ganja, when smoked rtualistically, sheds the scales from human eyes, separates the practitioner from the perception of self-hood, a perception which itself perpetuates the Babylon system, (aka the system of colonial slavery.)  The suppression of the pronoun "me" in Rasta is a characteristic of the ritualization of spoken language and speaks to the Rasta insistence on his/her spiritual existence and the rejection of his existence as an object of the Babylon system. The truth will set you free!

Read the words from Bob Marley's Soul Rebel, one of his earliest expressions of his Rasta beliefs. It's a simple song that carries the lesson of self-affirmation and the quest for realization.

"See the morning sun
on the hillside.
If you're not living good,
You gotta travel wide.

Said I'm a living man.
I've got work to do.
If you're not happy children,
Then you must be blue.

I'm a rebel, soul rebel,
I'm a capturer, soul adventurer."

The Rasta believer, these days, may be a dread in Trenchtown , but is more likely a white, black, or brown person who is disenchanted with his/her own cultural access to spirituality, who lives outside of Jamaica, who smokes weed and who has established a unique belief system based on the revelations provided by Bob Marley as a prophet, by self-examination, and by listening to Rasta music, chiefly Jamaican reggae.

What is the essence of Rastafarianism's influence on its broader diaspora? I believe that people who have internalized Rasta beliefs mostly don't talk about it, because they don't want to be perceived as weed-smoking, naïve re-appropriators of a Jamaican belief system founded in African nationalism. At the same time though, as the influence of smoking weed grows in the youth culture, so too does the value of a system of wisdom teaching that accounts for the altered perception that weed-smoking affords and also one that firmly grasps the power of a belief system in which a colonial social structure is resisted actively without violence through wisdom and self-enlightenment. Which raises another question: "Can Rasta new believers use the stoy of their  forebears as a cultural allegory applied to their own condition like the early Rasta used the Israelites to make meaning out of their situation in the African diaspora?

 

I found Bob Marley first in high school, and like most people, started with the album Legend. I generally only listened to U2, Bob Marley, and whatever rap was current for four years. U2 satisfied my cultural yearning to be Irish, but was itself a spiritual expression of resistance and self-affirmation. As I delved deeper into Bob Marley, read more about him, watched videos, I saw an expression of masculine spirituality I had never witnessed before and I liked it.

Studying theology brought me to the Gnostic debate, to systematic theology, to the study of liturgy and ritual. And my interest in Rasta steadily I-ncreased.

Take the following three Rasta sayings:

"The stone that the builder refuses, shall be the head cornerstone." Psalm 118

"Everyday the bucket a go a well, one day the bottom must drop out." Jamaican saying

"You can't reject your history, nor your destiny. In the abundance of water only the fool is thirsty." Bob Marley

Now connect the dots and you have an anti-establishment, self-affirming wisdom cult with roots in history and a belief in its fulfillment.

The reason I'm writing this is mainly because I want to start a conversation about what Rasta means to different people, to gather info, and to share ideas. If you're interested, write me and tell me what you're thinking.

Top Links for Rasta Info:

BBC
Wikipedia
Jamaicans.Com

Smithsonian.Org

Swagga.com

Rastafarian.net