The Body as the Place Where Babylon Is Resisted

Cannabis holds a sacramental place in several Rastafari houses, used especially during reasoning sessions, extended discussions in which participants work through scripture and doctrine together, and at Nyabinghi gatherings, the movement's principal communal ceremonial occasions. Rastafari have argued for the religious standing of this practice in courts in several countries, seeking the same kind of protection other traditions receive for their own sacraments, though the practice is not universal across the movement and different houses take different positions on it; it is recorded here as something actually done within parts of Rastafari rather than as something the tradition as a whole recommends or requires. What connects diet, hair and sacramental use under the single heading of livity is a broader refusal running through Rastafari thought, the refusal to treat health, food and personal grooming as matters that sit outside religion, separate from doctrine and worship. Livity instead makes the body itself the ground on which Babylon, the movement's name for the whole system of historical and ongoing oppression, is either quietly accepted through careless daily habit or actively resisted through deliberate daily practice.