Babylon is the movement's central category, and it is political and religious at once because Rastafari does not separate the two. The name is taken from the exile of Israel and applied to the condition of Africans in the Americas, so that the plantation, the colonial state and their successors are read as one captivity with a scriptural precedent and a promised end. What counts as Babylon is broad: the police and the courts, which policed Rastafari heavily for decades, the churches that had blessed slavery, and the wider order of commerce and consumption the movement calls on its members to withdraw from. The category explains a good deal of Rastafari practice that otherwise looks unconnected, including the refusal of processed food, the preference for self-employment and craft, and a vocabulary deliberately rebuilt to avoid words felt to carry Babylon's assumptions. Zion is its opposite, and the relation between the two organises the movement's account of where history has been and where it is going.
Facts
Origins
Origin of the NameThe name is taken from the Babylonian exile of Israel in the Hebrew scriptures and applied to the condition of Africans in the Americas, so that the plantation and the colonial state are read as one captivity with a scriptural precedent. 1 Structure
StructureA paired opposition rather than a single term. Babylon covers the police and the courts, the churches that blessed slavery, and the wider order of commerce and consumption; Zion is its opposite, and the relation between the two organises the movement account of where history has been and where it is going. 1 Status
Status Within the TraditionStandard teaching, not formally defined 1 Doctrinal CategoryAfrican and Diaspora Concepts 1 Learn More
What Babylon Meant in Jamaica in April 1963
The clearest instance of Babylon acting on Rastafari in the movement's own history took place at Coral Gardens near Montego Bay in April 1963. A land dispute at a gas station escalated into violence between a small group of Rastafari and police, several people on both sides were killed, and the Jamaican government responded with a mass roundup that swept up Rastafari across the parish regardless of any connection to the incident, cutting the dreadlocks of men taken into custody and holding many without clear charge. Rastafari in Jamaica still refer to the events as Bad Friday, and the episode is remembered inside the movement as confirmation rather than surprise, an instance in which the state, the police and the courts behaved exactly as the doctrine had already named them as behaving, so that Coral Gardens functions less as evidence introduced from outside the belief than as a case the belief had already made room for. The scale of the response, cutting hair understood as a Nazirite vow and detaining people whose only connection to the violence was wearing locks or living nearby, is what gave the term Babylon its concrete, remembered referent inside Jamaica specifically, distinct from the broader use of the same word for the whole history of slavery and colonial rule the movement also draws on.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
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