How might we understand health and healing if we started, not from a hospital or clinic, but from the graveyard? This paper explores this question through historical-archival and ethnographic analysis of Jamaican Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order” and its physician-healers. While Jamaican Revivalists are often viewed through an afrophobic lens that imagines them as perverse necromancers gallivanting in graveyards under the cover of dark, conjuring the dead for nefarious works; this paper reframes Revivalists’ relationship with the dead, through what I term, their graveyard etiology. Within this paradigm, disease, affliction, and misfortune, originate in the land of the dead, as it did for their Bakongo ancestors. Simultaneously, the land of the dead is also the source of powerful remedies for affliction. As such, the paper shows how the graveyard, as both a tangible physical site and a semiotic referent, is central to the healing, health, and well-being of the community.
Revival Zion is a Kongo-heritage religion birthed in Jamaica in the 19th century. It has roots in Central and Western African belief systems and practices, particularly the twin conjuring and healing traditions of Obeah and Myal, as well as the later Christian evangelical revivals of the 1860s. Enslaved Africans in Jamaica mobilized both Obeah and Myal towards the exigencies of their reality within an unrelenting plantation society where “death was at the center of social experience for everyone” (Brown 2010, 13). In the years immediately following emancipation, Jamaica continued to be plagued by disease, natural disasters, and economic injustices, and the newly freed slaves were disillusioned (Payne-Jackson and Alleyne 2004). In the face of these tribulations, and even in the contemporary moment, African-Jamaicans marshal the resources of these traditions towards multiply-layered forms of healing and wholeness.
Revival is divided into two orders, Revival 60 sometimes called Zion or the Gospel Order and Revival 61, known as the Physician’s Order. Revival 60 practitioners primarily work with “celestial spirits” like the archangels, Biblical messengers, and the Holy Spirit, while Revival 61 practitioners work with earth-bound spirits, ground spirits, or “dry bones,” which are the dead. This link between ‘61 practitioners and the dead is a source of antipathy towards the religion, but it is also critical to their understanding of healing and health. In the early literature, Myal was often described as the science of “taking off” and Obeah as the science of “putting on” (Espeut 2019). While Obeah could be used to both heal and harm, it was often framed in terms of its antisocial utility. On the other hand, Myal was almost exclusively considered a communal practice of invoking ancestors through trance and possession towards community upliftment. The contemporary scholarship troubles this binary and shows the myriad ways in which these practices are intertwined.
The proposed paper explores the complexities of healing within the plantation and its afterlife through Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order.” It argues that Revivalists’ relationship to the dead, and the graveyard, is animated by a Kongo sensibility and cosmology. For the Bakongo, and subsequently Revivalists, there is no clear distinction between human life, nature, and spiritual entities, rather it is within a single packet that the spirit world and the world of the living are entwined. This packet is divided only by kalûnga, a porous, watery boundary between the land of the living and the land of the dead. To maintain harmony between the two worlds, humans must maintain contact with their ancestors in the other world. The paper shows how this interaction between the mundane sphere of the living and the spirit world of the dead, facilitated by “graveyard physicians,” is a source of medicine.
How might we understand health and healing if we started, not from a hospital or clinic, but from the graveyard? This paper explores this question through historical-archival and ethnographic analysis of Jamaican Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order” and its physician-healers. While Jamaican Revivalists are often viewed through an afrophobic lens that imagines them as perverse necromancers gallivanting in graveyards under the cover of dark, conjuring the dead for nefarious works; this paper reframes Revivalists’ relationship with the dead, through what I term, their graveyard etiology. Within this paradigm, disease, affliction, and misfortune, originate in the land of the dead, as it did for their Bakongo ancestors. Simultaneously, the land of the dead is also the source of powerful remedies for affliction. As such, the paper shows how the graveyard, as both a tangible physical site and a semiotic referent, is central to the healing, health, and well-being of the community.