A Sort of Paradise and Pocomania

Any tea, a sort of paradise, take one. For the food. The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. The National Educational Television Network is the National Educational Television Network.

A magic lake in the clouds, a hidden place of haunting, moody perfection. A Shangri-la you might reach in some wild search for happiness, some impossible dream of escape. A Tidua, a sort of paradise. This lake's a mile high, set in a volcanic landscape. And should there be a lovely uplace anywhere in the world, I've yet to find it.

I came down to Guatemala 19 years ago, got to this village of Punahatchel in the lake. There was an Indian path you could see along the whole mountainside. So with two other men I just took a walk to a point in the distance. I had no intention of me to attend, I needed to do what I was doing. But I got up to this point, looked to the right, looked to the left, said to the men I was with. Boys, this is it, went back and bought the mountain. His mountains high in the Sierra Madre. This massive range dramatizes the heart of Guatemala. A tiny land you can hardly find in the world at us. Another banana republic, straddling Central America south of Mexico. Smaller than England, yet crammed with 33 volcanoes, a prodigiously gifted country of unknown beauty,

of a flaccid eternal summer, where listless trees bear flowers and fruit at the same time, and shed autumnal leaves the year round, where on the shores of its most beautiful lake, among dark and perfect mountains, live three unusually handsome Indian tribes. Each with its own language, its own costume, and its own witch doctors. The only Indians who may worship at shrines upon the sacred peaks of these immense volcanoes. This is a luscious land of political as well as volcanic eruptions. The whole country is still in what's called a state of siege after the last revolution, the noisy dismissal of the last president. But these regular palace upheavals, far away in Guatemala City, cause not a ripple up here, among the dead and the dying volcanoes.

They are distant thunderclips, unheard by the Indians of Attitlan, in their tranquil magnificent isolation. But they do have their own not always fatal explosions. This village feast is a yearly letting off of steam, a chance to fire religious rockets towards heaven, to dance a sort of dance, to get drunk, and to worship God, all on the same day, even at the same time. Today his God and saints are carried from the old battered church,

to receive these rocket-borne and emphatic Indian prayers. The more sober support the foot while the teetering drunks are left to dance, or alarmingly to set light to great bags of gunpowder, stuffed into mounted drain blocks. It may be a thought that you need to be drunk before tankling such as it was worse. On fiercester afternoons, almost all the men become quietly drunk, gulping their aguadient, a fierce native spirit made from sugar cane, and getting quite staggeringly stirred. But the harmless drunkly dancing drunk is treated with great consideration, and usually there's a silent, expressionless wife to follow his lurching footsteps that dust him down and take him home. Next weekend, he may do the same for her. The flirts are preceded by the primitive and traditional Indian drum and flute,

and followed by, of all things, saxophones, and of course, by a great marimba, the inescapable instrument of Guatemalan. Till its liquid knows the Indian's dance, the symbolic dance of the bullfight evolved since Spanish Christianity arrived here on horseback four and a half centuries ago. With the white man's god, the white man's diseases, and the white man's curious delight in destroying brave bulls in public. The dancers are leading men in the community and their sons,

and to be chosen to dance for the village is an honor. They trudge on solidly, their pink cheeked, blonde bearded mask leering vacant. The dancing, as you see, is hardly friendly, a simple monotonous jig-like stick. In their vapid-smirking masks, they jog about for hours, sometimes even for days until they drop. The ancestors of the simple silent Indians behind these jolly masks were very much greater men. In the Central American jungle, they created the Mayan Empire. They built great cities, palaces and pyramids,

devised a system of arithmetic 2,000 years before mathematics came into general use in Europe, conceived the value of zero a thousand years before the Hindus. They were artists and poets, philosophers and astronomers of a brilliant still unsurpassed, a blaze of advanced civilization which lit across Central America, while we in Britain were lost in the dark ages. Today, after more than four centuries of white man's civilization, the grandeur of the Indian has gone, declined, decayed, or destroyed by the Spanish conquistador. And that ancient defeat drove the Indian back to his land, back into himself. He has never emerged. And today, when not solemnly celebrating some feast day, labors in neat fields of volcanic soil, or stares within different and incurious eyes, out into an incomparable scene.

At Hitler's a place of almost hypnotic beauty, whether soft and shining, like that, or dark and savage. Within sight of the lake, it's quite impossible to read a book. After every few sentences, the eyes are pulled back to that, back to contemplation, not only of splendor, but of legend and of history. As they always have, the men leave their adobe hearts around 5am. 2am, if they're starting on a journey,

and work in the fields until a light fades. Here in paradise, there is no leisure class. The Indian believes that his all-important land belongs not to him, but to his dead ancestors. He lives upon it by their grace. It's loaned to him as a lodging for a lifetime. The soil through which he proves his manhood and wins the respect of his woman, for he must provide the food for his family. And since the gods control both its growth and the weather, prayers and offerings to them are just as important as the seeding itself. The produce he carries to market once a week, and an Indian can jog along with a bulky 150 pounds on his back for days. 15 to 18 miles each day, with this lured, is reckoned an average junk. Here the ordinary pack animal is still man.

The total value of his loads, not more than a pound or two, the profit of the day goes well will be a few shillings. And to earn it, to reach the largest and most important of more than a dozen lakeside villages, he escapes into the rare luxury of public transport, the Lake Mailboat, shugging 17 miles across Attila, where fishermen still use the rough dugout canoe of their forefathers. When they reach the old Zuttoheel capital of San Diago d'Attila, the way things are ordered out here, they've crossed into a woman's world.

But this is the only all-woman market in Guatemala, a weekly social center of barter and quiet bargaining. Apart from the porters, there's only one man in this market. He's knitting. The women in their move and crimson wee peels, cotton blouses, squat before small piles of avocados and onions, ground nuts and bananas and eggs, with their solemn and thoughtful children. Some following the advice of their witch doctors, and covering the heads of those still at the breast against the eye of strangers,

who can cause evil by a look or by a thought. It's said that if an Indian woman has ground three tomatoes, she'll pick them, polish them, walk ten miles to market, sit in the sun all day, finally sell them, and with the proceeds buy three tomatoes from the next stall, and walk ten miles home with a gratifying sense of achievement of something accomplished. She'll do this because the market's almost the only answer to the Indian's great poverty of social life. Here, gossip is more prized than profit. Here, the child receives its only schooling. The Indian woman's a gentle and solicitous mother, but never takes time off to play with her children or talk with them. At Attidlan, there are no lullabies, no children's tales, no sweet and silly games that adults play with children. Nothing distracts from this serious daily business of living. This is perhaps the most important attribute of a new wife

and the most time consuming. A blouse requires a month of steady weaving. Here's another daily chore, and the distinctive sound of the Indian race. A woman makes her tortillas. Last night, she soaked the grain kernels in water. Now she grinds them on a metate, a grinding stone of volcanic rock, exactly like those her ancestors used a thousand years ago. With flying fingers, she pats them into flat discs and bakes them. So, even in paradise, it seems a woman's forever bent over a hot stove and her work is never done. These harsh and tasteless maize pancakes have always been the Indian's bread and meat, even their drink.

For, when burnt to a crisp and soaked in boiling water, they produce a dark and unsatisfying liquid, and this amid the finest coffee plantations in the world, but coffee, of course, he cannot afford. So, when the Indian eats, it's a tortilla. Sometimes, if he's lucky, there's something on it. Corn and beans, he eats and potatoes, an occasional apple or a squash, almost never meat, never protein. In so lush a setting, a glimpse of a life that is short and stern. It's in the faces of the old that one first sees a paradise lost. T Unaffected by rare contact with the unknown world outside,

outside, Attitlan remains a gorgeous south-south dream, an unknown and unspoiled Tahiti, people to buy a pretty girl to giggle, and have never even heard of Hollywood. The men of Sandi Agarattitlan are hardly less decorative, with their shirts of tribal mower and crimson, their sashes and three-quarter length trousers brightly embroidered with flowers and birds. If it were not all so natural, you'd think the whole village had been costumed

by Cecil Beaton for some vuccaneering musical. They do their share of standing and staring, and who wouldn't, at a place which makes an ordinary hygienic tap seem rather tame. But there's more to it than casual interest, for it's here they choose their wives. The suitah gets the consent of the father of the girl he selected, then on this shore he lies in wait. As she comes down with her water jar, he covers his face, grabs her arm and proposes. It may not be romantic, but at least it's determined. To learn her answer, for she may not reply in words, he must break her water jar, and hot-blooded romantics have been known to suffer slight injury after a particular this mashing caution. If she puts up little resistance and he's successfully knocks the jar to the ground, she's accepted, and he's hooked.

Once married, though, a beedian, she's no chattel. The Indians believe that divorce is not a sin to be punished by their ancestors, but quarreling ears. And if she feels her husband's done her wrong, she'll act as many more sophisticated wives have acted, and go home to mother. And here in Paradise, that's divorce. In Paradise, if you're poor and sick enough for hospital, you're sick and dead. Even harder to conquer than ignorance is superstition. Of the 50,000 people of the lake, at least half will have no dealings at all with a doctor. When they're ill or troubled, they turn to another

sort of doctor, to a witch doctor. There are perhaps 200 of these witch doctors practicing around at it-la, men to whom, by word of mouth, the secrets of their race have been confided, the rituals and significance of ancient symbols and ceremonies. At this age of space travel and nuclear power, there remained two ways in which the Indians of Atitlan believe they can kill a man without touching him, by appealing to dead forefathers and by sorcery. The first method is legitimate. This man is weeping before his ancestors. He's been affronted, he believes, and now prays of the Shrine of Pascualaba, offering candle so that his ancestors in their world of the dead will try the case. If the verdict goes against the man who's wronged him, this man can be summoned to appear before

them in their other world. That means he'll die. On the steps of this old Catholic church, they pray in murmured conversational turns to their pagan gods, to Pascualaba, to San Diago, their spiritual go-between, who's also the patron saint of the conquerors. They encourage him to calm the wind so that the smoke from the pine cone incense enveloping their prayers will travel thick and fast towards the spirits of their ancestors, who then, on their behalf, intercede directly with the divinities. But such healans are at once equally fervent Catholics, and these coffradia, these lay brothers

elected by the elders of the village care for this church. They carry out every duty and stage the ceremonies. A brotherhood wearing the ceremonial costume of pure black wool, embroidered with tribal symbols of scarlet sashes and headdresses. This coffradia of the blessed sacrament has great importance within the village, and they serve with reverence, carrying their silver standards through clouds of pagan incense. Here they consider the shortcomings of their saints and if necessary, rebuke them for any reluctance to grant a prayer when candles which are not cheap have been so

generously offered. And many times these revered and dusky saints, Indians can never quite believe in loving kindness from a white skin. Often these brown saints have been taken from the church by angry worshippers and left on the scorched arid ground outside to teach them a stern lesson when a reasonable and humble request for rain has not been promptly granted. For these are Catholic idols and idols to the Indians are people. Most Indians, even ostensibly converted Catholics, can well do without the church's rights of marriage and burial. But to all this service of baptism remains indispensable. For that in words, the pre-slipper announcement of the baby's name.

These constitute an essential opening gambit in their lifelong struggle against aggressive evil. Without christening, without this powerful Christian magic, they'd feel doomed to lose the game. But despite such an array of gods in this sort of paradise, only the strong survive. Even today life expectancy is just 37 years. And however profound the distress of a father, a sick child, more often treated by the chance of the village witch doctor than by the penicillin of the 20th century.

In time of spiritual danger, the relatively new teachings of the church fall away. Their child has been cursed so this family imagined so they believe by an enemy. The white man's medicines forgotten and they follow the village witch doctor towards a cabin known as the cave of Judas, high in the mountainside overlooking the lake, here to attempt to resist this spell in the way of their ancestors by prayer and by sacrifice.

The roof of this sinister cabin is fared with the sort of centuries of sacrificial fires, a place where dark gods are called upon, a sense of evil and depression far too great for a little child who suddenly feels himself at first. With its candles, it's offerings of Aguadiante in place of communion wine,

the ceremony becomes the dark and obscene parody of a mass. The gods offered these fouls as symbols of the child afflicted as a substitute for the child.

Should they not die at once but flap their wings, this will signify good luck for the family they represent, but if they die without a struggle, if little blood pours out, this means that one of this family must die. This they know as they wait and listen. Thanks be to your will. Thank you. Thank you for it.

Above the candles, the sever head of the chicken still squawks. From its body, blood sprinkles upon the head and altar. In the end, it seems it's all been in vain. The conquest and the bloody slaughter in the name of Christianity, the centuries of devoted service by converting missionaries, through it all the Indians of Guatemala have remained aloof. So expert at concealing thoughts and emotions, traditions and rituals, they've resisted assimilation.

And today carry out with a kind of blind unreasonable, the commands laid upon them by priests and chieftains who died many centuries ago. And their silent gods of rain and corn and death have triumphed. The dark side of Atidla of this sort of paradise. In the name of the Lord, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful. The Most Merciful, the Most Merciful, the Most Merciful.

The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. Do these mean anything to you?

Joculists? Evening the lights? Two-by-tos? Neutrals? Schwenkerfelders? Romanoffs? Daniels Band? Students of Wright? Two Seed in the Spirit? Well, they, along with the collection of Absolute Truth, the Washfoot Brethren, the Solomon Reformists and the Philpot Tabernacle, are just a very few of the cult groups of Jamaica, an island which, though Christian, exhibits a healthy variety in its forms of Christianity. Most powerful and active of these unorthodox religious bodies are the Pokemon eggs. Pokemon, a sort of religion.

Semi-Christian, with strong revivalist flavor, Semi-pagom, with overturns an African witch-doctored record. Ritual Jamaican worships, inspiring remarkable further, satisfying the Pokemon eggs need to be mystified and exalted, leading them gradually to the world. The dark edge of magic to experience a little magnet. Let us pray, light sheep, we will astray, and build the full of God, O Lord, I am asking now, to even shine your own light, let your own truth, your own spirit, be in our heart, our soul, and also our body. O Lord, I am asking you to shout down your blessings tonight, O Lord, I am asking you to let the seeds tonight of the spirit,

the seed of truth and peace be so in our hearts, and this is your world that we have to place for man to live in. Tomorrow morning, there are many going out to have the job, provide for them, even to them, the daily bread. O Father, you are blessed up and see, to Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. The Pokemon egg priest is called a shepherd, and wears robes, like those of shepherds in illustrated Bibles. He controls the service, regulates the drummer's endless beat, orchestrates the communicans, as they're called, shepherding them toward the auto-hypnotic state they'll reach after hours of hand clapping and chanting of dancing and groaning, drumming and stamping, and all these, of course, are hypnotic exercise. They're preparing to get the spirit to be in direct contact

with their spirit world. Most effective method of making what they call They call close connection with the angels of achieving self hypnosis is known as tromping. Regular and forced exhaling from deep within chest and belly, which causes overbreeding. In Africa, nomadic tribes tromp like this before going into battle become light-headed from oxygen intoxication. A determined hot mother will reach the reeling trance-like state

that Asha's imposition almost at once, and she's away. Let by the shepherd, they begin to speak in tongue. To shalt and nonsense language, a gibberish that pockomaniacs claim is some remote and unknown tongue. Perhaps Greek or Chinese or Latin. At any rate, the voices of spirits which now possess them. For the Go row! Go row, row.

Go row, row! Stop! Heard någonting what he's worthy. Where does it go? Did he hear it? ben. They're fierce now neither. 比較 ever, but he's a maid. Hasn't it been him? Yes, second sir. The maid needs not to speak he is the one who's brave. Only in the field. The real strategy is to defeat everyone. Go along. I lohization the fight! Oh, I understand and I know that! What? Amen. Amen. Woohoo. Amen. Amen. We can write some people believe that we are mad about. We can be called the specialists. But the loaded ones, I do not believe. Every one of us could understand it. Amen. In the short time. All the nations and kings and people of the earth will be living free. Do the scum on the face of the earth to get peace.

Not only directly, and to amen where you were born. Not only into the Jewels, but unto everybody. And to the saddesties, unto the Pharisees, unto the different tribes of Africa. People in the United Kingdom. People in the United States. People in the Russia. People in China. People in Japan. People in all places of the earth. In one blood. Despite its more gentle moments, its communion around a homemade altar, complete with bread and wine, bottles of English ruby red, and orange-aid, with candles standing in empty boot-polished tins, Perkomania is condemned by orthodox religious bodies as a debasement of Christianity.

Also, for the emergence and self-conscious middle and apacras to make ends, it carries some of the stigma that a good English Protestant might suffer, if caught attending a black mass. But whatever the pressure from outside, there are today between 100 and 150 Perkomania camps in Jamaica, with a following of 10 or 15,000 communicans, most of whom practice in secret. This solemn, fearful girl has been unable to speak for many months, since some illness struck her down. Tonight the hands of the shepherd massage her scalp, normally a pleasant enough sensation like a shampoo,

but now she cannot stand what she feels from his fingers. She tries to move away. Grinningly, shepherd pursues her triumphant in the effect he's produced, in his evident power over the mind of this silent confused girl. Already he knows that she will speak. There is no spoo, no zombie, no duck, but what if you know he will speak? Amen. Don't do nothing at all for art, but only pray for art. Amen. Tomorrow this time she will be like you, like me, like everybody. Amen. But not anything funny to send art to the asylum. She has got the spirit in her life, oh I did get it. I know she knows where she lives. The service has gone on all night.

Now the frenzy has drained away. But for some, rest is still not possible. They feast on bread, drink a mixture of honey milk and wine. But for others, for the frantic drummers, there's only exhaustion that's deep and beyond words. Soon in a few hours they must prepare for the normal weekday service, less sedate, less orthodox perhaps than the communion just ended. And the girl who's recovered her voice, who's been given back the trick of speech, sits and weeps. It is another day.

In the dismal dawn, the church which throughout the convulsive passions of last night was filled with some sort of powerful magic, becomes again just a small primitive shent. In a language that can be almost biblical, the shepherd explains Pochomanian. He will describe it as a religion that is a gift from God himself. Something that is not coming up from a parishioner is what somebody would say, that you get it from your ancestors, but anybody can have it. The way of it, you do not know when it is coming on.

If it fails in you, you know that it fails. But when it is coming to you, it is not a thing that you know that you are going to take up as a job. You just take anybody, it could be a gambly, it could be a thief, it could be anybody, and get this conversion. What sort of power do you believe that you have over your followers? Well, I do not believe that I have any great amount of power over then beside understanding, because I am the one who is the engine or machine of what is going on. They work through me, my inspiration, and according to the words of the Bible. I execute the power that is within me. I feel within myself that I am the mouthpiece, I am one of the mouthpiece of God. I believe in it this way that the Bible is of no use without man. Man will of the deliver of the Word of the Bible so that it will grow up in the midst of the people. So that is our motto.

By believing then that whatsoever we do, we do it not for ourselves, but there is a greater power that lies within us through the Creator. To understand what was going on here and why, it is important to remember that during two centuries of slavery here in Jamaica, all religious practices by Negroes were regarded as dangerous in themselves, unlikely to foment rebellion. In a dual society of masters and slaves, conversion was not encouraged, as it might have led to an undesirable sense of equality in the slave, and even disturbed the basis of the slave owners morality. The official attitudes of Britain and France, the two leading nations in the slave trade, were directly opposed. The French converted their slaves, the British did not. You'd better decide which was the more hypocritical. The French were able to convince themselves that slavery was good for slaves, that bondage was the slave salvation,

for it was only in that way that such lost black sheep could be gathered into the fold of the true Church. The British, on the other hand, thought it quite improper for a Christian to hold in bondage his brothers in Christ. So, to get round that awkward belief, slaves were allowed to remain eitherans. To keep them beyond the pale and so available, they were never baptized. There was, of course, also the danger that missionaries might teach them that all men were equal before God. When Christian slaves were captured from the French, that piece of dogma had to be hastily rearranged. While it's hard to decide, as I say, which of these two examples of sophistry is the more unpleasant and devious and cynical. So, Negroes, shipped to Jamaica to slave on these sugar plantations, lived in a spiritual vacuum, forbidden to continue their African customs, yet not considered suitable for Christianity. Even today, it's impossible to separate the religion, magic, and folklore ingrained in the Jamaican soul.

The most complicated theology's coexist with the most primitive beliefs in magic. For here, Christianity was grafted on to the surviving remains of the jungle religions of Africa. The Church's belief in spirits and angels, in the devil and the propitiation of the supernatural, was so close to the old magic that the few remaining deities in the African pantheon were easily conquered. They are soon grew up a rich crop of native churches, incorporating in their services all the Negroes' natural physical enthusiasm. There is, and these pleasant people, it seems, a definite inability to maintain interest in anything in which they can't take an active part. So, their Christianity burst free from the restricting bonds of orthodoxy, of the solemn, mumbled religion of the missionaries, and was absorbed into pagan rituals, which, of the early Spanish masters of Jamaica saw as Pochomania, as a little maid.

And then, does Pochomania appear to an historian and political scientist, like Rex Nettelford? Well, I would say that there is that just a little bit of embarrassment, and the part of the people who are generally termed as the middle classes in Jamaica, and this is understandable, to the people who are interested in the arts, they find this is a very rich and fruitful source for projecting much of what they regard to be the Jamaican image, or some of our cultural heritage. Why do you say it's understandable for the middle class to draw back from it?

Well, because of the entire value system of that section of the community, which has been largely a Europeanized one, how serious are they devotees? I mean, is it just a form of physical release of self-expression? I don't think one can dismiss it merely as an excuse for physical release. It's much more than that. I think, definitely, there is seriousness of approach that people think that this is a form of worship. A quite legitimate form of worship, it gives them an experience with supernatural powers, in very much the same way that we in the Orthodox religion feel that we are in communion with the Almighty through a church service, and I think it ought to be looked at in that way. But as someone in the theatre interested in it from the point of view of movement of dance, I was very struck by the contrapuntal nature of the whole thing, the feet moving to a one-two shuffle, one-two, one-two, and on top of that you will get what they call the long meter singing of a line of a hymn on top of that, quite against the one-two rhythm, and the one-two rhythm is picked up, of course, by this wonderful breath control, this is what we call groaning,

and that too is something of a thing in counterpoint, with a groaning, and then another thing is that that is skillfully coordinated with a contraction, release complex of the diaphragm, and when one is breathing in and out, one breath in, and out like that, and one expects to in, out, in, out, and they tend to go the other way rather, and do rather in, out, in, out, so you get a movement like this, for generations, economic and social privations are forced Negroes to rely more and more upon some promised deliverance from above, since experiences taught, there's precious little to be expected here below,

so Pocomania satisfies a deep social need, the emotional amplitude, the dressing up and the singing, the dancing and feasting offer entertainment and social life in a poor community, still starved of group activity and of any sort of glamour. Such cults also offer the opportunity for leadership, acknowledgement and identification, each has its many appointments and offices, its governesses and deacons, captains and mothers. Here a humble faceless peasant woman, existing in poverty and squire, can become at night say the grand sword bearer of the Mount Carmel Icelandic Church, complete with authority and yellow science. Here Pocomaniacs for a few hours are absorbed in some powerful spiritual world, where their material state doesn't matter, where each has a sense of importance, where incantations can produce exciting physical results. Where there's reassurance that transcends the bonds of poverty and colour. Here's an outlet for archery and music, for poetry and self expression, an elevated, almost lyrical experience, certainly not present in daily life.

So, most of all, Pocomania is an escape. So tonight they experience a little madness. Here's an outlet for archery and music, complete with authority and yellow science. Here's an outlet for archery and music, complete with authority and yellow science.

Here's an outlet for archery and music, complete with authority and yellow science. Here's an outlet for archery and music, complete with authority and yellow science. Here's an outlet for archery and music, complete with authority and yellow science.

This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.