sied messiah in the Book of Revelations: "Who is worthy to open the scroll, and loose the seals thereof?...and one of the elders saith unto me, 'Weep not; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has prevailed to open the scroll, and to loose its seven seals." An irony for Marcus Garvey who saw Haile Selassie as a political leader not the messiah, but planted the seeds for the Rastafari belief in Haile Selassies divinity by quoting from the Bible to describe the rise of the Ethiopian empire.The spirituality also created another fundamental difference between Rastafari and Garveyism. Although both were committed to political and economic independence for blacks, the Rastas did not view the independence as Garvey did. Garvey saw western civilizations accomplishments as the ideal for the rising black nation. However, this is still an acceptance of white culture and views of wealth and power just by blacks. The Rastas wished to remove themselves from the establishment altogether. Leonard Howell created the Pinnacle, a commune for Rastas in Jamaica, where people could live freely and away from the European world. Rastas also took to wearing their hair in dreadlocks as a statement against a white culture of flat-hair blondes an ideal, literally and figuratively that could never be attained by blacks. The Rastas never wished to reach such goals.Rastafari also suffered for its anti-establishment attitude. A movement which is much more strongly rooted in the lower class takes much more time to reach the upper elements who controlled society than a movement like Garveyism which had wider appeal from the onset. The movement was not recognized institutionally, as Garveyism was, for decades. Rastafari found the acceptance among the middle class in Jamaica in the 1960s when it became a university study. It also gained wider acceptance when Prime Minister Michael Manley took a political interest in and sympathized with...
