Nm\iIONALISTI( MYON'A


Other movements proceed the Great Revival years, but "[Revivalism]
is the cult form which has persisted as the main heir of the Great Re-
vival" (4). Pocomania, or Pukkumina, is one of the major Revivalist
groups that endures. Marked theological differences existed between
Revivalists' religious beliefs and more orthodox Christians' religious
beliefs. Revivalists rejected Christian monotheism for African Polythe-
ism. Revivalists also believed in spirit possession, which the more or-
thodox Christians rejected.4 While most Christians were educated
middle class members, most Revivalists were uneducated, lower-class
Afro-Caribbeans (Simpson 408). By the end of the nineteenth century,
and into the twentieth century, pocomania marked African roots and a
lack of education and money.5
 During Jamaica's socially and politically turbulent 1930s, members
of the middle class on the orthodox Christian end of the nation-build-
ing spectrum labeled pocomania's religious rituals sexually transgres-
sive, and therefore, a serious threat to the envisioned progress of a
respectable Jamaican nation. For those middle class members, actions
exhibited at pocomania meetings, such as screaming, moaning, trem-
bling, clinging to other worshippers, and rolling on the ground, endan-
gered the maintenance of Jamaican respectability, "a term indicating
'decent and correct' manners and morals, as well as proper attitude
toward sexuality" (Mosse 1).(i In response to these apparently orgias-
tic actions, some middle class members suggested the state suppress
pocomania practices, as seen in the following editorial published in a
1932 issue of the Daily Gleaner, a Jamaican newspaper:

 It will have to be lawyers, however, who must try their hands at framing
 legislation to suppress the [pocomania] practices complained of. We


 Seaga describes African Polytheism as "all embracing and able to accommodate
the Christian Trinity the Angels and Saints, the Prophets and the Apostles, combining
these, however, with the spirits including Ancestral dead, and even with the
diabolical host" (4).
 In a 1956 sociological study, Simpson writes, "those who are involved in
revivalism [i.e. pocomania] are at the lower end of the socio-economic scale." I link
lower-class with black, because many have documented the class color divide in
the Caribbean. In Contradictory Omens (1974), for example, Brathwaite describes
class Caribbean society after slavery along class, ancestry, and color lines, putting
"Afro-Caribbean (black) population" at the "bottom" of Caribbean society (29-30).
 6 Although the actions appear orgiastic they represent manifestations of
individuals' believed spiritual possession. For additional information on pocomania
ritual practices, see Simpson 352, 354 and Chevannes 24.