(Quick) Music (Related Post on a) Monday

I’ve already broken from my summer reading list schedule by reading Virginia Burrus’s latest book Earthquakes and Gardens: Saint Hilarion’s Cyprus (2023). 

I don’t have much of a post today other than to observe that she appears to make a reference to my favorite Bob Marley song, “Duppy Conqueror”  when she states concerning Hilarion’s first hermitage on Cyprus: “The place would not hold him” (p. 23).

This seems to be an obvious reference to Marley’s line: “the bars could not hold me.” For those who don’t know, the Marley song describes an individual who (as the title describes) can conquer duppy. Duppy in Jamaican (and more broadly West Indian) cosmology are restless spirits or even ghosts. For Marley, Duppy represented the forces of evil, of malicious people, and maybe even his private demons. A more expansive (and politically situated) reading of the song might even see a duppy as the combination of capitalism, the state, and the post-colonial situation. 

Burrus’s oblique reference to the Marley song is fitting for Hilarion. The saint journeys to Cyprus to escape throngs of the faithful who come to him for spiritual solace or healing. Of course, Jerome, Hilarion’s biographer, knows that these individuals are not all motivated by faith. Some come at the instigation of duppy to drag the saint down and to make it impossible for him to reach “Mt. Zion” or the “highest region” as the song says.

In fact, Hilarion soon escaped from his first hermitage (the bars could not hold him) and ascended the heights above Paphos to a mountain top garden near an abandoned temple. Here, he was able to find some peace, but he also kept the duppy close as they congregated around the old temple. 

Don’t try to cold me up on this bridge, now I’ve got to reach Mount Zion The highest region So if you a bull-buckah Let me tell you this I’m a duppy conqueror, conqueror