Table of Contents
Introduction to the prophesy and Bob Marley
Marley and Music
Politics and Prophets
Cannabis Culture
Solomon’s Ring
Contemporary Cultural Considerations
Introduction to the prophesy and Bob Marley
Not surprisingly, some people consider that the commentaries in the following paragraph were intended as prophetic statements.
(44:1.15) While you have assembled some beautiful melodies on Urantia [Earth], you have not progressed musically nearly so far as many of your neighboring planets … . If Adam and Eve had only survived, then would you have had music in reality; but the gift of harmony, so large in their natures, has been so diluted by strains of unmusical tendencies that only once in a thousand mortal lives is there any great appreciation of harmonics. But be not discouraged; some day a real musician may appear on Urantia, and whole peoples will be enthralled by the magnificent strains of his melodies. One such human being could forever change the course of a whole nation, even the entire civilized world. It is literally true, “melody has power a whole world to transform.” Forever, music will remain the universal language of men, angels, and spirits. Harmony is the speech of Havona.
The good news is: This study aid requires listening to music. You get to decide how much. As Bob Marley put it so well, “One good thing about music. When it hits you feel no pain. So, hit me with music.”
But before hitting you with his music, a little bit of background on Bob Marley and the Rastafari religion is being provided to efficiently enrich the experience of his music and stage presence. As well, it provides a foretaste of why he might be the prophesied musician-prophet of The Urantia Book.
Wikipedia introduction to Bob Marley:
Bob Marley (6 February 1945 – 11 May 1981) was a Jamaican singer, musician, and songwriter. Considered one of the pioneers of reggae, his musical career was marked by fusing elements of reggae, ska, and rocksteady, as well as his distinctive vocal and songwriting style. Marley’s contributions to music increased the visibility of Jamaican music worldwide, and made him a global figure in popular culture to this day. Over the course of his career, Marley became known as a Rastafari icon, and he infused his music with a sense of spirituality. He is also considered a global symbol of Jamaican music and culture and identity, and was controversial in his outspoken support for democratic social reforms. In 1976, Marley survived an assassination attempt in his home, which was thought to be politically motivated. He also supported legislation of marijuana, and advocated for Pan-Africanism.
In 1980 at Milan, Italy, he played his largest concert to an estimated at 110,000 attendees.
At the heart of it all, of course, is a talented musician’s courageous and faithful effort to find God. His cultural accomplishments are a reflection of his dynamic and progressive inner life. Consider this excerpt from a 2011 Catholic.org article:
Bob’s baptism is marked by the heroic conviction with which he lived his life. For some Rastas, conversion to Christianity is tantamount to sacrificing the sacred cow. Yet this man who had become the international icon of Rastafarianism converted anyway, deeply upsetting many people, including some of his closest friends. Marley showed a willingness to renounce everything in his pursuit of God.
The late archbishop who baptized Bob several months before his death spoke of his deep faith in a 1984 newspaper interview with Jamaica’s Sunday Gleaner:
“I remember once while I was conducting the Mass, I looked at Bob and tears were streaming down his face. … When he toured Los Angeles and New York and England, he preached the Orthodox faith, and many members in those cities came to the Church because of Bob. . When he was baptized, he hugged his family and wept, they all wept together for about half an hour.” …
“Many Rastaman call him the prophet,” Father Malakot said. “Even myself as the chief of the Church in Jamaica, I saw he was a prophet in his own right. His music was inspired by God. It was an expression of his belief that the Lord was with him. And he inspired so many people to enter the Church. Many are inspired by him, even now, to convert. Five months ago I baptized a Rasta priest with his big dreadlocks who came into the Church with his wife.
One of the most important overlaps between between Rastafari practices and Urantia Book teachings relates to the indwelling spirit of God, the Thought Adjuster. “I and I” is used by Rastafari in their speech as a constant reminder of the presence of God within. From Wikipedia:
I and I … is a complex term, referring to the oneness of Jah (God) and every human. In the words of Rastafari scholar E. E. Cashmore: “I and I is an expression to totalize the concept of oneness. ‘I and I’ as being the oneness of two persons. So God is within all of us and we’re one people in fact. I and I means that God is within all men. The bond of Ras Tafari is the bond of God, of man.”
The Rastafari religion leans heavily on a sense of affinity with Judaism. This has its origins in the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. More will be provided about this later in the study. But for now, know that Bob Marley ended up with an historic ring from Haile Selassie I, (the last) Emperor of Ethiopia until 1974. Selassie was a descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He wore a ring that contained the remnant of the ring given by King Solomon to the Queen of Sheba as a gift to their child.
This ring has the Lion of Judah insignia on it. It can be seen on the Legend album cover, which includes one of his most popular songs, “One Love.” (The song borrows from the Curtis Mayfield song “People Get Ready.”)
“One Love” will give you an experience of his studio work and it is important as an example of the powerful connection to end times prophecy found in the Rastafari religion.
One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
Hear the children crying (One love)
Hear the children crying (One heart)
Sayin’, give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Sayin’, let’s get together and feel all right
Let them all pass all their dirty remarks (one love)
There is one question I’d really love to ask (one heart)
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own?
Believe me
One love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
As it was in the beginning (one love)
So shall it be in the end (one heart)
Alright, give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Let’s get together and feel all right
One more thing
Let’s get together to fight this Holy Armageddon (one love)
So when the Man comes there will be no, no doom (one song)
Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner
There ain’t no hiding place from the Father of Creation
Sayin’, one love, one heart
Let’s get together and feel all right
I’m pleading to mankind (one love)
Oh, Lord (one heart)
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right
Let’s get together and feel all right
The following examples of live performances will give you a sense of how he evolved as a musician and how fast his hair grows:
1977: Live at the Rainbow
1979: Live at Santa Barbara
Marley and Music
In 2020, CEOWORLD Magazine listed Marley as the fourth highest-earning deceased musician, behind Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, and Juice WRLD (who died in 2019).
(44:1.15) While you have assembled some beautiful melodies on Urantia, you have not progressed musically nearly so far as many of your neighboring planets in Satania. If Adam and Eve had only survived, then would you have had music in reality; …
Note how the Adamic default—the lack of sufficient genetic uplift—is identified as the reason for why we are behind musically.
(44:1.15) … but the gift of harmony, so large in their natures, has been so diluted by strains of unmusical tendencies that only once in a thousand mortal lives is there any great appreciation of harmonics. …
One out of a thousand might not give us great odds as individuals. But we still get to vicariously experience the relatively great appreciation for harmonics that occasionally shows up.
(48:4.13) … Apparently you received much in the way of humor from your Adamic inheritance, much more than was secured of either music or art.
Apparently, even if we cannot carry a tune in a bucket, have two left feet, and never got past drawing stick figures, at least we can laugh about it.
(44:1.12) Appreciation of music on Urantia is both physical and spiritual; and your human musicians have done much to elevate musical taste from the barbarous monotony of your early ancestors to the higher levels of sound appreciation. The majority of Urantia mortals react to music so largely with the material muscles and so slightly with the mind and spirit; but there has been a steady improvement in musical appreciation for more than thirty-five thousand years.
Though possessing the best genetic endowment of the six Sangik races, consider the reputation that the red race has for monotonous music—emphasizing the first beat of a 4-beat measure.
1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4 | 1 2 3 4
Vocally, it is a rather chanty expression of melody, not particularly sensitive to harmony.
(51:4.2) The earlier races are somewhat superior to the later; the red man stands far above the indigo—black—race. The Life Carriers impart the full bestowal of the living energies to the initial or red race, and each succeeding evolutionary manifestation of a distinct group of mortals represents variation at the expense of the original endowment. …
(51:4.4) The evolution of six—or of three—colored races, while seeming to deteriorate the original endowment of the red man, provides certain very desirable variations in mortal types and affords an otherwise unattainable expression of diverse human potentials. These modifications are beneficial to the progress of mankind as a whole provided they are subsequently upstepped by the imported Adamic or violet race. On Urantia this usual plan of amalgamation was not extensively carried out, and this failure to execute the plan of race evolution makes it impossible for you to understand very much about the status of these peoples on an average inhabited planet by observing the remnants of these early races on your world.
(79:5.7) The North American Indians never came in contact with even the Andite offspring of Adam and Eve, having been dispossessed of their Asiatic homelands some fifty thousand years before the coming of Adam. During the age of Andite migrations the pure red strains were spreading out over North America as nomadic tribes, hunters who practiced agriculture to a small extent. …
(79:2.3) By 20,000 B.C. … As it developed, the red man was destroying himself in the Americas …
(64:6.26) Isolated in Africa, the indigo peoples, like the red man, received little or none of the race elevation which would have been derived from the infusion of the Adamic stock. …
But what happened in the musical and racial melting pot of New Orleans, not long after slavery ended in the United States? Jazz! Then reggae and Bob Marley, who was mulatto.
[Editor’s note: mulatto shows up in the Merriam-Webster dictionary with “usually offensive” introducing the definition. The Thesaurus found no results for this historically and scientifically identifiable pattern of genetic mixing. How does this reflect on our current culture’s relationship to discussing historic and scientific facts? Poorly. Ironically, celebrating interracial unions is harmonious with having words that describe various stages of the homogenization process. In 2023, the trend has been towards creating pronouns for those who unscientifically refuse to acknowledge that sex genes do not homogenize, while stigmatizing terminology related to racial homogenization. Go figure!?!]
(44:1.13) Tuneful syncopation represents a transition from the musical monotony of primitive man to the expressionful harmony and meaningful melodies of your later-day musicians. These earlier types of rhythm stimulate the reaction of the music-loving sense without entailing the exertion of the higher intellectual powers of harmony appreciation and thus more generally appeal to immature or spiritually indolent individuals.
syncopation (n.) A shift of accent in a passage or composition that occurs when a normally weak beat is stressed.
“Tuneful synocaption” with “expressionful harmony and meaningful melodies” fits perfectly well with Bob Marley’s reggae stylings. Reggae, of course, is especially known for its syncopated rhythms.
Politics and Prophets
Notice in the quote below the use of “whole peoples,” “whole nation,” and “entire world.” Could this be hinting that such a person might be of mixed race and have a racially unifying influence?
(44:1.15) … But be not discouraged; some day a real musician may appear on Urantia, and whole peoples will be enthralled by the magnificent strains of his melodies. One such human being could forever change the course of a whole nation, even the entire civilized world. …
Speaking of not being discouraged, on December 3, 1976, Bob and Rita Marley were injured in an assassination attempt in Jamaica. Days later, the band performed. The Wikipedia review of this event is brief and recommended. Looking around, I don’t see a lot of us having stories about how we played a concert shortly after getting shot in an attempted assassination. Maybe we should think on these things.
From the Wikipedia One Love Peace Concert page:
In 1978, Marley returned to Jamaica and performed at another political concert, the One Love Peace Concert, again in an effort to calm warring parties. Near the end of the performance, by Marley’s request, Michael Manley (leader of then-ruling People’s National Party) and his political rival Edward Seaga (leader of the opposing Jamaica Labour Party) joined each other on stage and shook hands. [Entire concert.]
In June 1978, Bob Marley was awarded the Peace Medal of the Third World from the United Nations. In February 1981, he received the Jamaican Order of Merit, then the nation’s third highest honor.
Though we are out of step with the regular progression of planetary progress, consider this in context:
(52:3.6) The result of the gift of the Adamic life plasm to the mortal races is an immediate upstepping of intellectual capacity and an acceleration of spiritual progress. There is usually some physical improvement also. On an average world the post-Adamic dispensation is an age of great invention, energy control, and mechanical development. This is the era of the appearance of multiform manufacture and the control of natural forces; it is the golden age of exploration and the final subduing of the planet. Much of the material progress of a world occurs during this time of the inauguration of the development of the physical sciences, just such an epoch as Urantia is now experiencing. Your world is a full dispensation and more behind the average planetary schedule.
(52:3.11) During the closing centuries of the post-Adamic age there develops new interest in art, music, and literature, and this world-wide awakening is the signal for the appearance of a Magisterial Son. The crowning development of this era is the universal interest in intellectual realities, true philosophy. Religion becomes less nationalistic, becomes more and more a planetary affair. New revelations of truth characterize these ages, and the Most Highs of the constellations begin to rule in the affairs of men. Truth is revealed up to the administration of the constellations.
Lyrics to all Marley songs. Songs of special note (pun intended, of course): Natural Mystic, Exodus, Redemption Songs, Ambush In The Night, Africa Unite, Burnin’ and Lootin’, Crazy Baldheads, Get Up! Stand Up!.
Cannabis Culture
[Now or at some point, consider reviewing Mysticism and Entheogens to support your appreciation of this study aid.]
Online search engines do not pull up an obvious reference for this quote:
(44:1.15) … It is literally true, “melody has power a whole world to transform.” …
But creativity and tenacity eventually led me to a possibility:
“Musical innovation is full of danger to the State, for when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” ― Plato
Consider the challenges faced by a mulatto Jamaican in his early thirties, being someone who used cannabis as a sacrament, and while rising to international stardom as a musician. To help put this in perspective, from 100 Years of Evolution and the Urantia Revelation:
1978: A study indicates that 14% of cannabis in the US is contaminated with paraquat. A lawsuit initiated by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws ends funding to Mexico for paraquat. Government officials exposed for growing cannabis in the Chattahooche Forest led to retaliatory paraquat usage in the US by the Reagan administration that continued until the 1990’s.
Consider the impact and legacy of Bob Marley on the decriminalization of cannabis and the increase in medicinal research and therapeutic products.
Consider the criminalization of cannabis in the context of blasphemy. God provides intelligently designs plants for the benefit of his children. Some of his children conspire to deprive God’s children of what God has provided, declaring a plant unsafe for his children to cultivate and possess. How wrong is it to disparage God’s gifts and criminalize them?
Consider the scientific and educational lies. Consider the full range of propaganda associated with cannabis, in the context of this teachings:
(90:2.9) Ever and anon, true prophets and teachers arose to denounce and expose shamanism. Even the vanishing red man had such a prophet within the past hundred years, the Shawnee Tenskwatawa, who predicted the eclipse of the sun in 1806 and denounced the vices of the white man. Many true teachers have appeared among the various tribes and races all through the long ages of evolutionary history. And they will ever continue to appear to challenge the shamans or priests of any age who oppose general education and attempt to thwart scientific progress.
Solomon’s Ring
See the Board of Jewish Education review of the relationship between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. It recounts the history of the ring he gave her, which eventually ended up being given to and buried with Bob Marley. But it does not give the story of how it got him. That story is told in a 2014 article celebrating Marley’s birth. I have reproduced here to make it easier to read:
Thursday, February 6, 2014 By NZAU MUSAU
Judah is a lion’s whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up? The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet. Genesis 49: 9-10.
On the cover of 1984’s best-selling posthumous album ‘Legend” is the picture of Bob Marley’s arm resting on his chin, his forefinger taping his lower lip.
Noticeably in his middle finger is the emblematic Lion of Judah ring worn by the late singer in the last five years of his life and before him, said to have belonged to the late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I.
The ring bears the royal insignia of late Ethiopian monarchy, a lion holding a scepter. It is said to be a precious relic containing actual fragments of Biblical King Solomon’s ring.
The ring turned out to have been one of Bob’s prized possessions and also the most coveted upon his death in 1981.
How did Marley, a man of peasantry heritage, come to possess such a ring which caused so much anguish, contestation and drama on his death?
In Catch A Fire, The life of Bob Marley, Timothy White traces the story of the royal ring to a dream that Bob had in Delaware in 1966 when he laboured in a Chrysler plant as a casual.
One evening while resting at his mother’s house he fell asleep on the sofa and had a dream that would disturb him for the next decade.
In the dream, White recounts, a short man dressed in Khaki and an old fedora came through the front door of the house and stood next to the sofa.
The man then slid his hand into the jacket and produced a black ring embossed with an insignia the dreamy lad could not immediately figure out. He then took Bob’s hand and pushed it into his forefinger saying; “this is all I have to give you.”
When Bob’s mother Cedella Booker came from a grocery trip, he found his son dazed and they both tried to figure it out.
For the mom, it was all clear. She simply went upstairs and pulled out a ring she thought she had gotten from his father Captain Norval Marley.
“Norval was a short mon, jus’ like yuh, an’ him dress in dat same fashion. He never give yuh anyt’ing when him alive, suh maybe him want ya ta have a blessing’ now,” White quotes Ciddy telling Bob.
Bob took the ring but did not like it. White says he took it off at the end of the week telling the mum that it made him feel uncomfortable.
Fast forward to 1977 with Bob having quite made it musically, become a Rasta and exiled in London following an assassination attempt in Jamaica.
White says prominent Rastas in London put him in touch with officials of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. One thing led to another and before long he got an audience with Crown Prince Asfa Wossen.
Wossen was a son of Selassie, also living in exile in London after his father was deposed on September 12, 1974. He had been briefly proclaimed the new emperor, a proclamation he declined, before the military junta abolished the monarchy in March 1975.
His father, whom Bob had worshiped as Jesus-reincarnate, had died in prison in 1975. Bob had refused to believe that the man-god had died and instead released a single assuring his children that “Jah lives.”
In the song, Marley mocks “fools” for saying that Rasta God is dead.
During the two-hour meeting between Bob and Wossen, White says in his book, the Crown Prince spoke about his life, betrayal and about his late father. He lamented the circumstances of his father’s death.
“As Marley was leaving, the crown prince said he had something for him. ‘This belonged to His Majesty,’ he said, ‘you are the one who should wear it.’ He showed the Rasta a ring,” White reports.
He says Bob was dumbstruck. It was the ring he had seen in his dream in Delaware – a black stone bearing the figure of the lion of Judah.
Just like the man in the dream, the crown prince slipped in into Bob’s forefinger fitting it perfectly. It is said the prince noticed what White describes as “mixture of terror and joy” in Bob’s face and asked if something was wrong.
Bob simply told him that a riddle he had lived with for a long time had just been solved. The LP Bob released that year, Exodus: Movement of Jah People went on to become Time’s album of the century, also reputed as the album which propelled him to international stardom.
Around 1980, Selassie’s granddaughter and nephew visited Bob in Miami. White says that while they chatted in the living room, Bob pointed to the ring and posed: “Dis indeed was His Majesty’s ring?”
The Ethiopians nodded saying the late Emperor had worn it all through his life. White says Bob went silent for a while then “softly, matter-of-factly, but, in a voice that trembled in a way Cedella had never thought possible, he said: Ya know, sometimes dis ring, it burn my finger, like fire.”
Later that year, Bob’s health deteriorated and doctors gave him a few months to live. He wandered around different cancer clinics before settling to fly to Germany for some unorthodox treatment late in the year.
Before leaving for Germany, White says, Bob took off the ring and gave it to his lawyer Diane Jobson for safe-keeping. White says that at first he had mulled at the idea of entrusting it to her to be given to his eldest son David “Ziggy” but pulled the thought away.
The ring would later cause quite a drama on Bob’s demise in May 1981. White reports that Vernon Carrington, popularly known as Prophet Gad, the founder of Twelve Tribes of Israel to which Bob belonged, had let it be known that when Bob died he would liken to have the ring.
He says Gad waged unrelenting campaign to obtain the ring “from the moment Bob died until the final minutes before he was sealed in his coffin.” The ring was on his finger when Bob lay in state in Jamaica but that was the last seen of it.
White writes: “Once the coffin was sealed in a closed-door ceremony, the question of its whereabouts was likewise sealed.”
He says as the actual internment of Bob approached, Prophet Gad was said to be “in a righteous rage beyond describing.”
Seething with anger, the Twelve Tribes of Israel orderlies would later slap Bob’s family with a three thousand dollar bill for “ceremonial services rendered by the sect during the funeral services.”
The no nonsense Jobson dismissed them: “Yuh nuh get yar t’irty pieces a silver from me, Judases.”
The officials later confronted Bob’s mother Cedella demanding to know what had become of it. She too had a blunt retort for them: “De ring gwan back ta where it come from, same as Bob.”
When they persisted to know exactly where it could be found, White says, she looked up her eyes narrowing and smilingly but firmly closed the inquiry:
“De ring gwan back from whence it come. It back on His Majesty’s mighty hand. And yuh… yuh know neither de day nor de hour.”
Contemporary Cultural Considerations
(19:1.6) … The true perspective of any reality problem—human or divine, terrestrial or cosmic—can be had only by the full and unprejudiced study and correlation of three phases of universe reality: origin, history, and destiny. The proper understanding of these three experiential realities affords the basis for a wise estimate of the current status.
Bob Marley struggled personally and culturally with his mulatto origin. His father kept distance and died at 70, when Bob was ten years old. He had a slight build for growing up in the violent Jamaican ghettos. And yet, with this start, he attained global recognition for the spiritual and political content of his music, which solidified a new style of syncopated rhythm in the evolution of contemporary music. Bob and his wife, Rita, survived an assassination attempt related to trying to harmonize Jamaican political disharmony, which led to self-imposed exile for the family and band’s safety. Marley’s spiritual teachings focused on listening to the indwelling spirit of God that guides us all, and he had great respect for the Bible and interest in the development of Judeo-Christian concepts about God. Shortly before he died at thirty-six years old, he converted to Christianity. He was buried with the ring that King Solomon gave to the Queen of Sheba, which he received from the son of Ethopia’s last emperor.
When it comes to whether The Urantia Book’s prophecy about a musician-prophet is fulfilled by Bob Marley, one perspective to consider is, “What more could we ask for?”
Why has the Urantia Book culture, generally speaking, never given serious consideration as to whether Bob Marley fulfilled this role and marked time for the movement by having done so?
Consider the prejudice against cannabis as a sacrament and how this has and continues to influence consideration of Bob Marley as The Urantia Book’s musician-prophet. How does this effect interpretations of Urantia Book teachings and outreach efforts? How would celebrating Bob Marley’s life, as The Urantia Book’s musician-prophet, influence relationships with family and friends?
With nothing said either way, should we expect the musician-prophet to have any direct relationship to the Urantia revelation? Would this help or hurt someone fulfill the role of unifying people?
Given the increasing cultural acceptance of cannabis, plus contemporary racial tensions and the challenge that many people have with appreciating Urantia Book teachings about race, how much would it help the cause to embrace Bob Marley as the musician-prophet?