John Crow Speaks: Teachings of the Jamaican Elders

By Chet Alexander

The true story of a young boy growing up in Jamaica who meets a holy man named Bredda Man. Bredda Man was one of the elders in the remote Maroon community of Jamaica still practicing the "old ways." The Maroon traditions were said to come from secret meetings in the bush with wise elders of early African medicine people, European kabbalists, and masons. Thus the teachings evolved into an esoteric shamanism focusing on self-knowledge through reverent communication with nature. For centuries, this powerful teaching helped produce a people who were feared and respected as warriors and equally sought after as healers.

Chet Alexander is a contemporary teacher of kabbalistic shamanism. He met and was apprenticed to Bredda Man while a young boy growing up in Jamaica as the grandson of a wealthy landowner.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0974935948
• ISBN13: 9780974935942
• Release Date: September 2005
• Publisher: Monkfish Book Publishing
• Length: 266 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.6" x 8.3"

Customer Reviews

layers of identity

Chet Alexander's book combines a sensuous attention to detail of the Jamaican natural flora, colour, and local language, with an impressive self-disciplined approach (in the personified form of the strong "Bredda" man) to the training and mysticism of finding oneself (in the story, a youth who he befriends)- the work of their encounters being to align in harmony with the surrounding nature and so become one with universal laws. In particular, the letting go of wrong habits, including for a young man, his hero worship of the older, wiser man, is seen as a holy process of return to the soul's knowledge. Stones, plants, animals and humans are able to interact with respect for life, and in honour of a higher knowledge which guides, if allowed to. The local herbs which are used hark back to ancestral/indigenous abilities, and do not belong to the better known "rasta" variety. The book should continue! Another volume, expanding on the Jamaican cultural moments of marketing, street and conversations, and giving more examples of the training. It would also lend itself nicely to a film, with self-discovery happening as a theme in the younger generation, not in rebellion, but in the return to personal strength experienced with one's identity with nature, rather than in power over it.