Holy Piby

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The Holy Piby is a proto-Rastafarian text written by an Anguillan, Robert Athlyi Rogers (d. 1931), for the use of an Afrocentric religion in the West Indies founded by Rogers in the 1920s, known as the Afro-Athlican Constructive Gaathly. The theology outlined in this work saw Ethiopians (in the classical sense of all Africans) as the chosen people of God. The church preached self-reliance and self-determination for Africans, using the Piby as its guiding document.

The Holy Piby is made up of four books. The first, entitled "The First Book of Athlyi Called Athlyi," has only two chapters. The next, "The Second Book of Athlyi Called Aggregation," is the largest with fifteen chapters, the seventh of which identifies Marcus Garvey^[1] as one of three apostles of God. The "Third Book of Athlyi Named The Facts of the Apostles" presents two prominent members of the UNIA-ACL, Robert Lincoln Poston^[2] and Henrietta Vinton Davis^[3], as the other apostles in the Holy Trinity. The title of the last book is "The Fourth Book of Athlyi Called Precaution." That book is followed by a series of questions and answers wherein Garvey, Davis, and Poston are proclaimed to be the saviors of the "down trodden children of Ethiopia."

While not, strictly speaking, a "Rastafarian text", it was certainly a primary source of influence to the Rastafari movement, who see Haile Selassie I as Christ, and Marcus Garvey as his prophet.

The original is very rare. There are no copies listed in either the Library of Congress or the University of California catalogs. The Holy Piby was even banned in Jamaica and other Caribbean Islands in the middle and late 1920s.