Procession (Juggernaut part 3)

[Christopher Stewart]

("Ratha Yatra Festival in Puri, India" by James Fergusson)

The third part of « Juggernaut, » entitled « Procession, » evokes the arrival of the juggernaut before it unleashes into a frenzy of steamrolling.

The title and music of this section are both inspired by the origin of the word. From Wikipedia :

One of the most famous of Indian temples is the Jagannath Temple in Puri, Orissa, which has the Ratha Yatra ("chariot procession"), an annual procession of chariots carrying the murtis (statues) of Jagannâth (Krishna), Subhadra and Baladeva (Krishna's elder brother). A popular 14th-century work The Travels of Sir John Mandeville apocryphally describes Hindus, as a religious sacrifice, casting themselves under the wheels of these huge chariots and being crushed to death. Based on this claim, British colonials promulgated the claim that Hindu devotees of Krishna were "lunatic fanatics who threw themselves under the wheels of these chariots in order to attain salvation".


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In rare instances in the festival's past, people had been crushed accidentally as the massive 45-foot-tall, multi-ton chariot slipped out of control, with others suffering injury in the resulting stampedes. This sight led the Britons of the time to contrive the word "juggernaut" to refer to examples of unstoppable, crushing forces.

In the storyline of the suite, the third section corresponds to the entrance of the team of workers led by the not-totally-honest designer. At first, the spectacle is orderly and even admirable, but as questionable deeds are committed by both camps, relationships degrade and things go awry.

To illustrate this musically, I've tried to come up with something that evokes the ceremonial and majestic grandeur of the original chariot procession which suddenly escapes control before turning into to the catastrophic crush of the stampede that reaches its climax in « Steamroller. »

« Juggernaut » is a suite which clocks in at a little under 18 minutes and is made up of the following six parts : « Prologue, » « Heedlessness, » « Procession, » « Steamroller, » « Resilience, » and « Epilogue. »

The composition has originally been inspired by a most painful experience which involved a rented house shared by six young and not-so-young adults, unannounced extensive renovations, and frictions and miscommunications of all sorts. It's intended to illustrate the hamartia/metanoia principle :

Missing the point. Yes, hamartia which meant missing the point, missing the mark. Now that got translated as sin. And repentance was metanoia, meaning a transformation of the mind, and got translated as pain, right? Penitence, repentance. The point is that repentance is merely to understand that you missed the mark, you see? (laughter) Therefore evil is missing the mark, basically. It is confusion, right? Its ultimate source is the kind of confusion I described about thought. - David Bohm