Volume 1

Encyclopædia of religion and ethics / edited by James Hastings ; with the assistance of John A. Selbie ... and other scholars.

Date:
1908-1926
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Encyclopædia of religion and ethics / edited by James Hastings ; with the assistance of John A. Selbie ... and other scholars. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    85/932
    spices and augures at the same time. Of course, they consider themselves much better than the ordinary sorcerers. There seem to be certain sects among them, e.g. the sect of Abba Muda, who lives in a mysterious cave with a serpent to which offer- ings are made. When the members of this sect make pilgrimages to the famous cave, they wear women’s clothes, let their hair grow, and perform some well- known religious duties. An example of a Galla prayer is the following: ‘ Thou hast made the corn to grow, and shown it to our eyes ; the hungry man beholdeth it and is consoled. When the corn is ripening, thou sendest caterpillars and locusts into it, locusts and pigeons. Everything cometh from thee, thou allowest it to happen : why thou doest this, thou knowest.’ Besides Waq, there is a host of lesser deities, who fall into two groups, viz. the ‘good spirits,’ named aydna, and the ‘evil spirits,’ namedJmM. The aydna live in all places where Waq lives, especially in rivers; but they also comprise the house-gods (penates) and the souls of the ancestors (manes). Even in a newly built house there is an aydna, and crumbs are thrown on the floor for him when the people first enter the house. In- dividual members of this class of gods are Kilesa, the god of war and of the winds ; and Atete, the goddess who protects women, like the Greek Eilei- thyia. It seems that even the personified Sabbath, called Sambata, is known as a goddess to the pagan Gallas, who must have borrowed her worship from the Falashas. Among the ‘ evil spirits ’ the buda, or the devil of the evil eye, is the most feared. It is well known that this superstition, so common over all Southern and Eastern coun- tries, is particularly deep-rooted in Abyssinia. Other evil demons seem to be the monsters banda and bulgu. The former is the wolf, a demoniac animal among various peoples; the latter is ex- plained as ‘man-eater.^ A special caste of sor- cerers has to do with these evil spirits. Among them there are ditterent degrees and specialists, some of whom predict the future, others cure diseases by driving out the devils, and others know the art of making good weather and of producing rain. Sacred animals are, among others, the hysena, the snake, the crocodile, and the owl. The hygenas eat the dead, and thus the souls enter their bodies ; hence the spirits who are in the hyaenas enter living men, and men—especially blacksmiths, who know magic art—change into hjraenas. The snake is worshipped by almost all primitive peoples. The crocodile is sacred because it lives in tlie sacred rivers. Again, a certain owl is believed to be the bird of the dead; these owls are the souls of people who died unavenged. Life after death is, according to the belief of the pagan Gallas, a shadow-like existence in a sort of Hades or Sheol, called ekerd (taken from the Arabic al-dhira, ‘ the other,’ sail, world, but adapted to Galla ideas). 3. Pagan religion of the Semites.—What we know about the religion of the Semitic con- querors of Abyssinia is very little indeed—scarcely anything more than a few names. Our sources are the ancient inscriptions and native tradition. According to the famous Greek inscription copied at Adulis by Kosmas Indikopleustes, the king of Aksum, who had this inscription written (1st cent. A.D.), sacrificed Ad xai ry Apei Kal ry Iloo-eiSuj'i and erected a throne in honour of his god The next earliest document is that of King Aizanas, who reigned about A.D. 350. This in- scription is carved in Greek, Sabaean, and Old Ethiopic. The Greek part speaks only of the god “Kp-qs, the Sabaean of Mahrem, 'Astar and Beher, the Old Ethiopic of Mahrem, 'Astar and Medr. A Greek fragment from Abba Pantaleon, a Chris- tian shrine near Aksum, built over an ancient Sabaean sanctuary, mentions the 'Ap^js dviKqros of Aksum. But in only one case are all these gods found together, viz. in the first inscription of (Ta)zana, written perhaps about a.d. 450. There the throne is dedicated to 'Astar, Beher, and Medr ; and thanks are rendered to Mahrem, the god ‘ who begat the king.’ From this it appears that the Semites who came from South Arabia to found the Aksumitic empire worshipped the ancient triad of Heaven, Sea, and Earth. 'Astar in Tigre means ‘ heaven,’ and Atar-Samain (Atar, i.e. 'Astar in Aramaic, of the heavens) as well as IStar belit sama (Ishtar Lady of the Heavens) are known in Semitic mythology. Thus 'Astar is the Aksumitic god of heaven translated into Greek by Zeus. Bledr is the Ethiopic word for ‘ earth,’ and here it must necessarily mean the god (or goddess) of the earth. Now, if the Adulitan inscription mentions Poseidon together wdth Zeus, the con- clusion is unavoidable that Beher is the god of the sea, in spite of the fact that the Ethiopic word beher means ‘ land,’ and is even used in this sense in our inscriptions. We must connect it with the word bahr (‘sea’), and assume that, being a proper name, it retained its ancient meaning even after the common noun corresponding to it had received a different meaning of its owm. Besides this triad, Ares-Mahrem, the tribal or ancestral god of the kings of Aksum, was worshipped. Since they fought many wars to establish their empire and to protect their dominions, it was most natural that they should identify Mahrem wdth Ares, the war-god. From the inscription of (Ta)zana it seems that bulls and captives were sacrificed to this god. From other texts it appears that ‘thrones’ and statues were erected to him and the other gods. [Drawings and photographs of the thrones will be found in the publications of the German Expedition to Aksum]. In a way Mahrem-Ares may be connected with the native tradition. For the Abyssinians tell that before their ancestors adopted King Solomon’s religion they worshipped a dragon, and that this dragon was their king. According to Greek mythology, A begat, in a cave near Thebes, a dragon, his own image. It lerefore not impossibie tliat a similar association existed een Mahrem-Ares and the dragon, but of this no record has i down to us thus far. (A study of the Abyssinian dragon 's Bibliotheca Abessin 5r hint with regard to the cult ofithe t ,n^xpedition.^ The stele is an tween the stone and the personality ( is called nephesh (‘soul’). It, thenj a number of such stelae, and among thei monoliths, r—• =- ir ra^er arounif them, largi ntegral part of a South ysterious connexion be- f the dead, for the stele Aksum we find a large 1 huge highly decorated 33 metres, and in front . , - slabs representing, in all .,n.cJihood, altars, we may conclude, with a certain degree of probability, that these monuments served for ‘ ancestor-woi-ship,’ that form of religion which, as we have seen, is at the bottom of the pagan religions of Abyssinia. II. Christian ARyss/A/A.—Christianity be- came the religion of the Aksumitic empire about A.D. 450. The king (Ta)zana was the Constantine of Abyssinia ; for in his first inscription he is pagan, in the second he is Christian. In the latter he speaks of only one god, the ‘Lord of Heaven,’ or the ‘ Lord of the Land ’ (^egzVa beher,—in Ethiopic the word for the Christian God), who enthroned him and gave him victory over his enemies. But in the king’s own mind this ‘Lord of Heaven’ was probably not very diflerent from 'Astar. We have no contemporaneous records of the first ap- pearance of Christianity in Abyssinia, nor do we know whether the Jewish communities were older, or whether they had anything to do with prepar- ing Abyssinia for the Christiairfaith. However this may be, the Christian kings soon regarded them- selves as the protectors of the new faith, and when