‘Is it man?’ The monk thrust a flickering taper in my face. ‘Or woman?’
Teklu and I were in a dank shed at Lake Tana’s monastery of Daga Istifanos. A couple of wedding-cake crowns were just visible in the half-darkness, sitting on slatted shelves. Various leatherbound manuscripts were stacked with them. The island was accessible neither to women nor hens nor nanny goats.
Teklu smirked. ‘Man.’
The monk remained doubtful. But he led us into a windowless back room. He bent to hold the taper to an open-sided coffin. ‘King Zara Yaqob,’ he announced grandly.
Tallow dripped down the taper and onto the bare-earth floor. Inside the coffin was Ethiopia’s greatest medieval ruler. The skull was detached from the spine; leathery scraps of skin still hung on the bone. It could have been anyone.
‘Look, the foot.’ The monk moved the light down over the legs. I could see the shin bone partly sheathed in dried skin. The phalanges of the right foot were clearly arched and twisted.
‘Always on one leg, always praying. Like Tekla Haymanot. King Zara Yaqob was a very holy man.’
Indeed he was. He wrote a great number of tender and affecting prayers. He wrote homilies and hagiographies which are still in use. He commissioned many more, and the largest part of these were dedicated to the Virgin Mary. They leave little doubt about what he felt for her: ‘Our Lady Mary is purer than the angels. Our Lady Mary is the mind of God. Every form in our Lady Mary is the form of God…’ He ordered a copy of the Book of Nativity to be sent to all churches so that his people could stop worshipping devils and trees and donkeyidols and dedicate themselves to earning the eternal compassion of the Virgin.
Zara Yaqob towers above Ethiopia’s medieval centuries. He transformed both state and Church. It was his brand of myth-driven zeal that has enabled the nation to survive. He was also a vicious and paranoid tyrant. He viewed the world as fatally weakened by the malignant influence of fallen angels; he believed his own realm was besieged by their Muslim and heathen agents. His horror of magic and sorcery stemmed from the conviction that he himself was living under an insidious hex. All around him he saw the work of devils—turning good women into prostitutes, corrupting monks, stealing the lives of babies and cattle, constantly trying to infiltrate his court. Twenty-four hours a day a rota of clerics patrolled the palace, spreading holy water and reciting psalms and prayers.
He decreed that the entire Bible—New and Old Testaments—should be read during church services. In his campaign topurify the land he encouraged denunciations. Anyone accused, rightly or wrongly, of worshipping the devil was at once stoned to death. All Christians, he ordered, were to fix a cross to each of their possessions and to have branded on their foreheads the names of the Trinity. On their right arm they should write: ‘I deny the devil!’ and on the left ‘I renounce the accursed Dask, I am the slave of Mary, mother of the Creator of the universe!’ (Many Ethiopian Christians still tattoo their foreheads and wrists with crosses.)
He was mercurial, like all true despots. He ordered his own wife to be flogged. When she died as a result he had his son Ba’eda Maryam tortured and imprisoned for lighting a candle in her memory. Several great monks came to petition him. They told him that Ba’eda Maryam was protected by Tekla Haymanot, and Zara Yaqob immediately released him, showered him with favours and made him his heir.
Zara Yaqob’s elevation of the cult of the Virgin Mary helps to give Ethiopian worship its peculiar flavour, by providing an object for the very deepest devotion. Stories from the Gospels or the Old Testament are part of the canon; they are text, immutable. But those of the saints contain the playful traits of oral tradition. In the case of Mary, the stories are further animated by a mutual and limitless love.
The Ta’ammere Maryam—‘Miracles of Mary’, gathered together by Zara Yaqob himself, are better known than most Biblical stories. A story about Ras Makonnen, the conquering father of Emperor Haile Selassie, shows King Zara Yaqob’s enduring legacy. Visiting Britain in 1905, the ras was presented with a copy of the Ethiopic Miracles of Mary by the collector Lady Meux. Ras Makonnen at once dropped to his knees to give thanks to the Virgin—and placed the sacred volume on his head.
The miracles number in their hundreds. Some of them are duplicates, many have loose equivalents from medieval Europe. A glance at them gives an idea of how Mary’s powers are seen, and the particular way she dispenses them:
How a bishop cut off his hand which had been kissed by a woman during Mass, and how the Virgin Mary re-attached it to his arm…
How, while the monks slept inside, the Virgin Mary removed a monastery from the desert to a place beside a running stream…
How the Virgin Mary saved a drunken monk from a lion and a savage dog…
How the Virgin Mary enabled a man to slay a hun-dred-foot snake and how the man took from the serpent’s brain a pearl which he placed in a martyrium of Mary…
How the Virgin Mary saved a beautiful lady from committing adultery by causing her to read the Prayers of the Dead by moonlight in the garden where she was to meet her lover…
How the Virgin Mary forgave and protected a noble woman who committed incest with her son and conceived a child…
But favourite among Ethiopians is the story of Beilya Sub. A rich man and a Christian, Beilya Sub was also a cannibal. He ate his friends. He ate his neighbours and his servants; the rest of them ran away, leaving only his wife and two children. He ate them too. He was forced to go out to hunt for food, and while travelling came across a beggar. The beggar’s leprous body was covered in sores and scabs and smelled so bad that Beilya Sub didn’t eat him. The beggar pressed him for water but he refused. Then the beggar invoked the name of the Virgin Mary and Beilya Sub recalled her merciful ways and gave him a couple of drops. In time, Beilya Sub died and was taken to the depths of Sheol. There the Virgin saw him and called on Her Son to redeem him. The Lord sent for scales. In one side the angels placed the seventy-eight men Beilya Sub had eaten, and in the other the drops of water he gave the beggar. The scales tipped in the cannibal’s favour.
In the early Christian centuries, the cult of the Virgin Mary slipped behind other cults because she left behind no body parts to worship. But in later years their absence helped establish her pre-eminence. Like Enoch and Elijah and Moses (according to the apochryphal Ascension of Moses), the Virgin was believed to have been taken straight to heaven. It was there, according to Ethiopian tradition, that she received her Kidane Mehret, the ‘covenant of mercy’, the divine promise which allows her to intercede on behalf not only of the afflicted and the damned, but all mortals.
In the Miracles of Mary, Zara Yaqob gives a colourful version of how she attained the Kidane Mehret. It involves a glimpse of the next world, owing a little to that first mythical journey, that of Enoch.
On the sixteenth day of Yekatit [23 February] the angels raised the Virgin Mary to the heavens. First they showed Her the good places. She saw the souls of the patriarchs and the prophets, of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and they all bowed down before Her. She was then taken to a curtain of fire. As it was drawn so She saw, standing behind it, Her Son. He kissed Her on the mouth and said: ‘Did you come, my bearer?’ He seated Her on His right hand and revealed to Her the divine joy that transcends the senses and even the imagination. Then the angels showed Her the place of sinners, the region of outer darkness. There She witnessed the eternal torment of souls who had followed Satan: ‘Woe to them and alas to them!’
The Virgin began to plead with Her Son for their redemption. ‘He who builds a church in my name, clothes the naked in my name, visits the sick, feeds the hungry, gives water to the thirsty…reward him, O Lord with divine joy that transcends the senses and even the imagination. I petition you, O Lord, and supplicate to you for every one that believes in me: Make him free from hell.’ The Lord Jesus Christ said: ‘Let it be as you said. I shall fulfil all your wishes. Was I not incarnated for this?’
All three of the great monotheistic religions have in their storehouses of myths a similar story. The godhead takes a chosen mortal towards His realm and offers a covenant. In exchange for alms or righteousness or the promise not to ‘go a-whoring’ after false gods, the deity agrees to dispense His divine services. Thus Moses disappeared up Mount Sinai to intercede for the Jews; Muhammad went on a dream tour of heaven and later received the word of God. The Christian covenant was reaffirmed in the death and the resurrection of Jesus.
In Ethiopia, where the nature of Christ is still held to be more divine than human, the saints, and Mary in particular, act as His divine agents. Each of the saints makes a pre-death covenant with the Lord and it is this covenant that is invoked in prayer.
Every visitor to Ethiopia learns early on that the Ark of the Covenant is housed in a mysterious and never-entered chapel in Aksum. They learn that at the heart of every Ethiopian church is a representation of the Ark, known as the tabot; and on holy days it is this, hidden in gold-threaded silks, which is paraded around outside the church, carried on the head of a priest.
The Ethiopian claim to have the actual Ark is unique. Jewish history loses track of it after the destruction of the First Temple. The question of whether it is actually in Aksum can be left to the myth-seekers, grail-chasers and Indiana Joneses. Much more revealing is to examine what it is believed to be.
One of the ideas brought to the fore by Zara Yaqob is that Mary’s covenant of mercy, the Kidane Mehret, has precedence over all other covenants: ‘The Covenant of Our Lady Mary…did not start after the Ascension of Our Lord Jesus Christ but when Adam was expelled from the Garden…’
Mary was deemed to have existed at the time the world was made. (The Ascension of Moses suggests a similar idea for Moses). So all the saintly covenants in Ethiopia are merely branches of her arch-covenant. Even when Moses descended the slopes of Mount Sinai, he was, in effect, holding a version of the Virgin Mary’s covenant, the Kidane Mehret.
The association of Mary with the Ark of the Covenant is found on the fringes of other Christian traditions. Luke suggests it in his account of both the Annunciation and the Visitation. It is picked up in the apochryphal Book of James, a version of which survives in Ge’ez. But nowhere else do the two come together physically as they do at the very heart of Ethiopia, in Aksum. The compound of the Cathedral of St Mary of Zion contains the Chapel of the Tablets of Moses, the country’s most sacred place.
No one knows what is actually in the Ark—tablets of stone, the letters of divine law, a mound of dust or some mysterious ether, or nothing at all. But in the early seventeenth century, a Portuguese Jesuit asked Emperor Susenyos what was inside. His enigmatic answer confirms perhaps how embedded the cult of the Virgin Mother had become: ‘The figure of a woman with very large breasts.’
It was the eve of the festival of Kidane Mehret. We were walking beneath the Gheralta scarp. Streaks of late sun dropped behind a bank of cloud and against them rose the rocky façade of Debra Seyon, the ’mountain of Zion’. At the foot of the mountain was a low stone farmstead. A man was following his cattle in for the night. He glanced at us, threw one end of a gabbi over his shoulder and without a word led us into his yard.
The years had not been kind to Hailu Makonnen. He had lost two children in the great famine and another one just ten months earlier. In the corner of his yard lay a dying calf. His surviving five-year-old son was trying to interest the calf in a bowl of milk. Its flank heaved with the effort of breathing; it did not even have the energy to drink. When we started to put up the tent, the boy abandoned the calf to watch.
‘Look!’ He ran around the tent as it rose. ‘Look—it is coming out! Father, look—it is growing!’
Suddenly the tent took shape. The boy stood still. ‘Father, father—loo-ook! What they’ve made! It’s a car, Father!’
Hailu was not listening. His face was half-hidden by the hood of his gabbi. He was leaning against the wall of his house. He was looking out over the backs of his stock, over the top of the wattle tree, to the cliffs of the Mountain of Zion.
Dawn was cold. Hailu heaved a stuffed goatskin on to his shoulder and we crossed the valley. Around the base of the mountain ran a necklace of white-shawled worshippers.
The church of Kidane Mehret itself was tucked in under the cliffs. We eased our way through the crowds. They looked submissive and expectant. Along one side was a line of supplicants. A man was sitting on a cloth; where his right leg should have been, the cloth was scattered with coins. Next to him was a woman rocking back and forth. Beside her was a man with no face—nostrils flush with his cheeks, upper lip ripped away to leave a row of peg-teeth. A blind woman beside him fumbled each offering as she heard it fall, burying it deep inside a leather pouch. ‘In the name of Mary…’
Near the door a priest was guarding the church’s pool of Kidane Mehret gifts—cloth-wraps of bread, curled-up banknotes, fingerbone tapers. Hailu untied his goatskin and a stream of precious white wheat gushed onto a grain-mound already two feet high. I watched him closely as he did so. His face gave nothing away. It was as if he was paying some long-agreed tithe.
I squatted against the limewash wall and let the trance-like mood of the service flood over me. Incense and the drone of Ge’ez began to stretch out the minutes. In the half-darkness I could see the bowed, turbaned heads of priests and debtaras, the mounds of squatting women, the dozing drummers.
An elderly priest was leaning into a prayer book while a boy held a taper over it. ‘May he build the threshing floor of your harvest with blessing, amen let it be.’ The murmuring chant was hypnotic. ‘May he remove from your cities the invasion of arrows and spears amen and amen let it be—’
Just beside me was a man in a lemon-yellow towelling hat. He had bare legs and a staff-cross against his shoulder. A smoky hermit smell came from him. His face was pressed down hard on a shelf, and his cheeks had rucked up in creases against the rock.
‘- by the mouth of Our Lady Mary, the throne of fire, forever and ever, amen and amen upon me and upon you, let it be, let it be—’
Above our heads a flycatcher flew back and forth. No one paid it any notice. Between two standing figures, I spotted the raised head of a woman. Her cheeks ran with tears.
‘- for the sake of Mary, Mother of Light, amen and amen let it be, let it be; for the sake of His body and blood, the sacrifice of the faithful, amen and amen upon me and upon you let it be let it be let it be.’
An hour or more passed. Readings began, overlapped, rose and fell or faded to a mumble. Dawn spread the top of the doorway with its buttery light. The man beside me did not move an inch; I wondered if he was even breathing.
Then a long, low note filled the church. It was like the voice of the earth itself. It came from one of the debtara. All other noises ceased. One by one the other debtara added their voices. They shuffled into line. The note dropped. Soon there were a dozen singing. They roamed the scales; they were tentative and distant, as if looking for something. The metallic tinkle of their sistra trotted behind them.
Then—Bom!
With the drum, everything changed. Not at once, but imperceptibly, irreversibly. The worshippers’ trance was lifted: each beat sealed the covenant. The promise of compassion and redemption spread throughout that dawn crowd. The debtara raised their tempo. They coalesced around the drummers. An excitement seeped into the church. Handclapping rose from the perimeter. The women began to ululate. The debtara raised their prayer sticks. They rocked back on their feet. The drummers stood. Their double-beat drove the debtara. One line advanced. The other retreated. Their bare feet slid back over the rugs. Day was now streaming through the open door.
The bahtawi beside me raised his head. His face had a far-off expression. Then he took his staff and disappeared into the crowd; I saw him emerge a few minutes later, above the bobbing heads, leaping up over some lumpy boulders and into a narrow gorge.
Back at his house, Hailu pulled off the hood of his gabbi and smiled for the first time. We ate bread and honey. He told us about his father. ‘He was born on the mountain—he lived among the rocks. He loved those rocks!’
‘My father lived on the mountain of Debra Asa. He died up there.’ Gabre-Mariam picked a thread of plastic from a grain sack and begun to stitch one of his shoes. ‘My mother died and he went up to the mountain.’
‘Perhaps he is still there,’ said Hailu.
Gabre-Mariam grinned, without looking up from his stitching.
From the open doorway ran a cat. Behind it came Hailu’s son, waving his stick. The cat hopped onto a lying-down ladder, onto the top of the wall and under a lean-to roof; it padded to safety behind the only cow still in the yard, for whom the Kidane Mehret had also done its work. Beneath her, shunting its nose against her teat, was the sick calf.
In the evening we reached the town of Megab. One or two lights glowed in open doorways. The sun had long since set but its light still glowed creamy white on the clouds.
Music was throbbing from a tella bet. Several priests were sitting in front of beakers of custard-yellow tej, spinning out the last hours of the feast-day. The floor was spread with fresh grass and reeds. On the bar was a tape-recorder playing Eritrean dance music while three boys stood and shuffled their feet in a half-hearted way. A bored-looking girl sat beside the bar.
We put up the tent in the yard. In the morning, the girl was sweeping the grass from the floor, steering her broom around the slumped bodies of the dancers and the priests.
There was one more of Gheralta’s monasteries I wanted to see, and it stood on a thousand-foot-high cliff above Megab. I stepped out onto the road and looked up. Dawn had smeared the rock-face in honey-coloured light; the tiny shapes of eagles spun around its heights.
The monastery of Mariam Korkor played a formative part in Ethiopia’s greatest religious schism. In the fourteenth century a young monk named Ewostatewos studied here, becoming ever more convinced that the Church was in error, abusing divine law by failing to observe the Saturday Sabbath. As his following increased, so did the persecutions against him. He was forced to flee the country. In Egypt he was appalled to find the Copts committing the same mistake. In the monastery of Scete he was thrown in chains. He fled to Jerusalem. From there he went to Cyprus and Armenia (probably the Cilician kingdom), where he died.
This lonely life and death had a profound effect back in Ethiopia. Ewostatewos came to represent a divide deeper than the Sabbath dispute. It became a fundamental clash—between Old and New Testaments, between Judaic and Christian traditions. And beneath it all was the perennial Ethiopian urge for independence—in this case from the Coptic mother-Church, itself cowed by Mameluke rule. A hundred years later, a majority of Ethiopian monasteries were Ewostathian. It is probable that when Zara Yaqob came to the throne he too was a supporter—but, paradoxically, he was the one who settled the dispute by ruling against the Ewostathians.
We followed a path round beside the cliff and entered a narrow gully. Because of the skew of the rock, the sky was not always overhead. Leg-like roots dangled in the overhang. The gully opened out and Gabre-Mariam bent to kiss the cliff where it had been chiselled into a cell. We carried on up the bare rock.
We heard the chimes first. Alloy pendants hung from the eaves of the Dej-es-Selam, the ‘gate of peace’, and we entered the monastery. A bowl of open ground led to a space between two high rocks, and the abrupt edge of the cliff.
A family from Addis had just climbed up to the monastery. The women wore delicate gold jewellery and the men white jogging suits. They were teachers and lawyers and had come to visit the grave of their father. He had once owned a large tract of land below Korkor but when the revolution came the land was nationalised. He died soon afterwards and his widow had arranged for him to buried here. She then took her young children to Addis.
This was the first time they had been back. They filled bottles with holy water. They asked a monk to pour it over their heads and the sudden coolness made them laugh. ‘No! Wait—do that again…hold it!’ They took photographs of each other.
On a rock above squatted the abbot, a lone, crag-faced ascetic, his gabbi pulled tight around his face. Far below was the town of Megab and the mosaic of ploughed and unploughed plots around it.
I asked him about Ewostatewos and he fingered the curls of his beard. He peered at me as if from a great height. He did not reply.
‘Famous monk,’ I said. ‘Caused a great split in the Church. Ended by Zara Yaqob.’
His fingers dug deeper into his beard. His cloud-high gaze grew cloudier. His reticence grew more reticent.
‘Ewostatewos?’ I prodded.
He withdrew his fingers and folded his palms together. His voice was a melodic purr. ‘Ewostatewos and his men crossed the Red Sea to Armenia. They made boats from the skins of cows. His men’s faith was weak and their skins sank. But Ewostatewos had a very strong faith and because of that his skin did not sink.’
He turned away. The details of the past were no more relevant to him than the world below.
On the way out of the monastery we passed the family from Addis. Something had gone wrong. They had found the grave, but another body had been placed over that of their father.
‘You will remove it,’ one of them was ordering the monk.
‘Look, we do not mind which place you put it in,’ said another. ‘Just not there. This is the grave of our father. He was a landowner.’
It was almost dark when we reached the town of Hawzien. There we parted from Gabre-Mariam and Solomon.
‘Thanks to Abba Yohannis for the hour that we met!’ said Gabre-Mariam.
Solomon went from Hiluf to me, to Hiluf again and back to me, shaking our hands. ‘We have seen all those places, so many places!’
We walked with them to the edge of the town. We watched them grow smaller in the thickening darkness. Goodbye Gabre-Mariam, goodbye Solomon—favourite of all our mulemen!