Ethiopians are quite big on religion. They’ve got their own version of Christianity and their own church – the Ethiopian Orthodox Church – and I have a feeling that it’s a bit more fun than my church was.
I say this because of the stories. I visited two monasteries on the Zege Peninsula of Lake Tana today (two of the few that allow women in), and while they were very interesting and had treasures like silver crowns and golden robes dating back to the 13th century and armed guards and turbaned priests and interior walls covered from floor to ceiling in brightly-coloured paintings of bible scenes, I didn’t really get into it before we came to a scene on a wall that I didn’t recognise.
‘And, um, which story is this?’ I asked, pointing at a picture of a man surrounded by bits of a person, holding a knife and eating something with a worried look on his face. I knew he was a good guy, because he had two eyes, and that’s the convention with Ethiopian religious paintings: the goodies are shown with two eyes, the baddies are always in profile.
My guide explained that he was the ‘kind cannibal’. Apparently, the devil tempted him to kill his own son and eat him, and after doing so, he lost his mind and killed and ate everyone in his village. Then he met Saint Mary, who was thirsty, and gave her some water (or it may have been before his feeding frenzy – I’m unclear on the sequence because I was taking photographs).
When he died, the devil tried to drag him down to hell (shown separately) but the Angel Raphael (or similar) put the souls of the people he’d eaten in the scales, opposite the water he’d given Mary, and the water, believe it or not, was heavier. So the kind cannibal went to heaven (that part wasn’t shown).
This wasn’t the only story I didn’t remember from Sunday School. There was the rich woman who tried to steal Jesus (because he was very handsome) but her house sank into the ground and her servants turned into blue monkeys. Some other rich people who tried to steal Jesus on another occasion (reason unspecified) got chomped by a very large fish mid-kidnap (surprise!)
There was also a holy old guy wearing a robe made out of his own beard with a bird drinking water out of his eyes, and a saint who climbed a cliff with the help of a serpent to establish a monastery (the serpent was shown with one eye, which left me confused about its motivations), and Jacob (if I remember correctly) plowing a field on top of a tree (because if you’re Jacob, you can do that sort of thing).
It all made me want to go and read my Bible again, until my guide told me that these stories weren’t in my Bible. They’re in what’s known as the ‘common books’. I was dead keen to try to get hold one of those, even if it was only on paper and not goatskin, but they’re only available in Amharigna and I can’t read Amharigna. I appeal to any scholars of the language to translate the Common Books into English and I will gladly purchase a copy. But please include the paintings from the monasteries. The stories wouldn’t be nearly as good without the pictures.
