Mapping Ethiopia’s Ancient Spirituality and Amba Gishen: From Sacralisation to Desacralisation

Abstract

Amba Gishen, a cross-shaped mountainous place in the Southern Wollo Zone of Ethiopia, has for centuries been the site of a royal medieval prison thanks to its geographical isolation on the top of an amba (flat-top mountain). The first African narrative source of the deposition of a relic at Amba Gishen is cited in one of the most sacred Christian manuscripts of Ethiopia, the Mäshafä Tefut (fifteenth century). The presence of a holy relic, the fragment of the True Cross brought here by emperor Zara Yacoq in 1446, changed the meaning of that space for the Ethiopian people. The shifting topographies, from Mountain of the Royal Family to Mount of Myrrh, metaphorically referring to the myrrh associated with the Passion of Christ, have given way to a devotional focus and function, making Amba Gishen one of the holiest places in the land. As a place and site of confinement, however, the space inspired distorted imagery of Abyssinia, as conveyed by Anglophone travel narratives. The scope of the present research is to illustrate the dynamics in determining the sacralisation of spaces by their topographical morphology. This is achieved through the (re-)appropriation of natural spaces from the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and through resisting the desacralisation featured in Western narratives.

Keywords:

• sense of place
• (de)sacralisation of space
• travel writing
• Amba Gishen
• Ethiopian mysticism
• sacred mountains

Notes

1 Influential studies on American sacred space have been published since the 1990s (Carmichael et al. 1994; Chidester and Linenthal 1995); more recent studies have focused on African sacred spaces (Ogundayo and Adekunle 2019). In the early 2000s, Jamie Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley co-edited Mapping the Sacred: Religion, Geography and Postcolonial Literatures (2001). However, Ethiopia is not present in any of these works. The collection Sacred Waters, edited by Celeste Ray, includes a study titled “Divine Waters in Ethiopia: The Source from Heaven and Indigenous Water-Worlds in the Lake Tana Region” (Oestigaard and Firew 2020). Mountains and the sources of water they generate are often identified as integrated sacred spaces.

2 This is housed in the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice.

3 Thomas Pakenham believes that Amba Gishen “is probably the Amba Negast marked on the centre of Fra’ Mauro’s Mappamundi of 1460” ([1959] 1999, 127–28). The Encyclopaedia Aethiopica describes it as being “on the top of a massive mountain (3249 a.s.l.) surrounded by gorges” (Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 1, s.v. “Amba Géšän”). The description of the topographical elements seems to be consistent with the visual rendering in Fra’ Mauro’s world map, where it is represented as a castle perched on a steep mountainside.

4 He travelled to Ethiopia in 1515 as an ambassador on behalf of the King of Portugal. In fact, Emperor Lebna Dengel had asked for papal help against the Muslim invasions.

5 Upon consulting the original manuscript of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in the British Museum, Philip Marsden (2005, 70) discovered that the poet had written Mount Amara and not Abora, as reported in the printed editions. Coleridge had read about Mount Amara in the travels of Samuel Purchas and Pliny (Cooper 1906). At the bottom of the original manuscript of the poem, Coleridge had also made a note stating that he composed the verses in a kind of reverie brought on by two grains of opium, which facilitated the mysticism of the images evoked in the poem. Coleridge recounts falling asleep while reading Purchas His Pilgrimes (Purchas 1625).

6 The scientific name for teff is Eragrostis teff.

7 It can be seen very clearly on Google Earth. By searching for “Gishen Mariam”, one can also see the main churches surrounded by circular enclosures of trees.

8 In the Roman Catholic Church, indulgences refer to the remission of temporal punishment in purgatory after absolution.

9 Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Gazi (c. 1506–1543), known also as Grañ or Gragn, was of Somali origin and the leader of the Muslim conquest of southern, central, and northern Ethiopia in the first half of the sixteenth century. He was therefore called sahib al-fath (“the lord of the conquest”), whilst the Amhara nicknamed him Grañ or “left-handed” (Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 1, s.v. “Ahmad b. Ibrahim al-Gazi”).

10 Futuh al-Habaša, or “The Conquests of Ethiopia” is the chronicle of the Muslim conquests made in Ethiopia. Besides the Ethiopian chronicles it represents the only Arabic source of Gragn’s campaigns (Encyclopaedia Aethiopica, vol. 2, s.v. “Futuh al-Habaša”).

11 See, for instance, the Buganda kings’ places at Kasubi in Uganda, at https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1022 (accessed September 11, 2022).

12 Massaja (1897, 63) recounts that to reach the king’s palace he had to cross a narrow gorge between two mountain ridges artificially closed by a large wall.