Chapter XIII · (continued 2)
Reading edition
Abyssinian Hamites: Religion.
Amongst the Abyssinian Hamites we find the strangest interminglings of primitive and more advanced religious ideas. On a seething mass of African heathendom, already in pre-historic times affected by early Semitic ideas introduced by the Himyarites from South Arabia, was somewhat suddenly imposed an undeveloped form of Christianity by the preaching of Frumentius in the fourth century, with results that cannot be called satisfactory. While the heterogeneous ethnical elements have been merged in a composite Abyssinian nationality, the discordant religious ideas have never yet been fused in a consistent uniform system. Hence "Abyssinian Christianity" is a sort of by-word even amongst the Eastern Churches, while the social institutions are marked by elementary notions of justice and paradoxical "shamanistic" practices, interspersed with a few sublime moral precepts. Many things came as a surprise to the members of the Rennell Rodd Mission[1148], who could not understand such a strange mixture of savagery and lofty notions in a Christian community which, for instance, accounted accidental death as wilful murder. The case is mentioned of a man falling from a tree on a friend below and killing him. "He was adjudged to perish at the hands of the bereaved family, in the same manner as the corpse. But the family refused to sacrifice a second member, so the culprit escaped." Dreams also are resorted to, as in the days of the Pharaohs, for detecting crime. A priest is sent for, and if his prayers and curses fail, a small boy is drugged and told to dream. "Whatever person he dreams of is fixed on as the criminal; no further proof is needed.... If the boy does not dream of the person whom the priest has determined on as the criminal, he is kept under drugs until he does what is required of him."
To outsiders society seems to be a strange jumble of an iron despotism, which forbids the selling of a horse for over £10 under severe penalties, and a personal freedom or licence, which allows the labourer to claim his wages after a week's work and forthwith decamp to spend them, returning next day or next month as the humour takes him. Yet somehow things hold together, and a few Semitic immigrants from South Arabia have for over 2000 years contrived to maintain some kind of control over the Hamitic aborigines who have always formed the bulk of the population in Abyssinia[1149].