Medical Museum
Art That Heals: The Image as Medicine
in Ethiopia
Medico-Religious Identities
7. Adherents of a cult of place spirits (kolle) in Agawmeder, photo courtesy of Jacques Mercier, 1984 |
The period of the Christian Ethiopian state's expansion in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is an important moment in the construction of modern Ethiopian identities. This era saw the birth of an indigenous written literature consisting largely of chronicles of the activities of the Christian missionaries who, moving in the tracks of the royal troops, converted the pagan population. Ethiopian hagiographers, while following literary models inherited from Byzantium, allowed some elements of the preexisting religions to filter through. |
| Among the most remarkable aspects of these earlier religions was the practice of prophecy while in trance states. The ceremony would begin with the sacrifice of a cow. After being anointed with the cow's blood and adorned with its peritoneum, the priest would step into a fire of wood, and sometimes also of the cow's bones. There the god would "ride" him, honoring the sacrifice by protecting him from burns. The god would also speak through his mouth, prophesying for the congregation, who would ask questions about the future or about the origin and outcome of an illness. |
8. Medical treatment, Nefas Mawcha. A cleric applies medicine to a scrofula wound with a feather provided by the patient, a young boy. Photo courtesy of Jacques Mercier, 1980 |
Text courtesy of Mercier, Jacques. Art That Heals: the Image as Medicine in Ethiopia. New York: Prestel Books and The Museum For African Art, 1997.
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