488 MAN : PAST AND PRESENT. [CHAP. 



while none of the Gallas or Somals unaffected by Islam are able 

 to form any notion of a Supreme deity. 



But it is amongst the Abyssinian Hamites that are met the 

 strangest interminglings of primitive and more advanced religious 

 ideas. On a seething mass of African heathendom, already in 

 prehistoric times affected by early Semitic ideas, introduced by 

 the Himyarites from South Arabia, was somewhat suddenly im- 

 posed 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 con- 

 sistent 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 1 , who could not under- 

 stand 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 



1 Count Gleichen, Rennell Rodd's Mission to Menelik, 1897. 



