Evocation of spirits in Abyssinia
In the “Voyage aux sources du Nil”, in 1768, James Bruce tells the story we reproduce below,
regarding Gingiro, a small Kingdom located south of Ethiopia, east of the Kingdom of Adel. The story is about two Ambassadors sent to the Pope around 1625, by Socinious, King of the Ethiopia,
having the Ambassadors to cross the Kingdom of Gingiro.
“Then, says Bruce, it was necessary to notify the King of Gingiro about the arrival of the entourage
and request an audience with him. But at that time he was occupied with an important operation of
witchcraft, without which the sovereign would not dare doing anything else.”
“The Kingdom of Gingiro can be considered as the first, on this side of Africa, where the strange
practice of predicting the future through the evocation of the spirits and via a direct communication
with the devil has been established.”
“The King thought convenient to wait for eight days before conceding an audience to the
Ambassador and his companion, the Jesuit Fernandez. Consequently, on the ninth day they got
permission to visit the court, which they did in the same afternoon.”
“In Gingiro nothing gets done without resorting to magic. It can thus be seen how much human
reason is degraded, a few leagues away. Do not tell us that such a weakness is due to ignorance or
the heat of the region. Why would heat induce man to become wizards, which would not happen in
a cold climate? Why would ignorance stretch man’s power to the point of making him transpose the
limits of ordinary intelligence and giving him the faculty of communicating with a new order of
beings, inhabitants of another world? The Ethiopians, who embrace almost all Ethiopia, are blacker
than the Gingironeans. Their land is hotter and as the latter, they are indigenous to the lands they
inhabit, since the beginning of the centuries. However, they neither worship the devil nor pretend to
have any communication with him; they do not sacrifice humans in their altars; finally, one cannot
find, among them, any trace of similar atrocity.”
“On those parts of Africa which have open communication with the sea, slave trading has been in
place since the remotest centuries but the King of Gingiro, whose domains are almost entirely
confined to the center of the continent, sacrifices to the devil the slaves he cannot sell to man. It is
there that this horrific costume, of shedding human blood in all ceremonies, begins.”
“I ignore”, says Mr. Bruce, “its reach towards southern Africa, but I consider Gingiro as the
geographic limit of the devil’s Kingdom, on the northern part of the peninsula.”
Had Mr. Bruce seen what we witness today, he would not have found anything frightening in those
practices employed in Gingiro. He only sees a superstitious belief in them whereas we see their
cause in the fact of falsely interpreted manifestations, which could be produced there, as anywhere
else.
The role that the devil plays in their culture is not surprising. Firstly, it is necessary to observe that
all barbaric peoples have attributed to a malefic power everything that they could not explain.
Second, a sufficiently ignorant people, capable of sacrificing human beings, certainly could not
attract superior spirits to their environment. By their nature, those spirits who visit them can only
confirm them in their beliefs. Besides, one has to consider that the peoples of certain regions of
Africa have preserved a large number of Jewish traditions, later mixed with some formless ideas of
Christianism where they adopted the doctrine of the devil and the demons, as a result of their own
ignorance.
