Ethiopian Rite

The Ethiopian eucharist, the Qeddase, is served with a liturgical wealth no other church matches: fourteen anaphoras in use, where Rome historically kept one and Byzantium two. The ordinary prayer is the anaphora of the Apostles, an Ethiopian development of the ancient prayer known to scholarship from the church order tradition, and around it stand prayers ascribed to the Lord himself, to John the Evangelist, to the three hundred eighteen fathers of Nicaea, to Athanasius, Basil, Gregory, Cyril, and, uniquely in Christendom, an anaphora of Our Lady Mary, attributed to Cyriacus of Behnesa, whose Marian devotion is the rite's most beloved festal prayer.

The choice of anaphora follows the calendar and the feast. Every Ethiopian church is built around the tabot, the consecrated altar tablet representing the Ark of the Covenant, and it is the tabot, not the building, that makes the church holy; on the great feast of Timkat the tabots are carried out in procession wrapped in brocade, and the liturgy goes to the water with them. The rite's Judaic colouring has fascinated scholars for centuries: circumcision on the eighth day, the observance of Saturday sabbath alongside Sunday in parts of the tradition, and dietary distinctions kept from the Old Testament, features the church itself grounds in its national epic of descent from Solomon.

Ethiopian tradition tells that the deacon Yared, in the Aksum of the sixth century, was carried in spirit to heaven, heard the song of the angels, and returned to teach it to the church; the emperor Gebre Meskel, the story adds, was so transported listening that his spear pierced Yared's foot and neither man noticed. The attribution is tradition rather than documented history, but what it explains is real and extraordinary: the zema, the chant system of the Ethiopian church, with its three modes, ge'ez, ezl and araray, its own notation of interlinear signs developed to fix the melodies, and its great books, above all the Deggua, the antiphonary for the year ascribed to Yared himself.

The chant is the possession of the debtera, a learned order of cantors who are neither priests nor deacons, whose training in the church schools takes decades and covers chant, poetry and sacred dance. At the high feasts the debtera perform the aquaquam, the slow liturgical dance with prayer staff and sistrum to the beat of the kebero drum, a form of worship the church traces to David dancing before the Ark and which exists nowhere else in Christendom with such fullness. UNESCO and the musicological world have treated the zema as one of the great independent chant traditions of the world, a judgment the church would accept while stating the origin differently: that the music was heard, not composed.