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[caption id="attachment_460" align="alignright" width="300"] This is the second of four blog-posts going back to a paper at the International Congress at Leeds in 2017: I. Introduction II. Aregawi as Pachomios‘ son III. The saints’ interaction with the Aksumite kings IV. Conclusion[/caption]The first narrative oddity is the most conspicuous: The saints’ time in training with the famous 4th-century Egyptian monk, Pachomios, which is not chronologically feasible, given the fact that they later meet 6th century Aksumite kings. When Abba Aregawi found Pachomios in the Thebaid of “the Greek country,” Pachomios was immediately taken by his piety and accepted him as a student. After a lengthy period of training, and having passed all the necessary tests of his character, Aregawi, now 40 according to the text, stood before Pachomios. Pachomios then dressed him in his new uniform, the eskema and said “May god bless your eskema, as he gave his blessing to my fathers, Abba Antonyos and Abba Maqaris (Makarios).”The Pachomian moment in the lives of the holy man is significant for two particular reasons. First, Pachomios serves as a gathering point for the saints and so as a way to rank them in order of importance. After Aregawi becomes a monk, he stays in the Thebaid for some time, and it is here that all the saints meet except for Garima, who the text maintains was still the king of Rome by this point. Aregawi soon becomes head of the other saints, who look up to him as a father figure despite his being the same age as the rest of them, and so they give him the nickname Aregawi, meaning “the old man.” He is also the one who tells them to go to Ethiopia, and when they are there, he is also the one to suggest that they stop living together, in order to properly Christianize the countryside. The author, likely closely associated with the monastery of Debre Damo which Aregawi allegedly founded, uses the Pachomian training narrative as a key historical moment in which, by common assent, the 9 founders of Ethiopian monasticism, minus Garima all agree that Aregawi is the first and most able spiritual athlete.Second, it creates direct continuity between the Pachomian monastic tradition and Ethiopia’s own, a kind of legitimation that its own indigenous saints could hardly give it in the eyes of the Alexandrian See. This argument is made through the use of a genealogical narrative embedded in the Pachomian training narrative. The link to Pachomios legitimated the monastic bona fides of those who claimed to follow in Aregawi and Pachomios’s footsteps through a mode of argumentation that genealogically links the Egyptian saint to the holy men of Ethiopia. Genealogical arrangements of monks are a common sight in Ethiopian monastic texts, using the same language of “begetting” that permeates the Ethiopic Old Testament, right down to the use of the word “walda” or “son” to explain which monk was trained by which elder, so that when Pachomius gives Aregawi his eskema, Pachomios “begets” him and refers to him as ‘my son’.[caption id="attachment_362" align="alignleft" width="300"] The Nine Saints. Painting in the Abba Pentalewon Monastery near Aksum. Image taken by Ondřej Žváček; via WikiCommons; licence: CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en)[/caption]This genealogical link is marked by a ritual birth, in which the elder monk dresses the initiate in monastic garb, the eskema, and by doing so bestows upon him spiritual authority and the direct support of God. This ritual is so central to the idea of the legitimacy of Ethiopian monasticism that in other texts it is extended beyond the 9 saints and Pachomius to Anthony’s time as an anchorite: In much the same way that Pachomios dressed these two holy men with their eskema, initiating them in the monastic life, Anthony is described in a 18th century Ethiopic text as initiating himself in this monastic tradition by reflexively “donning monasticism” with the aid of St. Michael. Aregawi’s gadl continues this genealogy through his disciple Matyas, the line producing such indigenous monastic superstars as Iyasus Mo’a and Abba Takla Haymanot. This argument not only links Pachomios directly to Debre Damo’s monastic traditions, but completely undermines the heated discourse present in texts such as the Vita of Takla Haymanot, which, as Nosnitsin has pointed out, was quite preoccupied with genealogical quandaries concerning whether Iyasus Mo’a or Takla Haymanot were superior in rank, and who conferred holiness upon whom. It also firmly counters the arguments of any other northern monasteries that could claim a tradition stemming from any other saint, such as the separate genealogy established between 2 of the 9 saints, Abba Pantalewon and Abba Garima.We can also see the ghost of another medieval debate in this narrative: The author takes time to point out that during Aregawi’s time in the Thebaid, Pachomios dies and is replaced by Theodore. However, the language used to characterize the relationship between these two men, while still emphasizing Theodore as Pachomios’s successor in a position of superiority over Aregawi, is not genealogical. While Pachomios explicitly refers to Aregawi as “my son”, no such relationship is ever established between Theodore and Aregawi, even as the other saints begin to refer to Aregawi in such terms. The text simply states that Aregawi “remained with Theodore” for some time afterwards. This is significant in light of the version of the Lidete Abaw produced in the monastery of Debre Libanos, as published by Getachew Haile, which explicitly lists Theodore as the spiritual father of Aregawi. Aregawi’s genealogy in his gadl is a subtle rebuttle to this genealogy, acknowledging the historicity of Debre Libanos’s claims while adding just enough nuance to preserve a direct Pachomian connection. Yes, they were both present in the Thebaid and they may indeed have lived in the same community, but by the time Theodore has arrived on the scene, Aregawi already had his askema, and was already in the process of teaching others. So while not unimportant, Theodore was certainly not to be included in the genealogy in any way that might disrupt Aregawi’s claim to an undiluted Pachomian monastic tradition.[cite]