ÆTHER UTOPIA

Before the land took the name, kings carried it.

Ethiopia's royal roll names kings called Etiyopus among its earliest rulers. Old European maps wrote ETHIOPIA across half of Africa and named the South Atlantic the Oceanus Aethiopicus, the Ethiopian Ocean. Homer seated the gods at an Ethiopian feast. And in the Greek name itself, Aithiops, the ear hears the aether, the shining upper air.

Æther Utopia is a word study and a contemplative history of one land's many names. It follows them from the shining air, along the shores of Kush, down into Abyssinia and the deep, and on to the singers, scribes and elders who kept the record.

Inside:

• The kings named Etiyopus, and a name older than the story usually told about it


• Maps by Ortelius, Blaeu, Speed and Moll, including the one that wrote "ETHIOPIA this Country is wholly Unknown to the Europeans"


• Moses and his Cushite wife, and the old accounts of his marriage into the Ethiopian royal house


• Saint Yared, the singer remembered as one who did not die, and the sistrum that sounds the Word made flesh


• The Book of Enoch, kept whole only in Ge'ez


• The Italian occupation, the record buried under denial, and Churchill's broadcast tracing the war between Britain and Italy to Ethiopia


• Mexico and Ethiopia, two capitals that carry each other's names

Every claim is marked. Documented shows what a source actually says. Resonance marks the sound-pairings the ear hears across languages, offered as contemplation. Each of the twenty-six chapters closes with open questions to carry. The reader weighs the rest.

From Panentheos. God in All · All in God.