In fact, Yohannes is part of a growing trend in Ethiopian Christianity, one which is most visible within its Protestant churches but is slowly beginning to impact its ancient Orthodox community, too. It’s characterized by charismatic preachers redolent of American televangelists, an entrepreneurial approach to mass media, and an internationalist outlook. These features reflect the influence of Pentecostalism, an extraordinarily fast-growing Protestant revival movement that emphasizes a personal experience of God. On the rise across swaths of Africa and the developing world, Pentecostalism is transforming some of the very oldest Christian societies, including Ethiopian Orthodoxy. Other Christian denominations around the world are likewise reviving the practice of exorcism.

CHARLIE ROSSER

Yohannes often travels the world spreading his message, with the result that an average of 40,000 pilgrims, by his count, pass through Wenkeshet “like the flow of a river” each month, while a few thousand live in makeshift tents inside the monastery compound at any given time. But what really helps him cultivate an international following is modern technology.

He screens his mass exorcisms and baptisms on Facebook and YouTube, where his monastery has a combined following of more than 70,000 people. Several pilgrims told me they first heard of Wenkeshet online. Eshetu Neta, a government official from the town of Adama, near the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, told me that his sister in Germany had her spinal cord fixed “simply by watching this program on YouTube and coming here.” Meaza Lemma, a 25-year-old woman suffering from asthma, learned about Yohannes from her sister in Dubai who watched his services on Facebook. And at the end of the ceremony I witnessed, Yohannes asked a young woman to testify in front of a camera that she had been successfully cured of mental-health issues.

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This technical savvy is characteristic of modern Pentecostalism, according to Naomi Richman, a scholar of African religion at Oxford University. So is mass exorcism, which she told me is “fast becoming a staple practice in African Christianity.” Few denominations in Ethiopia have been left entirely untouched by these recent developments.

But that doesn’t mean that such articulations of the religion are entirely new, or that figures like Yohannes are without precedent in the history of Ethiopian Christianity. The faith, according to historical accounts, was brought to the country in the late fifth century by monks and missionaries from North Africa and the Middle East. Some, it is said, came bearing wonders. “The focus on miracles was there right from the inception of the monastic movement,” said Theodros Teklu, a theologian at the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, a Protestant seminary college. Father Garima, a Byzantine prince and one of the so-called Nine Saints of early Ethiopian Christianity, was famed for his spiritual gifts, notably a power to heal the sick. For centuries, Ethiopia held a special place in the European imagination as a mythical Christian kingdom sealed off from the outside world.

CHARLIE ROSSER

Throughout Ethiopian Christian history, monks and mystics known as Bahitawi sprang up. Nomadic and usually dreadlocked, some of them gathered large followings. Joachim Persoon, a scholar of the Bahitawi, has argued that they often appeared in times of social change and unrest. “When the government was weak and unstable, people were looking for guidance and leadership,” he told me. “They went looking for charismatic leaders.”