San Religion

The first thing to say about the beings of San religion is that they are not shared. The /Xam of the northern Cape, recorded in the 1870s, and the Ju/'hoansi of the Nyae Nyae region, recorded in the twentieth century, do not name the same figures, and neither do the Nharo or the !Kung of other areas. Writing about a San pantheon produces a composite that no community ever held.

Among the /Xam the central figure is Kaggen, whose name is also the word for mantis. He made the eland, which he loved, and he is present in the stories as a creator and a fool at once, tricked, injured, resurrected, and repeatedly the cause of his own misfortunes. The /Xam material also gives sustained attention to the sun and moon, to the rain treated as an animal that can be captured and led, and to a class of people of the early race who lived before things took their present order. It does not sort into a hierarchy, and attempts to make it do so have generally been imposed from outside.

Among the Ju/'hoansi, Lorna Marshall recorded a clearer division: a great god of the eastern sky, Gao Na, who made the world and remains largely benevolent and distant, and a lesser god of the west, //Gauwa, who is unpredictable and is the one actually responsible for illness and death. Below them are the //gauwasi, the spirits of the dead, who hover near the living and shoot invisible arrows of sickness. This is the framework within which the healing dance makes sense: the dancers are not appeasing a distant creator but arguing with the dead and with the lesser god about a particular sick person, sometimes audibly and sometimes rudely.

Guenther's comparative reading treats that variability as the defining feature rather than as noise to be averaged out.

The best documented San religious practice is the healing dance, described at length for the Ju/'hoansi by Lorna Marshall and by others since. Women sit in a circle at the fire, clapping and singing the medicine songs; men dance around them through the night; and in some of the dancers a potency called n/om, held to reside in the lower body, heats and rises. A healer in whom it has risen lays hands on each person present in turn, drawing sickness out, and may cry out, tremble or collapse. This is a description of what has been published about the dance, not an account of how it is done: the knowledge of raising and handling n/om is transmitted person to person within San communities, from an established healer to someone learning, and it is not the atlas's to pass on.

The other body of evidence is the rock art of southern Africa, tens of thousands of painted and engraved sites. Since the 1970s the dominant interpretation, argued most forcefully by David Lewis-Williams, has read much of the imagery as depicting the trance experience of the dance, using the /Xam texts and the Ju/'hoansi ethnography as a key. The reading has been productive and is not universally accepted; critics have argued that it flattens a very long and regionally varied tradition into a single explanation and reads recent ethnography backwards into images made thousands of years earlier by people about whom nothing else is known. The atlas records that argument as open.

What sits behind both is a limit. The religions of the San groups of the southern Cape whose languages ended before anyone wrote them down are not recoverable. The Bleek and Lloyd collection exists because two people happened to begin that work and were able to continue it for fourteen years. Where nobody began, there is nothing.