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Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume I pp 19–48Cite as

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Therianthropes

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Abstract

Therianthropic beings are described in their full splendour in this chapter. The ontological hybridity and species diversity of Myth Time’s “Early Race” is evident in the /Xam trickster /Kaggen and his multi-species extended family or band. Therianthropic or chimerical ontological ambiguity may be manifested with dazzling extravagance by some members of the Early Race, or, more commonly, in subtly elusive and mentally beguiling fashion, among them the First Race Elephants and Ostriches. Because myth time and historical time are not exclusive temporal and ontological domains in San mythology and cosmology, First Order therianthropes can also appear in the Second Order, where they may live in remote areas of the veld or hunting ground making occasional contact with human hunters or gatherers, adding grist to the San mill of stories, as well as corroboration to their World of Myth.

All things (that is living creatures) were once people …

/Hanǂkasso ( Bleek 1936 : 164)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “übernatürliche Wesen die weder eindeutig menschlicher, noch göttlicher Abstammung sind” (my translation).

  2. 2.

    For an examination of spirits in such terms—as beings “who are their own kind of real”—in the context of Amazonian shamanic cultures, see Kohn (2013: 217); also see Münzel (2013).

  3. 3.

    Some of the Naro informants from whom I received these accounts of the spirit realm were closely associated with a mission station (of the Gereformeerde Kerk, a branch of the South African Dutch Reformed Church) and their notions of the spirit world and its features were influenced by their exposure, through an active evangelist-missionary, to Christian notions, resulting in a syncretistic amalgam of features of the spirit realm that included the Garden of Eden, “Addam” and “Effa”, “Jessu Kriste”, the Tower of “Babbel” and a hell-fire in a dark, remote region of the Kalahari veld around which skulk shivering, cowering the spirit avatars of “bad people” munching on flies. I have described these notions in some detail elsewhere (Guenther 1989: 41–50; 1997: 203–11; 1999: 117–18). For a less acculturated depiction of the domain of the gods and spirits of the dead (among Ju/’hoansi), see Marshall (1999: 5–27); also see Thurner (1983: 304–5). For an account of the San spirit world that focuses on the aspect of termite hills—as God’s house in the spirit world and “symbolic wombs” of fat and spiritual potency within San cosmology, see Mguni (2006: 65, 2015).

  4. 4.

    As “a professional man of letters with primarily literary interests [who] was widely read in folklore and related fields of anthropology” (Lowie 1948: 119), Lang had read all the then available literature on Khoisan folklore, consisting of Bleek (1864, 1875) and Orpen (1874), the former a summary of hitherto collected /Xam folklore texts, the latter a short article on folklore texts from one Maluti /Xam informant. Lang drew on this recent ethnographic information in his two-volume magnum opus Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887, 1901) in his own discussion of “primitive religion”, including animism. Wilhelm Bleek’s characterization of “the Bushman mind” as holding “an especially fertile genius for myth formulation” (1874: 11) resonates with Lang’s postulate of a “universality of the mythopoeic mental condition” (1901: 16) and peaked his interest in the then available literature on Bushman orature. Regarding animism, Lang engaged critically with Tylor’s take on this pivotal concept (belief in souls), agreeing to disagree, in conciliatory debate, with “my friend Mr. E. B. Tylor” (1901: 17). With Tylor he shared the more general notion of “animation of nature”, which Lang, again, saw manifested especially fulsomely in Bushman mythology. This to him was an exemplar of “the savage condition of the mind … in which all things, animate or inanimate, human, animal, vegetable or inorganic, seem on the same level of life, passion and reason” (ibid.: 39).

  5. 5.

    The /Xam storytellers’ restraint here may have been in deference to the Prussian and Victorian sense of propriety of their interlocutors, one a theologian’s son, the other a rector’s daughter (Guenther 1996: 90–91; Wittenberg 2012). This editorial intervention was evidently continued by Bleek’s daughter Dorothea (Bennum 2004: 336).

  6. 6.

    Daniel McCall built his much-cited pioneer study on “the equivalence of hunting and mating in Bushman thought” around this symbolically pregnant ≠Khomani story (1970: 1–2).

  7. 7.

    In 1995, I obtained an especially vivid and expansive Naro version from D’Kar’s best story teller, Qhomatcã. The tale is presented and discussed in Vol. II (Chap. 3).

  8. 8.

    There were several phonetic transcriptions and glosses for this term (see Guenther 2014: 198–9). In the Keeneys’ “Dictionary of the Ju/’hoan Religion” that appears as an appendix in their Way of the Bushman (2015: 208–15) the entry for “the original ancestors” is g//aon=’ansi. The Ju/’hoan term for “first creation” is G=aing=aig=ani (ibid.: 210).

  9. 9.

    In kidnapping the infant springbok the Early Race she-elephant disposition for nurturing—a “maternal instinct”—that /Xam myth and cosmology appears to have attributed to elephants. This, suggest Neil Rusch and John Parkington, that elephants, a frequent motif in Northern Cape rock engravings, were “particularly powerful models for behaviours and aspirations of growing women” (2010: 120). “/Xam and other San”, they continue, “felt a common purpose with elephants—and none more so than women gatherers” (ibid.).

  10. 10.

    A description of Mantis given to Gideon von Wielligh by one of the /Xam descendants in the Northern Cape in the 1920s.

  11. 11.

    The Afrikaans term for the rock hyrax (Procavia capensis, order Hyracoidea). Also known as “rock rabbit” because it vaguely resembles the latter animal’s size and shape, the animal is anatomically and phylogenetically related to elephants, conferring to it, in a western zoologist’s eyes, a superficial morphological and taxonomic hybridity that resonates with its ontological ambiguity in /Xam myth. Etymologically, the taxonomists’ term for the animal’s Order is itself rooted in a species-confounding term: hurax, the ancient Greeks’ word for the creature, means “shrewmouse”.

  12. 12.

    Egyptian mongoose (Herpestes ichneumon).

  13. 13.

    For a complete overview of Mantis’s ontologically diverse extended family, over several generations see Bleek (1923: v–vi), Thurner (1983: 135–36, 148–61), Guenther (1999: 67–8), Lewis-Williams and Pearce (2004: 112–25) and Lewis-Williams (2015a: 82–5).

  14. 14.

    In Dorothea Bleek’s composite version of the tale Mantis’s point of entry is under her fingernail, to which Elephant replies, in human anatomical fashion, “that she would pick him out” (Bleek 1923: 43).

  15. 15.

    In other Kalahari ostrich stories, the ostrich character’s ontological and gender ambiguity is retained (Guenther 1989: 55; Eastwood and Eastwood 2006: 108).

  16. 16.

    When years ago I counted up the animal characters and beings that appear in Khoisan myths, I came up with a total of 73 species (Guenther 1990: 246).

  17. 17.

    See Barnard (1985: 37) for further Naro glosses for the term “animal”.

  18. 18.

    In another story of the raid genre by this narrator the myth time–real time conflation of Koranna raiders is even more explicit: the mythological provenance of one of the Early Race characters featured in the kumm is a bat-eared fox who, the narrator states, “was once a person [and] who felt he was once one of the Early Race” (L. VIII. 18: 7593–95).

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  1. Department of Anthropology, Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, ON, Canada

    Mathias Guenther

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Guenther, M. (2020). Therianthropes. In: Human-Animal Relationships in San and Hunter-Gatherer Cosmology, Volume I. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21182-0_2

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