The International Arts Pestival—a celebration of insects in the arts and the art of being an insect—is looking for volunteers for this year’s event, which will take place at the Southbank Centre in London, 3-6 September.

“Calling all insect workers, educationalists, artists and budding naturalists. . . . Reasonable out of pocket expenses paid.”

More details »

Coming up fast, over the last week of March, is the next Metageum conference. The last one was a fascinating event in Malta; this time, we’re in the slightly less megalith-rich, but hopefully more humanly hectic environs of London. Specifically, at the ever-conducive venue, Treadwell’s.

Speakers so far include Paul Devereux, Peter Lloyd, David Luke, Lydia Oukhaneva, Toni Perrott, Peter Knight, Donal Ruane and Deborah Marshall-Warren.

And me. I’m on March 28th at 1.30pm—sign up and I’ll see you there!

My talk has changed slightly from the blurb currently posted there. Here’s the latest version:

Darwin, Rock Art, and the Human Animal

Commemorating this year’s double anniversary (of Darwin’s birth and the publication of The Origin of Species), this talk will delve into the complex influence of evolutionary theory on both the study of prehistoric rock art in particular, and modern attitudes to “primitive” man in general. From the surprising origins of the myth of “the noble savage” in Victorian ethnology to Stephen Pinker’s contentions about prehistoric violence; from Terence McKenna’s mycological speculations to recent archaeological controversies about shamans and visions. This will be a wide-ranging trip through our varying perspectives on the prehistoric mind, what it means to be an animal with imagination, and the bearing of these stories on the ecological crisis we find ourselves in.

Palaeontologists in a vast desert. Large crested ridges of ancient red sand and rock formations… They remove the top layers, and reveal the skeleton of a giant snake beneath. No thicker than a man’s torso, but miles and miles long… stretching along the crest of the ridge… Sections of the remains are exposed intermittently

That was a dream I had once. It had an electric thrill about it, as if even the skeleton of this fantastic beast enlivened the dream landscape with seething energy.

I felt a surge of that reading a report about Titanoboa cerrejonesis, the name given to the recently discovered skeleton of the biggest snake known to have lived. From the steaming tropics of 60 million years ago, this beast was at least 13 meters long, “longer than a city bus … and heavier than a car”.

Link via Reality Sandwich. Creative Commons licensed photo by Doc Searls.

We know from the biological sciences that humans have evolved from other animals, and we know from our own direct experience that humans have consciousness. Given these two facts, it makes sense to assume that human consciousness evolved from pre-human consciousness. In other words, other animals are sentient, aware beings just like us. Thus, understanding animal consciousness may help reveal our own origins and the dynamics of our minds.

Actually this isn’t wholly a blindspot. For example, Richard Dawkins admirably puts his money where his mouth is in his support for The Great Ape Project, which aims to extend basic legal rights to our closest cousins.

Still, the specter of Christianity and humanism’s obsession with our “special status” in the scheme of life, and Descarte’s mechanical animals vision, continue to haunt our general paradigm for relating psyche and consciousness to other-than-human life. With brilliant minds like David Abram and Jeremy Narby as advisors, CIR looks very interesting indeed.

Betty, the hook-making crow in a lab in Oxford, probably got the ball rolling, easily out-performing the rudimentary tool skills of chimps:

Then we saw the crows from Osaka, not directly fashioning tools, but demonstrating a kind of planning ingenuity that will drop the jaw of anyone who’s grown up with the word “animal” having connotations of “dumb and brutish”:

But while such tricks make great web distractions, they only breach the crumbling wall between humans and animals in the science-friendly realm of functional, practical behaviour. What about those shiftier areas, such as emotion, with all its attendant complexities and pathologies?

Our culture has a see-saw relationship with perception of emotions in animals. Sometimes it seems like the debate is divided cleanly in two, with criticisms of sentimental anthropomorphism flying one way, and protests about the species-centric, Christian-Cartesian separation of humans from nature going the other.

We don’t find “truth” at some magical fulcrum point between the two, though. Both sides have validity, but they’re just like kids hooked on the simple back-and-forth fun of the see-saw rocking. (OK, the metaphor breaks down badly here, as this sort of polarized debate is usually anything but simple fun…) Truths start to emerge when bums get sore, they get off the ride, and have a chat.

Then they slowly discover that “reductionist” science’s view of humans’ place in nature, based ostensibly on the Darwinian revolution, has indeed retained a few too many prejudices from Christianity and Cartesian proto-science. As Stephen Jay Gould often maintains, Darwin’s revolution has not been completed. Our evolution introduced some hugely important variations and complexities into the animal world, but we really haven’t fully embraced the idea of our place in an evolutionary continuum with animals.

The see-saw opponents also start to realize as they converse that touchy-feely sentimentality about animals has been one of the only refuges for perception of this continuum in our deeply Christian world. As an increasingly repressive society makes extremists out of its moderates, the lack of real appreciation for the resonance that the deeper levels of our emotional and psychic make-up find with other life-forms have distorted this resonance badly, dulling it to nothing here, leaving it to ramp up uncontrollably there.

How have the vestiges of the Christian-Cartesian split between humans and other animals distorted our self-image? In ways too numerous to mention here; I’ll narrow things down to one example that’s come up twice for me recently: chimp violence.

I’m a great admirer of Howard Bloom, especially his ability to see clearly through sentimental images of nature when the evidence of science demands it. However, in his book The Lucifer Principle, in his chapter titled ‘Mother Nature, The Bloody Bitch’, he makes blunders as he tries to demolish any resistance we may have built up to the image of nature as “red in tooth and claw”.

First off, he makes the embarrassing mistake of conflating and confusing “violence” and “war”. He tries to debunk Richard Leakey’s claim that southern Africa’s !Kung demonstrate the absence of war in non-agricultural societies by rallying evidence that they have a relatively high murder rate. He neglects to mention whether the situation that yielded this murder rate in the study he cites might have been affected by the influence of agricultural societies. Even so, homicide and war are, in the terms of Bloom’s own argument, different kettles of fish altogether.

Regarding violence among chimps, he naturally brings to bear Jane Goodall‘s famed studies, where she “discovered war among the chimpanzees, a discovery she hoped she would never make.” The implicit message of this, and most such use of primate studies (especially studies of violence), is that in looking at chimps, because they’re 99% genetically identical to us, we’re looking at our own hard-wired nature. As Bloom’s colourful language has it, “our biological legacy weaves evil into the substrate of even the most ‘unspoiled’ society.”

However, all may not be as it seems. For starters, Jason Godesky at Anthropik.com recently posted an extract from a review of Margaret Power’s book The Egalitarians – Human and Chimpanzee: An Anthropological View of Social Organization, which is worth re-quoting in full here:

Essentially, Power argues that because human hunter-gatherers and chimpanzees in the wild share the same ecological niche, their social organization is remarkably similar. The qualifier, in the wild, is significant, inasmuch as the dominant paradigm in chimpanzee studies today derives from the later work of Jane Goodall, who reports that the animals are strongly territorial, aggressive, and dominance-seeking. Whereas Goodall’s analysis might support a theory of phylogenetic continuity for similar, biologically inherent, agonistic qualities in humans, Power’s important contribution is to show that Goodall’s conclusions may rest principally on the “unnatural” environment that Goodall herself created for the apes in order to facilitate observation of their behavior.

When Goodall began her naturalistic studies of chimpanzees in 1960 in the Gombe National Park area of Tanzania, she was a distinctly non-participant observer. After some years of patiently tracking apes over large areas, Goodall discovered that she could lure animals into a more or less permanent presence around her camp, thereby improving opportunities to observe social interaction, by baiting the camp with supplies of bananas. Indeed, this was an inspired notion. According to Power, it worked too well.

Power maintains that the change that Goodall engineered in the food supply warped the chimpanzees’ conduct and social organization more or less permanently. Power pursues the argument by examining the differences between Goodall’s observations prior to the artificial feeding regimen and the subsequent findings. Goodall herself does not rely much on the results of her early work.

Power argues that, like human hunter-gatherers, chimpanzees in the wild roam widely, rarely confronting each other in direct competition over food. Goodall’s artificial feeding, practiced from 1964 to 1968, introduced direct competition among the apes for the first time. Bunched around the feeding boxes and often frustrated by not obtaining the bananas (which were doled out according to specific schedules), the animals began to engage in more intense forms of competitive, aggressive, and threatening behavior than was known to occur in the wild.

A couple of days after reading this, I was reading the recent “Psyche & Nature”-themed Spring Journal, specifically an essay called ‘Trans-Species Psychology’ by G. A. Bradshaw & Mary Watkins. In arguing for the extension of psyche outside the human realm that we’ve habitually confined it in, they note that “humans alone have been considered to possess the capacity to be un-natural.” We possess mind, psyche, or soul, which gives us our ability to behave in ways that respond in a much more sophisticated way to the environment than the “hard-wired” genetics of “mere nature”.

If we avoid the hard-line behaviourism that seeks to overcome this dualism by erasing psyche from the map completely, we might admit that in observing chimpanzee behaviour, we aren’t necessarily looking at some image of what our biological nature is “in itself”. We would realize that we need to be sensitive to psyche’s role in the scene – with its inevitable corollary, psychopathology. Obviously Goodall’s apparent artificial distortion of “natural” chimp behaviour is an extreme instance of this. But even genuine observations in the field may not be revelations of our encoded genetic inheritance; they may be contingent psychological aberrations, influenced by a complex network of forces in the immediate environment.

Of course, this isn’t to argue that our genetic inheritance is “clean”, wholly bereft of unfortunate traits. In fact, it means that as we open our emotional identities to the animal kingdom, we’ll find resonance with instances of cruelty and pathology as well as with instincts to love and nurture.

Humans are plainly the most deviant, pathologized creature around. But finding cruelty in nature may not always be a cue to justify human foibles as “natural”; it may indicate that our struggles with the tumultuous difficulties of psychic life are not ours alone.

After seeing Werner Herzog’s brilliant documentary Grizzly Man, about zealous environmentalist Timothy Treadwell and his eventual death in the jaws of the bears he became obsessed with, I could write a lot about it. I’m immersed in studying the history of our conceptions of wilderness, and how civilization has positioned itself with regard to nature, and this film is a vital meditation on the whole subject. I’ll try and just throw out some ideas that have come to me in its wake.

The film’s tagline, “nature has boundaries”, is a strong theme in a book I’m reading called Nature & Psyche by David W. Kidner (review coming soon). Kidner sees nature and culture as inextricably intertwined, and would probably add to this tagline the observation that “culture is alive”. There are distinctions to be made between the two, but it’s a destructive mistake to create a dualism out of them.

Treadwell’s fixation with trying to immerse himself in the bears’ world is plainly, as Herzog observes, a fear of civilization (not to mention a deathwish). It’s deluded and fated because he has absorbed the dualism of nature/culture so deeply that he can only run from one to the other, missing their interactions as well as their uniquenesses along the way. Treadwell romanticizes nature in ways that make rednecks and science-worshippers froth at the mouth, and intelligent environmentalists cringe; it’s all love, tear-filled rushes of sentiment and breathless wonder (until you get eaten). But then, Herzog stakes his claim at the opposite end. For him, nature is “chaos, hostility, and murder”. He’s plainly as bad an ecological thinker as Treadwell, with an equally one-dimensional view.

But then, the film is wonderfully pitched, with compassion, curiosity and admiration mixed seamlessly with hard criticism. Treadwell is painfully easy to ridicule, as a trawl through YouTube reveals. I’m fascinated by how Herzog, armed with such a blinkered view of nature on the one hand, can craft such a sophisticated portrait of such a flawed human on the other. Given his strong opposition to Treadwell’s take on the wild, his tolerance and compassionate vision are something to learn from.

The interview with Alutiiq Museum director Sven Haakanson revealed how the lack of connection to nature in our culture was the root of Treadwell’s fatal obsession with “becoming a bear”. This native Alaskan observes that, “Where I grew up, bears avoid us and we avoid them.” I don’t know the cultural specifics of Alutiiq culture; but it’s hard not to also think in this context of the widespread permeation of animal images and figures in the lore and rituals of traditional cultures—not to mention the frequent transitions between animal and human forms in shamanic visions and world mythology. In Animal Spirits, Piers Vitebsky notes:

In North American mythology the grizzly bear was believed to have once walked on two legs like a human and to have killed its prey with a club. Brown bears are uncannily like humans in their ability to stand and walk upright. Even on all fours, the bear walks like a human on the soles of its feet, instead of on its toes like a dog. To this day, the startling appearance of a standing grizzly evokes ancient beliefs of the close identity between man and bear. (p. 76)

No doubt such myths fed Treadwell’s obsession. But, unlike the native cultures, whose close engagement with both the exterior world of nature and the interior nature of the spirit feeds a sophisticated cultural understanding of connections and boundaries, Treadwell’s background in a literalist monotheistic-scientistic culture—and his unhinged stupidity—doomed him to a disrespectful, ultimately fatal transgression into the wild.

Is there a difference delineated here between animism and anthropomorphism? The former is the belief that nature is sentient and alive, and the latter is the attribution of human characteristics to non-humans. As our natural animistic tendencies have been gradually repressed, the first part of the concept to go was the idea that there is any kind of intelligence and awareness other than human intelligence and awareness. Thus denied a free play among nature, our animism came to be distorted and squeezed into simplistic anthropomorphism, popping out here and there in confused projections of humanness onto creatures that have their own intrinsic nature.

Treadwell couldn’t see that yes, bears are intelligent and aware, but they are not human-hearted. His culture failed to integrate animism, leaving this evolved response to the world to fester in the sentimentality of Disney. I don’t agree with Herzog’s cold view of the natural world, but Grizzly Man is a potent and necessary antidote to the excesses of anthropomorphism in our crass, polarized culture.

I’m tempted to put the cover art up as a tease, but I think I’m going to wait until it arrives…

The persistent rain made my planned jaunt to Avebury afterwards less than promising, but after a hearty lunch in the Red Lion, by the time I got to Silbury Hill, I found myself between beautiful grey storm clouds and bright, warm sunshine. The walk across the meadow to Swallowhead Spring was nothing short of magical. I was already spinning from the lushness of the grass when a grouse poked its head up, followed by another smaller one, and another, and another… One mother grouse and five young ones bobbed about uncertainly. After a terrifying clash with a defensive mother grouse on the moors near Ilkley years ago, I have the deep respect for them. I slowly circled away from the path to avoid them and we passed in awed silence.

On the way back from West Kennet Long Barrow, I noticed—seemingly for the first time, though I must have seen it before—the plaque for the bridge where the A4 crosses the River Kennet. It says:

Wilts County Council
Pan Bridge
Rebuilt 1932

I smiled at the strange nod to the goat-god, and then it struck me sideways. Beyond the bridge in my line of sight was the very place on Waden Hill where I had a bizarre encounter with a black goat one solstice several years ago. I wrote an account of this here. I was dumbfounded, laughing hysterically as the speeding traffic rushed by. Searching on the web for information about this bridge brings up one page, a poem that mentions it briefly.

Does anyone know anything about this bridge? It’s a fine little coincidence to allow to exist in and of itself, but I can’t help being curious about its origins…

The definition of human is certainly an interesting philosophical question. But in practical terms, it seems obvious to me that living creatures, both humans and animal, should be treated with respect and care. However—even putting cruelty to animals and vivisection aside—people’s definition of "human", in practice, often fails to extend past their nation or race. 100,000 civilians dead in Iraq and we still ostentatiously mourn individual Britons that few of us knew. So it also seems obvious that only "freakshow" media-spectacular abuse would save hypothetical surviving Homo floresiensis from more obvious brutalities in this world.

From my window here, I’ve been marvelling each day at a spectacularly ambitious, wonderfully realised web across the road. It stretched from the lowermost branches of a tree on the other side of the street, at least three or four metres off the ground, and connected to the wing of a parked red sports car. The main supporting thread must have been four or five metres long. And that’s coming out the arse of something no bigger than my thumbnail. It was thrilling to see, tempered slightly by knowing that the spider wouldn’t have an inkling that the big red thing would just go one day.

The fact that these creatures can spin such fantastically beautiful, crafted webs gives them an air of otherness that goes far beyond the fact that their bodies are so little like ours. You can see the genesis of animal gods in there—us generalists who have traded in particular talents for a Swiss Army Knife lump of planning and imagination, our imagination and admiration clubbing together to revere and draw inspiration from these beings that casually do things it would take us years of learning to accomplish.

Today I drew the curtains and was slightly saddened, but unsurprised, to see a silver hatchback in the place of the red sports car. "Ah well," I thought. Then I reeled. The web was still there. Or rather, it had been rebuilt—in exactly the same place, only attached to the wing of the hatchback this time. That’s persistence.

But then, such resilience seems to pale next to some of the things we manage with our capacity for foresight, despite its obvious drawbacks like reflexive loops of fear and doubt. Reading stories from survivors of the school siege in Beslan, Russia, two things struck me, beyond the unutterable horror. One is how the level of unbridled desperation shown by the attackers so totally undermines their motives. The least I usually get from terrorist attacks, in terms of the perspective of the attackers, is an awareness of their desperation. But hundreds of dead and catastrophically traumatised children make even that seem trivial.

The other was this:

Ruslan Pukhayev said his seven-year-old grandson Gennady was slightly wounded in the left shoulder by an explosion.

The boy sat on a stretcher dipping a biscuit into some warm, sweet tea. The grandfather hovered above him.

"It’s incredible. Of course it’s amazing," the old man said.

"The whole thing is horrible for him. The whole thing happened before his very eyes. It will be years before he understands it. My God, who needed this?"

It struck me as amazing that, even in the immediate aftermath, tending his injured grandson, this old guy could conceive of the day the kid would understand the event at all. That’s tenacity.

A !Kung dancer falling into the !kia trance

by Gyrus

When the Dutch began to settle in southern Africa in the 17th century, they called the indigenous hunter-gatherers the San.1 ‘San’ is a word used by the native cattle-herding nomads of the valleys of the Cape of Good Hope to refer to the peoples of the higher grounds and mountains. The Dutch also used the term ‘Bojesman’ to refer to these people, which turned into ‘Bushmen’; this term became widely used in the West. Because of the racist and sexist connotations of this word, current anthropologists prefer the term ‘San’.

Many different, but intimately related cultures are embraced by the term ‘San’, and they cover a large area of southern Africa. The names of individual San tribes are mostly ‘given’ titles—for instance, the !Kung2 call themselves the Zhun/twasi, ‘the real people‘. There are strong cross-connections between the different San peoples in their religious beliefs and social lives, but the information I’ve used here is from the !Kung in the north and the /Xam to the south.

The San live on a diet of gathered plants—roots, berries, fruits and nuts—and hunted game animals—antelope, giraffe, warthogs and birds. Women do most of the gathering, though sometimes they kill smaller animals. Men do most of the hunting, but like the women they possess an extensive knowledge of the local plants—the !Kung have been called "superb botanists and naturalists."3

Awareness of the special relationship between the San and one type of antelope, the eland, has been heightened by rock art research. The Drakensberg Mountains, in Lesotho, contain one of the greatest concentrations of prehistoric rock paintings in the world. The closest contemporary San people to this area are the /Xam, but information from the !Kung has also been integral to shedding light on this art, demonstrating the common cultural bonds across space and time among the San. No San continue to produce rock art, but through examining interviews with San from the 19th century onwards, rock art researchers have begun to elucidate some of the probable meanings behind paintings done by the San long ago. San culture has been forced to change over recent centuries, because of the influx of white settlers and because of their increasing interaction with pastoral cattle-herders. Nevertheless, the survival of traditional ways of life has been strong enough to carry some of the psycho-mythical patterns of ancient San rock-painters into the present.

This essay will be necessarily simplified, as my main aim is to look at the ways in which testimony from modern !Kung and /Xam, and the testimony of past San left painted on rocks, reveals the specifics of how San relate to the eland. Our core concern here is how the eland as a physical reality—its behaviour, physiology, and the process of hunting it—stimulates and meshes with the eland as a vital symbol in San social and spiritual life.

Figure 1: Rock painting from Fulton’s Cave, Giant’s Rock, Lesotho

The eland is not the only animal hunted by the San, but they prize it highly. It is central to many ceremonies, and seems so important to San rites de passages (like a girl’s first period and a boy’s first kill) that Lewis-Williams has called it the San animal de passage. The rock painting in fig. 1 should be familiar to readers of Towards 2012 from Chris Knight’s article on menstruation and the origins of human culture. It was originally thought to represent a burial rite, but evidence from San people implies that it is most probably a ritual based around a girl’s first period.

In such !Kung rituals, the girl lies beneath a kaross, an animal skin robe, secluded in a specially constructed hut. There is an association between this ritual and what is known as "eland sickness"—for the !Kung, the symbolic importance of illness and menstruation are intimately related.4

The !Kung’s Eland Bull dance is performed for this event; women clap their hands and dance around the menstrual hut, mimicking the mating behaviour of eland cows, swishing the ‘tails’ they wear. All these elements can be read into the Fulton’s Rock painting. In the dance, one or two elder men imitate eland bulls, using sticks as horns, sniffing the dancing women. This is seen as the climax of the ceremony, and the whole dance "is so beautiful that the girl in the menstrual hut weeps, overcome by the wonder of it."5 During the dance, an eland is said to appear—symbolically, but as a living reality for the participants. The faded figure of an eland can be seen in the bottom left of the Fulton’s Rock painting.

The girl herself is associated with the eland in numerous ways. Special ‘respect words’ have to be used when referring to either. When asked why it is an eland dance (as opposed to any other animal dance), !Kun/obe, an old !Kung woman, said, "The Eland Bull dance is danced because the eland is a good thing and has much fat. And the girl is also a good thing and she is all fat; therefore they are called the same thing."6 Research into steatopygia (supposed ‘excess’ of fat in the buttocks) has shown that a store of fat is necessary in women for the menstrual cycle, and during puberty a girl’s fat store is almost doubled.

For the !Kung, fat is linked with fertility and balance. A !Kung euphemism for sex is ‘to eat or drink fat’. They are greatly interested in the fat of the eland, which is used as part of ointments rubbed on girls during their menstrual rites. Eland fat, particularly fat accumulated around the heart of the male, is one of many things thought by the !Kung to possess n/um, ‘supernatural potency’, which is most effectively transferred or communicated through the sense of smell. They consider the odour of cooking fat, and of the girl during the dance, to be highly pleasant. On coming out of menstrual seclusion, !Kung girls make a mixture of eland fat and certain plants, and go around every hearth in the camp, placing some of the mixture in each fire. Thus n/um is transferred from the eland to the girl, and from the girl to the whole group. This ritual is seen as essential in the maintenance of socio-cosmic balance among the tribe, a balance that ensures enough fat for the girl, food for the people, and rain for the land. But not too much, especially not too much food; a glut of supplies is seen to cause petty bickering.

Another link to the eland is found in an expression used by the !Kung to describe a freshly menstruating girl: "She has shot an eland."7 She is thus regarded in terms of being an animal and a hunter. The bond is furthered in a custom which dictates that a girl coming out of menstrual seclusion should look down to the ground; then the eland will look down as well, making it easy for the hunters to stalk up on them.

This brings us to the complex of observances and rituals clustered around hunting, especially those associated with a boy’s first eland kill. The core aspect of hunting is the intimate link between the hunter and his prey. This link forms the central axis around which the hunting process revolves.

Figure 2: A rare instance of a San painting showing a hunter shooting an eland, from Lariston, Barkly East, Lesotho

Arrows alone are not enough to kill large game animals such as antelope; so they coat the tips, which remain embedded after the shaft has broken off, with poison. They must then return to camp, and track the animals the next day to find where it has died.

While walking away from the animal he has shot, a hunter must not hurry. He must walk slowly, because if he quickened his pace or ran, so too would the animal. Back at the camp, he is questioned about his hunt. He will never answer directly. If he has been successful, he will say that he only saw the animal’s tracks, or that a thorn had stuck in his foot; the others will know from this that he has shot an antelope. When a !Kung boy has shot his first eland, he doesn’t return to camp until late afternoon. First, he makes a fire, and uses the ashes to draw a circle on his forehead with a line running down his nose. This imitates the red tuft of hair on the eland’s forehead, deepening his link to his prey as well as signalling wordlessly to the others on his return that he has had success.

Like menstruating girls, boys returning from their first kill are isolated in a hut. The /Xam build a special hut for this, and the hunter is cared for as if he were ill. And he is ill, in a sense, because of his bond to the eland. He must be quiet, and act as if his life-energy, like the eland’s, is ebbing away. Otherwise, the poison may be ‘cooled’—made ineffective.

The supernatural being /Kaggen is a part of many San cultures, and he often intervenes during the period when a hunter is trying to be sedate. He comes in the form of a mantis or a louse, and will try to irritate the hunter in various ways to trick him into waking, lashing out, or otherwise breaking his link to the dying animal. /Kaggen works on behalf of the antelope, and prevents the hunter from becoming complacent about his task of maintaining a bond with his prey.

The next day, the animal is tracked to see if it can be found. When a !Kung boy’s first eland kill is found, he does not approach it directly, "he crouches down behind an old man and places his arms around him; they both then pretend to stalk the animal. . . . [T]he position is like one adopted by a medicine man and a novice when the young man is learning how to go into a trance and to cure".8 A fire is lit, some parts of the eland are cooked, and the eland medicine dance is danced, "in praise of the fat". Medicine men go into trance and use the n/um they raise through dancing to heal.

Returning to the camp, the boy is praised by the tribe, and the remaining parts of the eland are cooked and shared. Sitting in the centre of the spread skin of the eland, the boy is ritually initiated. He is scarified on his arms, and a mixture of eland fat and plants is rubbed into the cuts; this combination of bleeding and anointing again echoes the menstrual rites. In !Kung terminology, scarification ‘creates’ a hunter just as the Eland Bull dance ‘creates’ a woman. Both are children who have died, to be recreated as members of society ready for marriage.

Marriage itself is connected to hunted animals. If a man desires a woman for marriage, he will leave an animal he has killed outside the huts of the woman’s band, demonstrating his ability to provide food. There are numerous variations on this and what follows, but again game animals, especially antelope like the eland, form a major part of a phase of social and individual transition.

Discussing !Kung marriage customs, where the groom gives eland fat to his bride’s parents and the bride is anointed with eland fat, Lewis-Williams confronts a major question: why is the eland in particular, and especially its fat, so important? He did not reach any conclusions until he discussed it with the !Kung. Apparently, in most antelope species, the female has a greater store of fat than the male. In the eland, this is reversed. The large accumulation of fat around the heart of the bull eland means that males have more fat than females. Lewis-Williams emphasizes that this is a point "which the !Kung themselves find remarkable: it excites their interest and they consider it to be an important distinguishing feature of the eland. The animal is, in their thought, almost androgynous in that, by the male’s possession of so much fat, the usual differentiation is uniquely reversed."9 And so, menstruating girls are spoken of as hunters; and a boy who has killed his first eland is cared for as if he were menstruating.

Sexual difference is one of the most basic polarities of human life, and of most animal life. It is not, though, a fixed duality; it is a dynamic relationship, especially among humans, where it is governed by fluid cultural categories. Among the !Kung, shifts in these categories are treated as liminal zones, where androgynous symbolism (rooted in eland physiology) signifies transition and sacred ‘betweenness’.

Asked why the word tcheni, meaning ‘dance’, is used as a ‘respect word’ to refer to eland, a !Kung informant said: "Your heart is happy when you dance."10 Their healing dance rituals are often associated with the killing of game animals, celebrating the sharing of meat and the relaxation of social tensions. Moreover, such dances form the very centre of !Kung social and spiritual life.

Popular perception of ‘shamanic’ cultures often carries with it an image of the shaman as a lone figure who is consulted by the tribe for healing and other purposes—an individual mediator between the tribe and the spiritworld. In !Kung culture, there are shamanic figures, called ‘medicine men’ by anthropologists, who specialize according to the quality and associations of the n/um, spiritual energy, they possess. Thus there are those who possess springbok medicine, eland medicine, rain medicine, locust medicine, giraffe medicine, etc. But despite this specialization, shamanic activity among the !Kung is much more communal—being focused in the collective healing dance—than the situation suggested by the ‘lone shaman’ image. "In fact, everyone is encouraged to try to learn to heal, and over half the men, and ten percent of the women usually become healers."11 Even those who do not attain this status participate actively in the dance. For example, the common form of the dance is for the women to sit around a fire while the men dance around them in a circle, moving one way round then the other. The women’s clapping and singing acts as an inspiration and source of guidance for the healers entering deeply bewildering and powerful trance states. The communal aspect of the !Kung ceremonies is again reflected in the way the dancers will care for each other as individuals enter deep states of ecstasy, often supporting and attending to the bodies of those whose souls have temporarily left to journey into the spiritworld.

The trance state itself is the probable reason that more people do not become healers. It is powerful; sometimes dangerous, often feared. The !Kung hold that n/um is stored in the pit of the stomach or base of the spine. The process of prolonged rhythmic dancing and singing ‘boils’ the n/um, causing it to ascend up the body, and to be excreted in the form of sweat on the upper body. This experience may cause one to shiver and tremble, and can cause nasal bleeding (streams of blood can be seen to emanate from the noses of many dancing figures in ancient San rock paintings—see fig. 3). This blood, particularly its smell, can be used in healing or to induce trance in neophytes. The peak of the trance—full visionary consciousness, associated with ‘out-of-body’ experiences—is attained when the boiling n/um reaches the skull, inducing a state known as !kia. Entering this state is likened to dying. More mature and experienced healers can avoid the bodily collapse, rigidity, trembling and moaning that !kia often induces, but no one enters !kia without respect for the precarious balance between life and death that it signifies. The experience is braved over and over again for the simple reason that it allows access to dimensions where invaluable healing, both physical and spiritual, both individual and communal, becomes possible. The !Kung believe that everyone is latently sick, and that physical or mental illness is merely the manifestation of what is there all the time. Thus they not only treat tangible ailments, but through their healing dances work to stop sickness from manifesting, a form of ‘preventative medicine’.

Figure 3: A row of dancers entering trance, from Fetcani Glen, Barkly East, Lesotho. Note the nasal flows and the hooves instead of feet in some instances.

Once more the eland figures in this special ritual. !Kia ‘death’ is likened to the death of a shot eland. "When an eland is pursued, it sweats more than any animal; this sweat, like the sweat of a medicine man, is considered by the !Kung to contain very powerful n/um. Brought to bay and near death, the eland trembles and shivers, its nostrils are wide open, it has difficulty in breathing and its hair stands on end . . . As it dies ‘melted fat, as it were, together with blood’ gushes from its nostrils".12 In interpreting therianthropic figures in ancient San rock art—e.g. humans with antelope ears or hooves—Lewis-Williams suggests that they represent healers in trance. Approaching !kia, the healer possessing ‘eland medicine’ may feel him or herself take on the form of that antelope, and retain that form throughout their journey in the spiritworld. Taking on the form of an animal expresses the radical shift in self-image that !kia precipitates. Brain chemistry, energy structures in the body, and consciousness itself are transformed through the dance, and the !Kung encapsulate their inner understanding of these shifts by linking them to their observation of the animals that sustain them:

As the eland stands at the entrance to male and female adult status and to marriage so, for those who possess its supreme potency, it is the medium which gives access to the mystical experience of trance.13

Once more the bonds between the San and the eland are brought to life, through intricate natural symbolism.

Footnotes

1. From the !Kung San page at the Lawrence University Department of Anthropology, now defunct. [back to text]
2. The various symbols like exclamation marks used in San terms indicate their use of clicking sounds in their pronunciation. [back to text]
3. From the !Kung San page at the Lawrence University Department of Anthropology, now defunct. [back to text]
4. This association doesn’t seem to carry the incredibly negative (and taboo) connotations of our own culture’s view of menstruation, as the following discussion will show. [back to text]
5. A !Kung informant, quoted in Lewis-Williams, p. 45 [back to text]
6. ibid, p. 48 [back to text]
7. ibid, p. 51 [back to text]
8. ibid, p. 59 [back to text]
9. ibid, p. 62 [back to text]
10. ibid, p. 64 [back to text]
11. From the !Kung San page at the Lawrence University Department of Anthropology, now defunct. [back to text]
12. Lewis-Williams, p. 91 [back to text]
13. ibid, p. 100. This aspect of shamanic practice, like many primal magickal techniques, has survived (or re-emerged) into the Western occult tradition. Talking of Aleister Crowley’s use of Golden Dawn techniques to enter and explore the ‘astral plane’ by assuming a god-form, Kenneth Grant notes that Crowley "chose the form of Horus . . . He sealed the plasm of his astral body in the mentally formulated image of a golden hawk (a vehicle of Horus) and, in that form, he explored the subtle aethyrs of the universe." (Aleister Crowley and the Hidden God) [back to text]