//Gauwa

//Gauwa created the world. //Gauwa sends disease to destroy it. This is not a contradiction. In the theology of the Ju/‘hoansi San of Namibia, it is the foundational fact.

Lorna Marshall, who began fieldwork among the Ju/‘hoansi of the Nyae Nyae area in 1951, spent decades trying to reconcile the contradictory accounts her informants gave of //Gauwa. He is the great god. He is a trickster. He is benevolent. He sends death. Some informants distinguished between a “big //Gauwa” (the creator, dwelling in the east where the sun rises) and the lesser //gauwasi (spirits of the dead, malevolent, sent to harm). Others used the terms interchangeably.

The theological ambiguity is the point. //Gauwa is not a deity designed to be consistent. He is a deity designed to explain a world that is not consistent.

The Arrows of Sickness

The //gauwasi, spirits of the recently dead, do //Gauwa’s work among the living. They appear as flickering lights, shadows at the edge of vision, or figures with reversed features. They cluster around the sick and dying. Their weapon is invisible: they shoot “arrows of sickness” into living people, causing illness, pain, and death.

The concept is specific and physical. The arrows lodge in the body. A healer in trance can see them. The healing dance exists to pull them out.

This is not metaphor. Marshall recorded that the Ju/‘hoansi experienced the arrows as a concrete spiritual reality. The healer’s hands, laid on the patient during trance, physically extracted the arrows. The healer then expelled them through shrieking, shaking, and throwing the sickness back toward the spirit world.

The N/um Dance

The trance healing dance is the central ritual of San religion. Richard Katz documented it in Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung (1982).

Women sit in a tight circle around a fire and clap complex polyrhythmic patterns. Men dance around the circle for hours, sometimes through the entire night, their feet stamping a circular track into the sand. The rhythmic movement and hyperventilation cause the n/um, the spiritual potency stored in the healer’s belly, to “boil.” The n/um rises up the spine, reaches the base of the skull, and the healer enters what the Ju/‘hoansi call !kia: a trance state.

In !kia, the healer sees the spirit world. The //gauwasi become visible. Their arrows, lodged in patients, become tangible. The healer lays hands on the sick, draws the arrows into his own body, and expels them with violent trembling and cries. The process is physically exhausting and sometimes dangerous. Healers can collapse, convulse, or appear to stop breathing. Other dancers catch them and rub them to bring them back.

Roughly half of Ju/‘hoansi men and a third of women become healers at some point in their lives. The n/um dance is not restricted to a priestly class. It belongs to the community.

The Ambivalent God

Marshall’s informants could not, or would not, resolve //Gauwa into a simple category. He created everything. He also created death. He gave humans n/um, the power to heal. He also gave the //gauwasi their arrows. The dance that cures sickness was taught by the same being who sends sickness.

Western theology tends to separate creation from destruction, assigning them to different beings (God and Satan, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman). The Ju/‘hoansi did not make this separation. //Gauwa is both. The world he made includes suffering because he made it that way. The healing dance does not defeat //Gauwa. It negotiates with the consequences of his nature.

This is not primitive theology. It is a theological position that refuses the simplification most organized religions require. The world contains both the n/um and the arrows. The same source provides both. What matters is whether you can dance long enough to pull the arrows out.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Marshall, Lorna, The !Kung of Nyae Nyae (1976): foundational ethnography
• Marshall, Lorna, Nyae Nyae !Kung Beliefs and Rites (1999): detailed spiritual beliefs
• Katz, Richard, Boiling Energy: Community Healing Among the Kalahari Kung (1982): the trance dance
• Biesele, Megan, Women Like Meat: The Folklore and Foraging Ideology of the Kalahari Ju/‘hoan (1993)
• Lewis-Williams, J.D., The Mind in the Cave (2002): trance and rock art interpretation