/Kaggen

He is a praying mantis. He is also a man, an eland, a hartebeest, a snake, and a caterpillar. He created the world by dreaming it. He created the eland, his most beloved creature, from a piece of shoe leather smeared with honey. He stole fire. He brought death into the world through carelessness, not malice.

He dies constantly. He gets beaten up by other animals, tricked by his own family, and blunders into catastrophe. Then he comes back. /Kaggen, the Mantis, the trickster-creator of the San peoples of southern Africa, is not a god in any orderly sense. He is the principle that the universe runs on improvisation.

The Archive

Almost everything known about /Kaggen in written form traces to one source: the Bleek and Lloyd archive, held at the University of Cape Town.

Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd, working in Cape Town in the 1870s, interviewed /Xam San men who had been imprisoned for stock theft and other colonial offenses. The prisoners, speaking through Bleek’s transcription system for the /Xam language (which includes four distinct click consonants), dictated their mythology, oral literature, and knowledge of the natural world. The archive runs to roughly 12,000 pages. It is one of the most important ethnographic collections in Africa, recorded at the moment a language and culture were being destroyed by colonial expansion.

The /Xam are now extinct as a distinct linguistic group. Their language survives only in Bleek and Lloyd’s notebooks. /Kaggen survives because two Victorian scholars had the sense to write him down.

The Trickster

/Kaggen’s family is animal. His wife is the Dassie (rock hyrax). His adopted daughter is the Porcupine. His grandson is the Ichneumon (mongoose). These are not metaphors. In San narrative, the boundaries between human and animal are permeable in both directions.

/Kaggen created the eland by taking a piece of shoe leather, carrying it to a secluded waterhole, and nurturing it with honey until it grew into the first eland. When his sons-in-law discovered the eland and killed it, /Kaggen wept. He pierced the eland’s gallbladder, and the dark fluid that spilled out became the first darkness. From the blood, he created more eland. The creation of the most sacred animal in San cosmology came from grief and shoe leather.

He stole fire from the Ostrich, who kept it hidden under his wing. He tricked other animals, got tricked in return, and was frequently humiliated. In one story, he was eaten by a group of children and had to reconstitute himself from his own bones. In another, cats beat him and left him for dead. He always returns.

The Rock Art

The eland is the most frequently depicted animal in southern African rock art, painted and engraved across thousands of sites from the Drakensberg to the Brandberg, from the Cederberg to the Tsodilo Hills. J.D. Lewis-Williams, in Believing and Seeing (1981), proposed that many of these paintings are not hunting scenes but depictions of trance experiences.

The “dying eland” motif appears repeatedly: an eland with crossed legs, lowered head, and hair standing on end. These are also the physical symptoms of a San healer entering trance during the n/um dance, the central healing ritual of San religion. The shaman’s legs cross, the head drops, sweat (or nasal blood) runs, and the hair seems to stand up as the n/um (spiritual potency) “boils” up the spine.

Lewis-Williams argued that the therianthropic figures in rock art, beings that are half-human, half-animal - represent shamans in the process of transformation during trance. /Kaggen, the shapeshifter who moves between mantis, eland, and human form, is the mythological expression of the same experience.

The Tsodilo Hills in northwestern Botswana, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, contain over 4,500 rock paintings. The San called them the “Mountains of the Gods.” The paintings span thousands of years. /Kaggen’s presence runs through them like a thread through beads.

The Mantis and the Trance

Why a mantis?

The praying mantis sits motionless for long periods, then strikes with speed that exceeds human perception. It turns its triangular head to look directly at observers, an unusual behavior in insects. It appears contemplative. To San eyes, the mantis was a creature that existed in two states simultaneously: perfect stillness and explosive action. This mirrors the experience of trance: the healer sits still while the spirit travels.

Lewis-Williams connected /Kaggen to the trance experience through the concept of n/um, the spiritual potency that San healers activate during the healing dance. The n/um resides in the belly and, when activated through rhythmic dancing and hyperventilation, “boils” up the spine and out through the top of the head. The healer enters an altered state, “sees” the spirit world, and pulls sickness out of patients. /Kaggen, as the supreme shapeshifter who crosses between the visible and invisible worlds, embodies this process.

The mantis is not a metaphor for /Kaggen. /Kaggen is a mantis. The San did not think in metaphors about the natural world. They thought in identities.

What Survived

The /Xam language is gone. The culture that produced /Kaggen in its original form was shattered by colonial genocide, forced labor, and land dispossession in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

But San peoples survive across southern Africa: the Ju/‘hoansi of Namibia and Botswana, the Hai//om, the Naro, the G/wi. Their mythologies contain cognate figures to /Kaggen, and the trance healing dance continues as a living practice. The rock art endures on stone across thousands of sites.

/Kaggen created the eland from scraps. He rebuilt himself from bones after being eaten. The pattern holds.