San Religion

The San religion is the traditional religion and mythology of the San people of Southern Africa, one of the oldest cultures on Earth, but is difficult to reconstruct due to the San's interactions with Christianity. The San kinship system reflects their history as traditionally small hunter/gatherer bands. The trance dance, a preface to the healing of illnesses, is one of the most distinctive features of San culture. This dance typically takes a circular form with women clapping and singing and men dancing rhythmically. Although there is no evidence that the Kalahari San used hallucinogens, student shaman may have used hallucinogens to more effectively enter their first trance. Psychologists explain San rock art as it relates to three trance phases. The first phase results in an altered state of consciousness. People would visualize geometric shapes like zigzags, chevrons, dots, flecks, grids, vortices and U-shapes. These shapes are commonly portrayed on the rock paintings of Southern Africa. During the second phase of trance, people try to make sense of the vision by deciphering the shape they had seen until it coalesced into something that seemed familiar to them. Shamans experiencing the second phase of trance incorporated familiar patterns from the natural world into their vision, so the depiction of natural objects on rock paintings pertains to phase two. In the third phase a radical transformation occurs in mental imagery, and also in rock painting imagery. The shaman becomes part of the experience. Those who enter the third phase begin to lose their grip on reality and begin to hallucinate about monsters and animals. In this phase, the therianthropes (humans who are transformed into animals) portrayed in San rock paintings can be associated with the heightened sensory awareness that shamans in a trance experience that convinces them that they have undergone a genuine physical transformation. This modern psychological interpretation of San imagery may shed some light on San pre-Christian religious practices, but is speculative and unverifiable. On San rock pasintings, images of animals and warfare greatly outnumber depictions of geometrical patterns and trance dance therianthrophic entities that display both human and animal attributes. There are very few depictions of plants, the domain of women, in the paintings so scholars presume that their creators were men.