RARI - Rock Art Research Institute - Witwatersrand University

Rock Art Research Institute (RARI)
University of the Witwatersrand

The Healing dance performed by San shamans to find and cast out sickness starts at night and carries on until dawn the next day. As well as living dancers, it was believed that the dancers were also attended by grotesque spirits of the dead.

The dance starts with a few women singing snatches of songs different from ordinary, recreational songs. These special, medicine songs contain n/om, a supernatural potency that permeates the cosmos but that resides particularly in large animals, such as giraffe and eland, and in the shamans themselves.

Soon the men start dancing around the women who have seated themselves in a tight circle around a central fire. The shamans push themselves towards an altered state of consciousness; they enter 'half-death'. They attain ecstasy simply by means of their dancing, concentration and hyperventilation, with the help of the women's insistent, complexly rhythmic singing and clapping.

This rock painting from the southern Drakensberg, shows a shaman surrounded by clapping women with individually drawn fingers. Grotesque spirits of the dead can be seen, some of them extending their talons in the direction of the shaman.

	This figure, from the KwaZulu-Natal Drakensberg, is part human - part animal. We call these creatures therianthropes. These paintings depict dancers/shamans who have taken on the potency of a particular animal. This person has taken on eland potency.