The Old Way by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Author:Elizabeth Marshall Thomas [Thomas, Elizabeth Marshall]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4299-5451-8
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2006-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

At first I wondered if the concept of healer-shamans who became lions was truly a Ju/wa concept, as it coincided in certain ways with the worldview of the neighboring Bantu-speaking pastoralists, a worldview rich in the supernatural where witches and were-animals abound. The Ju/wa worldview seemed to have less of the supernatural, as I saw it (although here again, my personal perspective is at work—I knew something about the worldview of the Ju/wasi but not about the worldview of the Bantu-speaking people, hence the former seemed familiar and the latter seemed exotic). Even so, my mother agreed that the belief in healer-shamans who became lions was in ways uncharacteristic of the Ju/wasi we knew. She wrote, “The belief seemed not to be integrated with the current concept of healers.” However, she suggested that the belief might be from “a different, perhaps older, stratum of concepts of the supernatural.”

I now feel sure that she was right, that the belief could indeed have come from an older stratum of concepts. Of the two Ju/wa gods (about whom more will be said later), one is believed by anthropologists to be considerably older than the other, a figure from an earlier time. Like eland music for the menarchal rite, the concept of this older god is scattered far and wide among many disparate groups of people, not just the groups of Ju/wasi but also among the other language groups of Bushmen as well as among the Khoikhoi, suggesting that his image comes from a time when all these related people were one people with a single set of religious beliefs. This could make the concept very old indeed. The older god is associated with death.

And here, I think, is the connection with the deep, mixed feelings that the people had for lions, the natural animals who were supernatural, and also, perhaps, a connection to the feelings that our distant ancestors surely had for the very large cats who preceded the lions—the saber-toothed homotheriums or the giant, jaguarlike dinofelids who lived on the savannah. These great cats were nearly twice as big as lions. If the roar of a lion can travel twenty miles, what must the roars of these cats have sounded like? We would have to go back millions of years before we could find a time when those of our lineage were not in danger from cats or their ancestors, and, considering the relative size of their ancestors compared to ours, probably not even then.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.