13

N|OM SONGS

We have many healing songs. These include songs from the gemsbock, giraffe, leaf, millipede, eland, buffalo, and wildebeest. These songs carry the n|om of these animals, insects, and plants when we sing them with all our heart. When a dancer gets hot with n|om, he will be dancing one of these songs. A particular kind of n|om comes into his body, and then he can slip into first creation. This is when an animal we love can enter the healer’s body to help get the sickness out of others.^*46

When we sing these songs, the animals come to the village to help us. Sometimes a healer must go into first creation and fully own the animal before healing can happen. This only happens for a moment. After a healer goes into first creation, he must soon come right back.^†18

The wild animals were tamed in second creation and kept like domestic cattle are today. When an animal was named in second creation, it was automatically tamed and made available. The first animals tamed are those who gave us their song. This enables us to have a rope with them, a means of contacting them. For example, healers may dance to go into first creation to attract an animal. The animal’s n|om helps us heal and it also brings us some meat to eat.

When a healer is very hot and strong in a dance, he can stand and dance on his toes. This indicates an entry into first creation, where our feet become like that of an animal. We walk and move like the animal. It’s an extraordinary experience. When the women see this, they are happy because they know this brings a good hunt. The next day when we go out to the bush to look for that animal, we can easily get it. This is how we survive. We are thrilled when someone dances on his toes. This brings us a great hunt the next day.

It is important to emphasize that each n|om song of an animal carries the n|om of that particular animal. If a healer is strong, a song will enter his heart, enabling him to enter into first creation. The animal comes the next day because the animal has felt the rope pull him toward the healer. The healer’s experience of identification with the animal inside first creation arises from n|om-inspired feelings. While a healer won’t see himself as the animal, at the same time he won’t see himself as different from the animal. He will properly see the song that rises out of his heart and feel it in the way it is correctly associated with the animal. The most important changes take place through how feelings change, which in turn transforms how we see, hear, and smell. (See editors’ commentary 13.1)

When we are hot and owning the song of an animal, we can climb its rope. We are able to climb the rope of the animal because its arrows have cooked us and are circulating within our body. There is a way in which we become the animal, but it is not how some people think we do it. For instance, when we climb the eland’s rope we do not outwardly look like an eland. If you photograph us, we will still look human. We become the n|om-feeling of the animal. When we see properly, we are the holder of the animal’s n|om; this is the equivalent of saying that we own the song and the rope of the animal.

When we enter first creation through the feeling of a gemsbock, giraffe, or eland, among others, we can climb their ropes. We can climb the giraffe rope during the time we feel we are a giraffe. This is because our heart is rising to its song and we use this rising feeling to climb that particular rope. We also dance in the way of the giraffe. Or we can walk as an ostrich if a person has the ostrich song. A healer can dance like an ostrich if she owns its song.

When we go into first creation and become a giraffe, an eland, or another animal, we definitely feel as though we are related to the same animal that we are familiar with today. We don’t become like the original ancestors, but we become the animal we know. We dance for the animal—that is, we dance for the feeling we have caught. When healers are in first creation, their heart becomes like the animal. The community is then asked to sing for the animal. This is how we dance and sing its medicine.^*47

Editors’ Commentary

13.1. On synesthesia and ecstatic shamanism

A key to understanding ecstatic shamanism, healing, and spirituality is underscoring the role of awakened feelings, rather than giving too much importance to visionary events. Outside scholars, who typically value visual experience over other sensory modalities (see Ong 1982), tend to prioritize visionary accounts and minimize how another culture may value other forms of sensory experience and description as equally or more important. Hence, scholarly reports on shamanism lean toward providing details of visions while commenting less on how practitioners feel or make different kinds of sound. The so-called “shamanic journey,” for example, is portrayed more like a visual sequence of events, where the drama unfolds as the practitioner watches it play out in a dream-like vision. For ecstatic shamans and other practitioners, it’s the arousal of intense feelings that lead to song, movement, and synesthetic experience that marks the authenticity of a spiritual voyage. For the Bushmen, a visual display without these experiences would be regarded as a distraction produced by trickster, resulting in little more than seducing the recipient into believing that she had acquired power.