Page:George McCall Theal, Ethnography and condition of South Africa before A.D. 1505 (2nd ed, 1919).djvu/131

Rh The Hottentots were a superstitious people who placed great faith in the efficacy of charms to ward off evil. They even besought favours from certain pieces of root so used, and if their wishes were successful, they praised and thanked the charms. This superstition might in time have developed into idolatry, but it was arrested before it reached that stage. They believed that certain occurrences foreboded good or ill luck, and were always on the watch for omens. Their veneration of the mantis, an insect that bears so close a resemblance either to a withered leaf or to a dry stalk of grass that its presence cannot be detected except when it is in motion, has been asserted by many writers, some of whom have even termed it the Hottentot God, but it has been called in question by others. The reason of this contradiction is that their notions regarding the insect were acquired from their Bushman female captives, who had been taught by their parents that it was endowed with the power of exchanging its form for that of any other animal, and that it could confer good or bad fortune upon human beings. Clans in which Bushman blood was strong would therefore venerate the mantis, and others would pay little or no regard to it.

They lived in dread of ghosts and evil spirits, but with no more conception of the nature of such shadowy beings, or of the mode of receiving harm, than little children have. They invoked blessings from the moon, the harbinger of their festivities, to whose praise they sang and danced when it appeared as new. In later times those who had come in contact with Bantu prayed for blessings from dead ancestors, to whose shades sacrifices were offered by priests on important occasions, but this was evidently a custom of foreign origin. Generally they implored protection and favour from a mythical hero named Tsuiǁgoab or Heitsi-eibib, who was believed by them to have lived on the earth and to have died and risen again many times, and whose worship consisted in throwing a branch of a tree, a bit of wood, or an additional stone upon a cairn at a place where he was supposed to have been once buried. Tales of the wonderful deeds of this Heitsi-eibib were commonly narrated by old men, and were implicitly believed by every one who heard them.