MANTISMEN! - adventures in dictionary-reading + a cult for Esoteric Enterprises

 

from A Dictionary of Sandawe: The Lexicon and Culture of a Khoesan People of Tanzania, compiled by Chris and Patricia Ehret from Eric ten Raa's field notes

Really out here doing anything and everything to avoid finishing almost-done posts. 

A couple of hours ago, I came across an extremely interesting entry in A Dictionary of Sandawe (shown above) while looking for another word. It was v. striking to see the mantis come up in this way, bc - as those even a little familiar with the religion of the San* peoples prob know - the mantis (and The Mantis) is really important in the worldview of Southern Africa's autochthons. There's been mentions of a special role for mantids in Sandawe thinking that I've seen before, but tbh it was just the kind of passing mention that I didn't credit with much beyond over-excited folks seeing a relationship where there might not be any; there's very little outside of these notes from ten Raa on what exactly that role was, frex. This is not to say that there hasn't been tantalizing connections to San cultures in Sandawe-focused anthropological work. Some the impetus for that sort of work grows out of the oral records of the Sandawe themselves, as illustrated by James Newman's Place and Ethnicity among the Sandawe of Tanzania 

The Sandawe are also recognized as the longest-term residents of the various inhabitants in central Tanzania. This notion is embedded in their own oral myths, and they even go so far as to assert that there "always" have been Sandawe-like people in the area. The always is predicated upon a notion of derivation from a nomadic hunting people referred to as the N/ini, who play a central role in many Sandawe stories and legends. For example: "Those people of who it is said they are called N/ini people, say, of old, they were very short and they were ruddy...and their children were taken (in marriage) by Sandawe and at present they have disappeared for a long time; they have just become Sandawe." Similar legends describing such preexisting populations abound in central Tanzania, and, at least among the Turu, Gogo, and Barabaig, they are associated with the present-day Sandawe. There is also a widespread belief that the "old Sandawe" are responsible for producing the many rock paintings in Kondoa Area, although this art form is not pursued actively today.  

This is interesting in light of some comments from the standby volume The History and Geography of Human Genes on the relationship between the Hadza, the Sandawe, the Khoikhoin and the San peoples: 

Both the Hadza and the Sandawe have retained very little, if any, genetic similarity with the San; they show the same similarity with the Khoi as they do with Bantu subgroups or with each other. The lack of special genetic similarity between these two displaced Khoisan-speaking people is in agreement with the low level of linguistic similarity...The case of the Hadza and Sandawe is different, however, from that of the Dama, because today they live very far from any Khoisan-speaking groups. Moreover, unlike the Dama, their languages have changed enough that their acquisition of the Khoisan language, or, more probably their loss of contact with other Khoisanids and the beginning of their genetic assimilation by neighboring groups, must be relatively ancient. 

(Worth noting that there are also stories of a short "red" people who came before the Central African forest peoples in many regional myths, but it's not clear whether these stories are authentically forager in orgin or derive from ones originating in the neighboring Bantu cultures that were meant to give the forest peoples their own civilizing narratives of triumph over red men, like in the Luba Kalala epic - Luc De Heusch's The Drunken King collects a handful of these myths if any of y'all are interested.)

Imogen Lim, in her essay for the edited volume Seeing and Knowing: Understanding Rock Art With and Without Ethnography, discusses Sandawe rain ritual in some detail:

One begins to hear of the need for rain rituals, including iyari, only when rain is insufficient (Lim 1992: 193ff.). In every sacrifice there are elements that have to be carried out in a particular fashion; in addition, there is always the possibility that a person may tamper with the rain. If it rains, then the sacrifice is a success; if not, a person may be to blame, or there may be some other cause, such as a problem in a technicality of the procedure. Thus, when rain is not forthcoming after a sacrifice, further consultation occurs...The use of iyari in rain-calling is strictly the women's prerogative. It resembles other rain sacrifices in the choice of animal colour. The chyme comes from a black-coloured animal "because the black colour attracts black clouds, so it makes a hope for rain. But white colour is bad because it can make the clouds run away and then there will be no rain"...The women bring together and activate all the metaphors of fertility and life in themselves and in the land (‘aboriginal womb'). For the land, fertility means rain. This was probably so even when the Sandawe were primarily hunter-gatherers; given the intimate relationship between Sandawe and the land, they recognised an association between the coming of rain and large game animals long before researchers quantified this correlation. The wet season is the optimal time for African herbivores to gain weight and accumulate the stores of both fat and muscle that are then depleted gradually during the dry season (McNaughton & Georgiadis 1986: 54). Migratory populations are able to track rainfall distribution to exploit the high protein content of new grasses. Obviously, when the Sandawe were strictly hunter-gatherers the coming of rain (and their concern about it) carried the meaning of the continuation of their life-giving sources (water and food).

The killing of a black storm-fattened rain animal has surprisingly close parallels in San rainmaking practice. A good description of some forms can be found in San Rock Art: 

 The whole phrase thus means ‘large animal of the rain/water’. These animals were, like the rain itself, of two kinds. A black rain-bull was the fierce thunderstorm, while a rain-cow was the gentler, soaking rain that often set in for some days. The !khwa-ka !gi:ten were said to capture a !khwa-ka xoro at night in a deep pool. They did this by throwing a rope or thong over its horns. They then led the creature across the country to the place where rain was needed or to the top of a nearby hill, and then killed it so that its blood and milk fell as rain. If they did not take precautions, the rain-animal could break the thong and escape. Capturing the rain was a risky business...A discrepancy between Qing’s statement that the flecks among the images ‘are things growing under water’ and Bleek’s informant’s view that ‘The strokes indicate rain’ can be explained. The two men were thinking of different stages in a rain-making sequence. Qing thought that the painting depicted the capture of a rain-animal in a deep pool or river and therefore interpreted the strokes as some sort of aquatic plant. The |Xam man imagined a later phase in the rain-making ritual when the people were leading the animal across the country, the rain falling as they went.

Even with all that as context, the similarities between the Sandawe and the San in mantis lore are particularly cool - not only is the Sandawe mantis associated with divinity and the trance (the trance dance is the central cultic ceremony of the Northern San peoples and almost certainly filled the same role in Southern groups) like the San mantis, but the sacrifices of butter made to the mantis by Sandawe also parallel the fat sacrifices done by San groups for the mantis in ethnological records. There's another interesting similarity around tying the mantis to spiritual communication, with the Sandawe mantis as a messenger of the spirits and the mantis as the master of the threads of light for San peoples. While I'm a staunch advocate for the "hunter-forager cultures are not living museums" POV esp. where the various San peoples are concerned, and it's worth remembering that the idea of one vast ancient "Khoisanid" culture from the Red Sea to the Cape is pretty contested, I think there's something so fucking amazing about this. The African forager populations we've been talking about (Khoikhoin, the San peoples, the Western and Eastern forest peoples, the Sandawe and the Hadza) conserve the most ancient human lineages with the highest phylogenetic diversity.  In these rainmaking traditions and mantis tales shared across vast gulfs of space and time, we may have a tiny window into the myth and culture of the earliest modern humans - perhaps even the makers of the Blombos Cave ochre engravings! There have been attempts to do this before; a particularly interesting example can be found in the paper Reconstructing a Source Cosmology for African Hunter-Gatherers by the always incredible Camilla Power (her thesis is genuinely brilliant and her work on the dev. of monogamy and the role of gendered reverse dominance ritual in deep human history is maybe the only evo-psychesque stuff that doesn't make me want to kill myself) and I used it as the main resource for sketching out The Proper People who formed Mantis' home community in the cult lore below, but it's relatively general for obv. reasons so this is still a welcome addition. A lot of the particulars are taken from stuff that I found especially cool/inspirational in Lewis-Williams' Myth and Meaning: San-Bushman Folklore in Global Context (which primarily deals with art and myth of the now-extinct /Xam culture, not the more well-studied Juǀʼhoansi !Kung.) The whole book is excellent and worth reading, a rare find in a sea of extremely mid writing about some of the world's coolest people. The below is an EE cult but the fluff interacts with the Lighthouse setting for the game written by Dan D. over at Throne of Salt.

Mystic Cult: Mantis

San rock painting of a seated man playing a musical bow with listeners clapping and dancing around him, from Lewis-Williams' Myth and Meaning: San-Bushman Folklore in Global Context

"[H]e sleeps, he trembles (!khauken), as he lies. Then the tree on which the meat is placed comes out of the ground. The tree comes out of the ground, rises up, with all the things hanging on it, and goes then thro’ the heaven and comes down near the /kaggen’s head where it descends near his head and grows there, making a house for him, as he lies." - //Kabbo the Philosopher, a /Xam mantisman**, rainworker, and storyteller imprisoned at Cape Town Breakwater Prison for the crime of stealing a white settler's sheep to feed himself. Most famous for conducting folklore research with Lucy Lloyd and the Bleeks in the 1800s. 

 

Domains - Wanderers, the Desert Way, transitions and change, reverse dominance, outsiders, respectful hunting, contradictions, peace, trance states, laughter and jokes, creation, meaningful glances, blood, dangerous power, youth, divination, extreme weather, madness, self-determination, shapeshifting, dance, rain animals, poison

Symbols - The Trembling Hand, a young man with the head of a Great Rain Animal (giraffe, eland, kudu, elephant, hartebeest, etc), the power-collecting poses, a stylized fly whisk, the trance dance. Never a mantis, obvious fed move.

Epithets

• Brother Outside the Camp - The Proper People doctored his braggart's soul into wholeness millennia ago, but he remembers what it's like to be different from the ones you love.  

• Trembling Seer - He drills holes in the tops of diviner's skulls so they can send their spirits out. 

• Open Basket Boy - Paragon of the Desert Way - sharing without expectations, radical ancient egalitarianism, mobility of the soul. 

• Poisoned-Arrow-Unerring - The best hunter in the world. No exceptions.

• Spirit of Clowns - Dumb in a calculated way, he blunders to teach others. Kind of crazy too, but you need a guy like that sometimes. 

• The Potent - Full of strange magic and youthful energy. Inventor of needful things. 

• Twirled-Firey-Stick - In the kind old days before chiefs or presidents, Mantis was a power of the divine masculine - master of the ebb and flow of male energy in the Moon Dance’s balancing act. 

Spell List

1. A Mantisman will start with two spells at random from this list 
• Alter Emotions - as per Wolf-Packs and Winter Snow
• Cure Wounds - as per Esoteric Enterprises
• Message - as per Esoteric Enterprises
• Erase Tracks - as per Wolf-Packs and Winter Snow
2. Speak With Animals - as per Esoteric Enterprises
3. Trembling Diviner - as per Divination (Esoteric Enterprises) but the casting time is 3 turns to account for the trance and the caster is treated as 5 lvls higher for accuracy purposes
4. Flay - as per Wolf-Packs and Winter Snow
5. Creation - as per Esoteric Enterprises
6. Find the Path - as per Esoteric Enterprises
7. Paradoxical Revelation - as per Esoteric Enterprises
8. Shape Change - as per Esoteric Enterprises

Followers of Mantis are superlative hunters, their eyes-behind-eyes are clear. They have a Forensics skill equal to their Charm skill only for the purposes of tracking and may use the Ambush Surgeon spook power when attacking their quarry. 

The Cult in the World

The remaining Mantismen are primarily Underworld-dwellers; the cult was never particularly numerous and it incurred savage losses during the destruction of the Ecumene.  They still make up a larger-than-normal percentage of the delving pop. in Southern and Eastern Africa. The cult of the Mantis is widely dispersed - bonds between members are reinforced by ritual kinship ties and classic long-term sharing relationships. Mantismen rarely form the core of any Underworld network, but often act as links between several different groups, connecting disparate communities and carrying news. The followers of Mantis often serve as guides or recovery specialists for those who ask, following their demand-sharing principles, but such service is a gift freely given and they don't take well to being treated like employees. 

The oldest and truest allies of the Mantismen are the cultists of Lu, whose priestess-matriarchs guided human bands when Mantis was still a minor spirit of anger and greed. Millennia of war against the shacklemakers have welded them together and Mantismen often treat Lu's cultists like older siblings. The book witches of Aza-Thoth are comparatively young but maintain their own longstanding ties of friendship with the Mantis; many delving expeditions for rare texts boast a Mantisman "finder" among their members. They are often at odds with the Spider-Cult of Anassa, who they battled in ancient days when the Crawling Queen schemed to shatter man's primeval liberty, and the more domineering Underworld factions.

* Normal caveats about terminology apply. 

** The /Xam original - /kaggen-ka !kwi - literally means "the mantis' man," but it is a gender inclusive term in practice; I'm using it the same way here.