Ropes to God:  Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe edited by Bradford Keeney.  Philadelphia, PA:  Ringing Rocks Press, 2003.  Append.; biblio.; illus.; 176 pp.; $39.95 (cloth with CD).

Feature Review by Timothy White. Reprinted from Shaman's Drum, Number 65.

Bradford Keeney, Ringing Rocks Press, and Leete’s Island Press can be commended for their excellent work on Ropes to God:  Experiencing the Bushman Spiritual Universe, the eighth book in their ground-breaking “Profiles of Healing” series.  In a style and format similar to those of previous volumes in the series, the editor (Keeney) and book designer (Karen Davidson) have produced a dynamic collage of stunning documentary color and black-and-white photographs of Bushman healing dances, ink drawings of ancient San Bushman rock paintings, photos of rock paintings, and short quotations from many ethnographic sources, against a background text filled with insightful comments from Bushmen healers about the ecstatic healing dances.  The boxed, hard-cover edition even includes a CD of mesmerizing Bushman chants that adds another dimension to the book’s overall effect. 

Ropes to God relies on an experiential approach to studying the ecstatic practices of the Kalahari Bushmen that may raise the eyebrows—and hackles—of some academic anthropologists.  Keeney says repeatedly that, although other anthropologists and social scientists have done a good job of documenting the broad culture of the Bushmen, no one has offered an adequate experiential view of Bushman spiritual practices.  While acknowledging that ethnographers “have made numerous and significant contributions, particularly in the recording of anecdotal accounts by Bushmen healers and dancers,” he challenges their lack of experiential understanding of the dances: “The traditional academic way of knowing entails numerous blind spots to the kind of experiences that take place in the dance.”  

This volume does not purport to be an anthropological study of Bushman culture; it is an attempt to educate people about the unique Bushman view of the spiritual universe.  The Bushmen of the Kalahari are already one of the most thoroughly documented of the world’s extant hunter-gatherer tribes, so Keeney chose to focus on his special interest—the ecstatic healing dance ceremonies of the Bushmen.  As a result, Ropes to God does a marvelous job of providing readers with a multisensory overview of the dance.  The volume is illustrated generously with drawings and photos of ancient San rock art images, juxtaposed against photos depicting the same key elements of the dance—for example, the “bent over” dance posture, caused by a tightening of the abdominal muscles during highly aroused states. Other drawings of rock art, showing Bushmen climbing ropes and ladders—the ropes to God—help bring to life some of the inner themes of the dance experience, described at length in the texts.  And images of humanlike figures with animal heads help illustrate the accounts of Bushmen doctors who talk of shapeshifting into spirit beings.   

From an experiential point of view, the most impressive aspect of the book’s graphic approach is its many double-page spreads, presenting two parallel series of photos documenting the dances.  A series of full color images dramatically depicts key elements of the dance: dance postures, ecstatic facial expressions, sweat-covered bodies, energy transference, and hands-on healings.  A second set, consisting of small black-and-white images, records the unfolding drama of the dances as “seen” through a micro-camera attached to Keeney’s head.  Together they provide a good picture of the dances. 

Although the book offers a visually rich external view of the dances, the marrow of this volume is the descriptive explanations of what the Bushmen doctors experience during their all-night ecstatic dance ceremonies. Over the last several decades, numerous books have been written relating the inner journeys of Western practitioners involved in entheogenic traditions, but there are relatively few books by Westerners describing their ecstatic experiences within the shamanic dance traditions of Africa.  Knowing that Keeney combines a psychothera-pist’s sharp intellect with an experiential practitioner’s sincere desire to learn, I anticipated that he might provide new insights into the Bushmen’s potent shamanic trance dances, and I was not disappointed.  

In contrast to many mainstream anthropologists who have been unwilling to participate in possession trances, Keeney went to Africa already initiated in the realms of ecstatic trance.  His willingness to jump quite literally into the dances seems to have endeared him to many Bushmen doctors.  As the renowned expert on South African rock art, J. D. Lewis-Williams, comments in one of the appendices, Keeney’s “real breakthrough came somewhat unexpectedly when, drawing on his psychotherapy training, he began to participate in Bushman healing dances.  Eventually, after many astounding experiences, the people accepted him as a ‘doctor,’ a n/om k”xau, one who is believed to possess and control a supernatural essence or power that can be harnessed to heal people with physical and social ills.” According to Lewis-Williams, “Bushmen n/om k”xausi told Keeney that, because of his participation and experiences, they felt he was ready to learn more about spiritual matters than his predecessor in the Kalahari had managed to absorb.” 

Drawing a comparison to the experiential perspective of American jazz musicians, who “are less interested in talking about how, what, and why they play, but prefer to simply play the music,” Keeney argues that the Bushmen doctors value “raw spiritual experience” over any need for cosmological consistency.  This approach doesn’t allow for tidy pronouncements, but it illuminates concepts through a diversity of viewpoints.  For example, one doctor, Cgunta /kace, offers these insights on the important “rope of light” sometimes experienced during the dances:  “The rope is the most important thing we know about, because you can walk with the rope to visit God.  The rope is the power.  It does not carry the power like a pipe carrying water.  It is the power.  It is like God’s finger:  it stretches out into a long thin line that reaches us.…  It is also a line that you can use to talk with God.  It’s like ‘Roger, Roger’ when you use your truck radio transmitter.  Several of us in this community have gone all the way up that rope and have seen God.  I turn into a wind and then travel up the rope.” 

Keeney’s willingness to report detailed and sometimes even repetitive commentaries from different Bushmen doctors ultimately paints a more complete picture of their healing practices than a conventional approach might have done.   Rather than assume that the Bushman concepts of “arrows and nails” are identical with sorcerers’ beliefs in other cultures, Keeney gives his associates room to express their views on this potentially confusing subject.  For example, one of the doctors, Cgunta !elae, sheds some insights on the role of these arrows and nails in healings:  “When a doctor moves the dirty arrows out of a person’s body, the arrows go out of a hole in the back of the neck.  When we touch a sick person’s body …, the person’s arrows get hot and move up their body.” He suggests that the arrows and nails can be used for magical purposes: “The nails are straight without a head.  They look like a thorn.  Our grandparents even called them thorns.  They talked about thorns and arrows.  Strong doctors can point at someone and a thorn or nail will shoot out of their finger.  As we speak, there are people shooting at us.  But a strong doctor has protection against other people’s arrows.” However, Cgunta !elae’s comments also hint that the arrows are neutral energy patterns, not just harmful sorcery projectiles:  “If your arrows sit still for too long, they get dirty.  You must heat them up in the dance in order to clean them.  The other way you can get sick is when your arrows are stolen.”  By relating miscellaneous comments on this topic from various doctors, as opposed to labeling and categorizing the concept, Keeney conveys both subtle details and the rich diversity of Bushman beliefs. 

One of the slightly disconcerting features of this book appears in the chapter “The Bushman Spiritual Universe,” which relates the articulate views of a “!Kung Bushman doctor” identified as “Bo.”  While Keeney states in his introduction that Bo’s views provide “a synthesized account of what a Bushman shaman, healer, or doctor experiences during the healing dance,” it wasn’t until the end of the book that I realized that “Bo, the Bushman doctor” was actually Keeney himself.  In a brief note in an appendix, Keeney’s interpreter states, “I have learned a lot about our medicine working with Brad, who we call Bo.” After coming across this curious clue, I reread the introduction, where I found that Keeney mentions in passing that “[Bo’s] construed narrative is derived from a combination of my own experiences and the many reports from Bushmen doctors I have interviewed over the years” (emphasis added).  Compiling fragmentary comments into an organized narrative is a literary technique used by many anthropologists.  However, it would have been helpful for Keeney to have spelled out at the opening of “Bo’s” chapter that he was engaging in such license.  That small oversight could be an Achilles heel that leaves Keeney’s otherwise substantial insights open to attacks.   

For the most part, Bo’s comments seem to accurately reflect the attitudes and sometimes even the words of indigenous Bushmen doctors as related in other chapters.  However, I question Keeney’s decision to mix his own insights with those of the Bushmen doctors into an ambiguous composite.  For example, Bo offers this assessment of the dances:  “We dance for many reasons.  We dance because it is fun.  We also dance because it makes us feel better about each other.  It fills our hearts with happiness and takes away any bad feelings we might have for another person.  Dancing keeps us healthy.  In the hands of a Bushman doctor, our sickness may be taken away and our life revitalized.  In the dance, special experiences can happen for the doctor.  He or she may even see the Big God.  This is why the dance is our greatest treasure and mystery.”  In this passage, most of the wording could have been borrowed almost verbatim from the comments made in later chapters by the Bushmen doctors. However, the wording of the last sentence left me wondering if that comment came from one of the indigenous doctors or the Western-trained Bo. 

The ambiguity of Bo’s voice left me guessing several times as to the source of “his” insights.  At one point, Bo comments about how the ancestors appear in dreams and give powers to the doctors: “I know a doctor who was shown an animal’s horn.  When he woke up from the dream, he went out and found that horn.  Now when he simply thinks of that horn, he gets power.  Just thinking about it changes him.  That’s how it is.” Since the concept of healing powers and gifts coming in dreams is found in many shamanic cultures, I wondered if this comment came from Keeney or from an indigenous doctor.  If it came from Keeney’s direct experience as an initiated Bushman doctor, it would have been useful if he had delved a little deeper and explained how doctors access powers by thinking of them.   

At another point, Bo talks about the nature of ecstatic journeys:  “When we show you the drawing that depicts what happens to us in the dance, keep in mind that even though it looks like we’re moving from place to place, we’re really just staying in one place.  These different places refer to the different things that can happen to you.  I’m talking about seeing evil, going underground, floating to the sky—all of these things happen to you as you stand or dance in one area.”  Is this a Bushman doctor speaking, addressing the doubts of a Western observer, or Keeney describing what happens from his Western perspective?  By incorporating his own views into the composite commentary, and then failing to identify the source of specific information, Keeney creates a multicultural portrait of Bushman spiritual practices that may stretch the boundaries of ethnographic reporting.     

For the record, let me state that I am not questioning Keeney’s insights; I personally appreciate his ability to describe in perceptive detail what he experienced during the healing dances.  In several sections of the book, Keeney offers detailed and insightful descriptions of the dances, in his own voice:  “Then, without warning, a flurry of what seemed to be random sounds and movements erupted.  Old Montag and his friends were holding onto each other, shaking each other’s bodies and shouting out ecstatically into the evening sky.  It was all so fast and furious that  my mind was not able to find a calm place for observing and contemplating the scene.  I was swept into the fury of the dance and found myself thrown into a wild encounter of human touch, sound-making, and whole body-shaking.  Several of us fell to the ground and the vibrations of our bodies pulsed through one another, taking us into a deeper trance.  We lost any sense of location or time or meaning.” 

Keeney’s claim that the Bushmen elders, men and women, told him that he had become “a Bushman doctor who experiences firsthand their spiritual universe” grabbed my attention and left me hopeful that Keeney might offer new insights into the healing or doctoring aspects of the ecstatic dances.  Having read various accounts of the !Kung and other Bushman dances, I was eager to hear how an outsider experienced the movement of n/om (spiritual power) rising through the body, and to find out what it feels like to have “nails and arrows” transferred into one’s body by another doctor.  While some of his insights about doctoring may have been incorporated into Bo’s accounts, Keeney remains surprisingly quiet regarding doctoring techniques in chapters that he explicitly authored. 

Keeney does provide many important new insights into Bushman ecstatic practices in his interpretive essay “Dancing the Songs: An Editorial Discussion.”  For example, he offers the fascinating suggestion, supported by personal experience, that when Bushmen doctors speak of seeing sickness inside the bodies of others—the phenomenon of “x-ray vision” found in many shamanic cultures—it may be a case of synesthesia, the experience of crossed sensations.  He explains, “Although Bushmen doctors speak of the importance of getting ‘second eyes,’ they are referring to more than vision.  Several Bushmen doctors spoke to me about feeling something so strongly that they could see it—a clear example of synesthesis.  Most doctors talked about smelling the sickness rather than seeing it.  When they looked at or touched a person, they would sniff them and smell the sickness.” In the same essay, Keeney comments that synesthesia may be involved in the phenomenon of dancers “seeing” ropes of light in altered states.  He explains, “If a doctor says, ‘Look, there is a rope,’ this can mean that a cord [of energy] is being felt, seen, or felt-seen, the latter being a synesthetic combination.  Once a doctor has seen the rope, every time he or she feels the rope pumping his or her belly up and down, the doctor acknowledges the presence of the rope.” 

Although Keeney acknowledges that he can’t speak for all Bushmen doctors, he fearlessly challenges some prevailing theories promoted by previous researchers.  For example, in contrast to some Harvard anthropologists who have suggested that Bushmen doctors see the ancestor spirits primarily as adversaries, Keeney states, “I found that the doctors, through their love for the Big God and their closest ancestors, enlist their service to help remove sick arrows, clean dirty arrows, replace new arrows, or steal back arrows from the evil ones.  The familial ancestral spirits are not seen as adversaries.  They are remembered in terms of endearment, and they want to help the doctors fight the disease that brings suffering to their offspring.” Keeney notes that his Bushmen associates “did not see themselves emphasizing battle with any agent of disease, although such combat could play a part in their ceremonial performance at a dance and help prepare the stage for healing.”  He suggests that the Bushmen’s enactment of shooing away evil spirits during ceremonies may serve a purpose similar to the practice of smudging to clear the air of evil spirits in other shamanic traditions. 

Despite my misgivings about the use of Bo’s eclectic voice, I can see that Keeney’s participatory approach has helped him understand and appreciate the spiritual universe of the Kalahari Bushmen in ways that have been closed to most outsiders.  By sharing his insights, Keeney has opened some new windows into the Bushmen’s world of ecstatic healing.  My only serious disappointment was that Keeney, the Bushman doctor, did not describe more of his own experiences and compare them to—not mix them with—the viewpoints of indigenous doctors.  In any case, there is much enriching food for thought in this volume, and it should help Westerners better understand the ecstatic healing dances of the Kalahari Bushmen. 

Timothy White is editor of Shaman's Drum.