found that the Namaquas believed their ’great father’ lay below the cairns on which they flung boughs.  This great father was Heitsi Eibib, and, like other medicine-men, ’he could take many forms.’  Like Tsui Goab, he died several times and rose again.  Hahn gives (p. 61) a long account of the Wounded Knee from an old chief, and a story of the battle between Tsui Goab, who ‘lives in a beautiful heaven,’ and Gaunab, who ‘lives in a dark heaven.’  As this chief had dwelt among missionaries very long, we may perhaps discount his remarks on ‘heaven’ as borrowed.  Hahn thinks they refer to the red sky in which Tsui Goab lived, and to the black sky which was the home of Gaunab.  The two characters in this crude religious dualism thus inhabit light and darkness respectively.

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As far as we have gone, Tsui Goab, like Heitsi Eibib among the Namas, is a dead sorcerer, whose graves are worshipped, while, with a common inconsistency, he is also thought of as dwelling in the sky.  Even Christians often speak of the dead with similar inconsistency.  Tsui Goab’s worship is intelligible enough among a people so credulous that they took Hahn himself for a conjurer (p. 81), and so given to ancestor-worship that Hahn has seen them worship their own fathers’ graves, and expect help from men recently dead (pp. 112, 113).  But, while the Khoi Khoi think that Tsui Goab was once a real man, we need not share their Euhemerism.  More probably, like Unkulunkulu among the Zulus, Tsui Goab is an ideal, imaginary ancestral sorcerer and god.  No one man requires many graves, and Tsui Goab has more than Osiris possessed in Egypt. {205}

If the Egyptians in some immeasurably distant past were once on the level of Namas and Hottentots, they would worship Osiris at as many barrows as Heitsi Eibib and Tsui Goab are adored.  In later times the numerous graves of one being would require explanation, and explanations would be furnished by the myth that the body of Osiris was torn to pieces and each fragment buried in a separate tomb.

Again, lame gods occur in Greek, Australian, and Brazilian creeds, and the very coincidence of Tsui Goab’s lameness makes us sceptical about his claims to be a real dead man.  On the other hand, when Hahn tells us that epical myths are now sung in the dances in honour of warriors lately slain (p. 103), and that similar dances and songs were performed in the past to honour Tsui Goab, this looks more as if Tsui Goab had been an actual person.  Against this we must set (p. 105) the belief that Tsui Goab made the first man and woman, and was the Prometheus of the Hottentots.

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