More Khoi Starlore...and Theology: The Pleiades

One of the most beautiful Spring star clusters rising in the east at Advent time are the Pleiades. The Pleiades captured human imagination from the earliest times. They are plaited and weaved with myth and belief. Some extraterrestrial researchers refer to Nordic type celestial beings as Pleiadeans.

"The eyes of the ancient Khoikhoi," says Khoi scholar, Theophilus Hahn, "were early directed towards the sky."  The Pleiades held a particular fascination for them heralding the coming rains. The Pleiades were the daughters of the Supreme God, Tsui-||goa.  The Greeks, strangely, called them the "Seven Sisters", the daughters of Atlas. Alcyone is the most beautiful one and the brightest. The other sisters are Celeno, Maja, Merope, Taygete, Asterope and Electra.

The 18th Century Moravian missionary at Genadendal, George Schmidt, related:

"At the return of the Pleiades these natives celebrate an anniversary ; as soon as these stars appear above the eastern horizon mothers will lift their little ones on their arms, and running up to elevated spots, will show to them those friendly stars, and teach them to stretch their little hands towards them. The people of a kraal will assemble to dance and to sing according to the old custom of their ancestors." (Quoted by Hahn, p.43)

They then dance and sing and pray to their Heavenly Father, Tsui-||goa, "Wounded Knee":

Thou, oh Tsui-||goa!
Thou Father of the Fathers! All Father!
Thou our Father!
Let stream, let rain, the thunder cloud!
Let please live our flocks!
Let us also live please!
I am so very weak indeed!
From thirst!
From hunger!
That I may eat field fruits!
Art thou then not our Father!
The father of the fathers!
Thou Tsui-||goa!
That we may praise thee!
That we may give thee in return and bless thee.
Thou father of the fathers!
Thou our Lord!
Thou, oh, Tsui-||goa!
(Hahn, p.58)

Appreciating these traditions of my early early African forebears, I cannot agree more with Theophilus Hahn when he concludes:

I hope that these pages may be an impulse to missionaries to look deeper into the eyes of a Hottentot. Perhaps they may discover some more sparks of the primæval revelation. Missionaries, I regret to say, are so apt to treat the heathen gods as demons or evil spirits. It is also very wrong to teach the heathen so eagerly, as is done by certain missionaries, our dogmas, and to tell them of the differences of Calvinism and Lutheranism. There is something like fanaticism in this -- a zealotism which can never bear fruit. To them, also, the poet gives the warning : 

Grau, Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und ewig grün des Lebens goldener Baum. 

(Grey, friend, is all theory,
And green the golden tree of life.) 

The abode of true religion -- I mean of the true yearning and craving  after the infinite -- is our heart, which becomes deaf and dumb as soon as it is surrounded by the mist and clouds of dogmatism. The key-note of true religion is love -- a key-note which is never touched in the fanatical controversies of our modern dogmatists.

-Hahn, p.150

Sources and Credits:
Theophilus Hahn, Tsuni-||Goam, The Supreme Being of the Khoi-Khoi, 1881, Trubner, London.
African Starlore, http://sirius-c.ncat.edu/EthiopianEnochSociety/Africa-Star/index.html
South African Star Myths, Royal Museums Greenwich
http://www.rmg.co.uk/explore/astronomy-and-time/astronomy-facts/stars/south-african-star-myths/*/viewPage/1


©Colin G Garvie HomePage: http://www.garvies.co.za