Antelope Spirit Animal

Across southern African San rock art (estimated 75,000 South African sites spanning 27,000 years), the eland (Taurotragus oryx) is the most frequently depicted single animal species, appearing as the central figure of trance-rain-making ritual. David Lewis-Williams's Believing and Seeing (Academic Press, 1981) and The Mind in the Cave (Thames & Hudson, 2002) argue, based on Lorna Marshall's !Kung ethnography and Bleek-Lloyd /Xam archive, that the eland's centrality reflects its role as the primary 'rain animal' whose ritual-hunt produced rain.

Megan Biesele's Women Like Meat (Witwatersrand University Press, 1993) documents contemporary Ju/'hoansi eland-and-girls initiation rites. The tradition is one of the oldest continuously-documented human-animal spiritual traditions on earth.

Anuket is the Egyptian gazelle-goddess of the first cataract of the Nile at Elephantine, attested from the Old Kingdom onward. She forms a triad with Khnum and Satet at the Elephantine sanctuary. Her iconography is consistently a woman with a tall plumed headdress; the gazelle-animal form appears in some contexts. Erik Hornung's Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt (Cornell University Press, 1982) treats the triad context.

The Chi Wara (also Ciwara, N'Gonzon Koun) is a Bamana/Bambara initiation-society figure of Mali, represented in elaborate carved wooden headdresses depicting an antelope (typically roan antelope, Hippotragus equinus) and often paired male-and-female. The Chi Wara narrative credits a mythical half-antelope-half-human being with teaching agriculture to the Bamana. The headdresses are worn in dance performances at the end of planting and at harvest.

Patrick McNaughton's The Mande Blacksmiths (Indiana University Press, 1988) and Pascal James Imperato's The Dance of the Tyi Wara (African Arts 4:1, 1970) are standard scholarly treatments. Chi Wara headdresses are in major museum collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.

Andrews's 1993 antelope is the grace-speed-alertness figure drawn generically from observable biology. The San eland tradition, the Egyptian Anuket, and the Bamana Chi Wara are absent.