Observations placeholder
Xam bushmen - Footpaths in the sky
Identifier
004922
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
The Xam bushmen used to refer to ‘footpaths in the sky’, which reflected their own practise of walking everywhere using footpaths in the physical world. Footpaths in the sky, however, were spiritual footpaths. Because the Bushmen believed that everything in the physical world had its spiritual equivalent, the visible path of things they saws with their eyes – sun, moon, stars – things which actually physically moved, had a spiritual equivalent – though not necessarily it seems exactly the same path that was physically displayed.
A description of the experience
The First Bushman’s Path: stories, Songs and testimonies of the Xam of the Northern Cape
…. The sun, they remarked, travels along a footpath or a road in the sky. There was as later poems tell, a distinct celestial geography of place and path shared by the sun the moon and other heavenly bodies, a geography that was not static but alive with sound and interaction