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MYTHOLOGY AMONG THE HOTTENTOTS. 285 So far, all that is told us about Tsui-goab is intelligible, and offers striking points of similarity with the thoughts and expressions of other more civilised nations who, like the Khoi-khoi, and perhaps neither sooner nor later, discovered in the great celestial phenomena, and more particularly in the constant manifestation of the power of the sun and its influence on the life of nature and of man, the first indications of higher and supernatural powers, whom they called by names applicable originally to natural phenomena only. Nothing can be more natural, or, we might say, more human, than the way in which the Khoi-khoi speak of Tsui-goab, always supposing that Tsui-goab was originally a name of the sky, or of the rising sun, or of the pouring rain, or of the thunder. All these names would easily find their common focus in a so-called solar or celestial deity, in a Jupiter, or a Varuna, or an Indra, or a Thor, and the smallest knowledge of the mythological language of the ancient world would suffice to enable us to understand their legends, such as they are told us by Dr. Hahn and his predecessors.
But we now come to the irrational element in these legends. The very same Tsui-goab, the god of the sky, the sun, the rain, the thunder—the Supreme Being, in fact, of the Khoikhoi-is the subject of the strangest stories. He is said to have been originally, and not many generations back, a quack doctor with a broken knee. Appleyard, for instance, in his Kafir grammar, tells us that the Hottentot Tsoci-koap is known to the Kafirs under the name of u-Tisco, and that this name means the Wounded Knee, and was originally applied to a doctor or sorcerer of considerable notoriety and skill among the Hottentots or Namaquas some generations
