San religious life varies by community rather than following one fixed theology: Lorna Marshall's fieldwork among the Nyae Nyae Ju/'hoansi records a greater god, Gao Na, and a lesser, more dangerous being, //Gauwa, while the /Xam testimony Bleek and Lloyd recorded centers instead on /Kaggen, a trickster and creator most often taking the form of a mantis, whose unpredictable acts explain both the order and the disorder of the world.
What recurs across San communities, in Mathias Guenther's comparative account, is the central place of the trance dance, in which healers, both men and women depending on the community, dance around a fire while women clap and sing until n|om, a potency understood to reside in the healer's body, is activated and rises, allowing the healer to draw sickness out of the sick and to travel in spirit to negotiate with the dead and with the beings responsible for illness.
Rock art across the Kalahari and the Drakensberg, much of it centuries old, is now widely read by researchers as a record of trance experience rather than simple hunting scenes, though how far that reading applies to any single painted site remains a matter of ongoing interpretation. Christianity has spread among many San communities, held alongside rather than replacing the trance dance and its healers in most of the communities where both are practiced.