The first thing to say about the beings of San religion is that they are not shared. The /Xam of the northern Cape, recorded in the 1870s, and the Ju/'hoansi of the Nyae Nyae region, recorded in the twentieth century, do not name the same figures, and neither do the Nharo or the !Kung of other areas. Writing about a San pantheon produces a composite that no community ever held.
Among the /Xam the central figure is Kaggen, whose name is also the word for mantis. He made the eland, which he loved, and he is present in the stories as a creator and a fool at once, tricked, injured, resurrected, and repeatedly the cause of his own misfortunes. The /Xam material also gives sustained attention to the sun and moon, to the rain treated as an animal that can be captured and led, and to a class of people of the early race who lived before things took their present order. It does not sort into a hierarchy, and attempts to make it do so have generally been imposed from outside.
Among the Ju/'hoansi, Lorna Marshall recorded a clearer division: a great god of the eastern sky, Gao Na, who made the world and remains largely benevolent and distant, and a lesser god of the west, //Gauwa, who is unpredictable and is the one actually responsible for illness and death. Below them are the //gauwasi, the spirits of the dead, who hover near the living and shoot invisible arrows of sickness. This is the framework within which the healing dance makes sense: the dancers are not appeasing a distant creator but arguing with the dead and with the lesser god about a particular sick person, sometimes audibly and sometimes rudely.
Guenther's comparative reading treats that variability as the defining feature rather than as noise to be averaged out.