[Sidenote: The sacred sticks representing the ancestors are probably the fire-sticks which were used to kindle fresh fire in the village after a death.] In these accounts the sacred sticks which stand for the ancestors, and to which the meat of sacrifices is first offered, are distinguished, expressly or implicitly, from the sacred sticks which are used to make the holy fire.[728] Other writers, however, identify the two sets of sticks. Thus we are told that the Herero “make images of their ancestors as follows. They take the two sticks with which they make fire and tie them together with a fresh wisp of corn. Then they worship this object as their ancestor. They may approach it only on their knees. For hours together they sit before it and talk with it. If you ask them where they imagine their ancestors to be, since they cannot surely be these sticks, they answer that they do not know. The sticks are kept in the house of the great wife.”[729] Again, another writer defines the _ondume_ or male fire-stick as a “stick representing an _omukuru_, _i.e._ ancestor, deity, with which and the _otyiza_ the holy fire is made.”[730] Again, the Rev. G. Viehe, in describing the ceremonies observed at the return to a deserted village where an ancestor (_omukuru_) is buried, tells us that they bring no fire with them, “but holy fire must now be obtained from the _omukuru_. This is done with the _ondume_ and the _otyiza_. The meaning of these two words plainly shows that the first represents the _omukuru_, and the other his wife.”[731] The same excellent authority defines the _ozondume_ as “sticks which represent the _ovakuru_, _i.e._ ancestors, deities”;[732] and _ozondume_ is simply the plural of _ondume_, the male fire-stick.[733] Hence it appears highly probable that the sticks representing the ancestors are, in fact, nothing but the male fire-sticks, each of which was cut to make a new fire on the return to the old village after a chiefs death. The stick would be an appropriate emblem of the deceased, who had been in his lifetime the owner of the sacred fire, and who now after his death bestowed it on his descendants by means of the friction of his wooden image. And the symbolism will appear all the more natural when we remember that the male fire-stick is generally made from the ancestral tree, that the process of fire-making is regarded by the Herero as the begetting of a child, and that their name for the stick, according to the most probable etymology, signifies “the begetter.” Such sticks would be far too sacred to be thrown away when they had served their immediate purpose of kindling a new fire, and thus in time a whole bundle of them would accumulate, each of them recalling, and in a sense representing, one of the great forefathers of the tribe. When the old sticks had ceased to be used as fire-lighters, and were preserved merely as memorials of the dead, it is not surprising that their original function should be overlooked by some European