The Nilotic Lwo - Divine Kingship

- The Kings Two Bodies

The Golden Bough - Divine Kingship - The Kings Two Bodies

Hence the Lwo, though politically acephalous in their own homelands, emerge in
Bantu history as kings and nobles in systems built up by others.
The Nilotic Contribution to Bantu Africa
- Roland Oliver, 1982

Various Lwoo peoples as well as the Dinka, Nuer, and Atuot "originated" in a
common homeland to the south of Lake No, and while these peoples then
migrated in relatively short distances, sections of the Lwoo separated, one group
moving to the north to become the Shilluk and others giving rise to peoples such
as the Anuak, Acholi, and Alur. Finally, in his summary of the very rich literature
on the association between pastoral migrations into the interlacustrine region
and the emergence of novel forms of political economy, Oliver suggests, "Hence
the Lwo, though politically acephalous in their own homelands, emerge in Bantu
history as kings and nobles in systems built up by others." As he notes, there is
tacit agreement on this general, clearly abstracted process. Still, one must note
that nobles, headmen, and even the unlikely distinction "divine king" are known
in the Nilotic Sudan and indeed, there are numerous reasons supporting the
interpretation that the designation "acephalous" is the exception rather than the
rule.
N
ilotic Studies Some
Past Problems and Prospects
John W. Burton

The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan.

The Frazer Lecture, 1948
E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD
The central theme of The Golden Bough was the divine kingship, one of the
examples of divine kingship cited by Sir James Frazer, that of the Shilluk of the
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and to discuss it as a problem of social structure. All the
kings are believed to be descended from Nyikang, the leader of the Shilluk in
their heroic age, who led them into their present homeland, conquering it from
its inhabitants and dividing it among the lineages of his followers; and Nyikang,
or, as we would say, the spirit of Nyikang, is believed to be in every king and to
have passed from king to king down the line of his successors. Nyikang is thus a
mythological personification of the timeless kingship which itself symbolizes the
national structure, a changeless moral order. Nyikang, the culture hero of the
Shilluk, their first king, and the creator of their nation, is immanent in him and
this makes him the double pivot of Shilluk society, the political head of the
nation and the centre of the national cult. The kingship is the common symbol of
the Shilluk people and, Nyikang being immortal, an abiding institution which
binds past and present and future generations.

The divine kingship of the Shilluk of the Nilotic Sudan.

The Frazer Lecture, 1948
E. E. EVANS-PRITCHARD
Nyikang is the reth but the reth is not Nyikang.21 The religion and cosmogony of
the Shilluk are bound up with the political system through the identification of
Nyikang with the king. Nyikang is the reth but the reth is not property as a
legal construct In Anglo-American property law there is freedom to make the
most ingenious arrangements. The concept of the corporation with all its
impersonal relations is such an arrangement. 41Nyikang.21 The participation of
Nyikang in the king raises the kingship to a plane above all sectional interests,
Nyikang are centred all those interests which are common to all the people:

success in war against foreigners and the fertility and health of men, cattle, crops,
and of those wild beasts which are of service to man. when a king died the
Shilluk say piny bugon, there is no land the centre of the Shilluks world has
fallen out. It is restored by the investiture of a new king, for though kings may
perish the kingship, that is Nyikang, endures. It possibly arises from the dual
personality of the king, who is both himself and Nyikang, both an individual and
an institution, which accounts also for the linguistic convention that a king does
not die but disappears just as Nyikang is said not to have died but to have
disappeared, in his case in a storm.
I will return to this question of regicide after I have reviewed the procedures of
election and investiture of kings to show what light they shed on the nature of the
kingship. In my view kingship everywhere and at all times has been in some
degree a sacred office. Rex est mixta persona cum sacerdote. This is because a
king symbolizes a whole society and must not be identified with any part of it. He
must be in the society and yet stand outside it and this is only possibly if his office
is raised to a mystical plane. It is the kingship and not the king who is divine. But
though I would insist that a sufficient explanation of the sacral kingship can only
be derived from a detailed and painstaking comparative study of a wide range of
monarchical institutions, which implies a yet wider comparative study of types of
political structure, I do not wish to maintain that because all kingship has some
of the features of the divine kingship the divine kingship is not in respect of other
features a distinct type of institution. It is to the credit of Sir James Frazer to have
shown that it is; and I would suggest that it is an institution typical of, though
doubtless not restricted to, societies with pronounced lineage systems in which
the political segments are parts of a loosely organized structure without
governmental functions. In societies of this kind the political organization takes a
ritual or symbolic form which in polities with a higher degree of organization
gives way, though never entirely, to centralized administration. African cases of
'divine kingship' are similarly problematic.

- Wikipedia

The Kings Two Bodies 1957

On medieval and early modern ideologies of monarchy and the state.
In 1957, Kantorowicz published his masterpiece, The King's Two Bodies, which
explored, in the words of the volume's subtitle, "medieval political theology." The
book traced the ways in which theologians, historians and canonists in the
Middle Ages and early modern period understood the office and person of the
king, as well as the idea of the kingdom, in corporeal and organological terms.
The figure of the European monarch was a unique product of religious and legal
traditions that eventually produced the notion of a "king" as simultaneously a
person and an embodiment of the community of the realm. The book remains a
classic in the field.
The Kings Two Bodies
- Ernst Kantorowicz

The Golden Bough

- A Study in Comparative Religion
James George Frazer - 1854 - 1941
Retitled The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion in its second
edition, The Golden Bough - A Study in Comparative Religion - is a
wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by the
Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (18541941). It was first
published in two volumes in 1890; in three volumes in 1900; the third edition,
published 190615, comprised twelve volumes. The work was aimed at a wide
literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch's
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855). The influence of The

Golden Bough on contemporary European literature and thought was

substantial.[1]
The Golden Bough attempts to define the shared elements of religious belief and
scientific thought, discussing fertility rites, human sacrifice, the dying god, the
scapegoat and many other symbols and practices whose influence has extended
into twentieth-century culture.[2] Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults
that revolved around the w
orship and periodic sacrifice of a sacred king.
Frazer proposed that mankind progresses from magic through r eligious belief to
scientific thought.[3] The king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a
solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the Earth. He died
at the harvest and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend
of rebirth is central to almost all of the world's mythologies.