Keystone and the Divine King：A Study on the Nyikang of the Shilluk and Divine Kingship

In his famous book The Golden Bough,]ames Frazer mentioned one special custom found along the shores of Lake Nemi in Italy. The forest king who lived beside Lake N e m i, was not only once a prisoner, but also the murderer of his predecessor. W hy did the K ing have to be kille d ? How could he be k ille d ? This was the very starting point of James Frazer’s divine kingship study. This was in contrast to the common idea held in many cultures, that kings, or even gods, would die.

In his famous book The Golden Bough,James Frazer mentioned one special custom found along the shores of Lake Nemi in Italy. The forest king who lived beside Lake Nemi, was not only once a prisoner, but also the murderer of his predecessor. Why did the King have to be killed? How could he be killed? This was the very starting point of James Frazer’s divine kingship study. This was in contrast to the common idea held in many cultures, that kings, or even gods, would die. However, in the most primitive societies, kings and gods also had a symbolic duty. People be-lieved that their king took the responsibility to maintain the order of society and the natural world. In that case, it was obvious that if the king became old and weak, the society and order would be in danger. The way used by primitive people to solve this problem was to kill the king when he became weak, and to rebuild this symbol of order through the accession of a new king. This worry about the loss of order and fertility, Frazer explained, was the reason why they choose to kill their king, who was also a god to them. To prove his theory, Fra-zer used many examples. Among them, the exam-ple of the Shilluk of Nilotic Sudan was the only real case of a people killing their king. All the kings were possessed by the spirit of Nyikang, who was not only a hero and king in their history, but also the god who created the universe of the Shilluk people. In Shilluk, it was not the king who ruled the country, but the spirit who possessed him. For that reason, once the king showed his weakness and age, he had to be killed or commit a suicide so as to keep Nyikang in a healthy body. This case was mentioned by James Frazer, re-examined by Evans-Pritchard, and discussed by Henri Frank-fort and David Graeber. The Shilluk people lived in Sudan, in the Ni-lotic area alongside the Nile River. Their kingdom consisted of y many hamlets and occupied by linea-ges. But all these hamlets and lineages shared the same king, who was believed to be the descendant of their semi-divine hero and first king, Nyikang. Nyikang was believed to bring the fertility of men, of cattle, and of the crops. He lived among his people and blessed them. He was a mythological figure who represented a changeless moral order and the stable structure of the state. The Shilluk people believed that the king was the embodiment of Nyikang, and, thus, shared his divinity. All the Kings were believed to be descended from Nyi-kang. The king could be killed for two reasons:when he could no longer satisfy his wives, it was time for him to die and make room for a more vig-orous successor; or he would be killed by one of the prince who coveted the shrine at night. There were many graves of kings and of Nyikang all a-round the kingdom, but all the Shilluk people knew that Nyikang was not buried in any of them, he would never die. The king, however, was the container of the Nyikang’s spirit. Thus, after his death, he was no longer divine, so his funeral would be a clan affair rather than a national affair. In Frazer’s opinion, Shilluk kings confirmed their rule and power by maintaining their connec-tion with the god, Nyikang. And, he gained divin-ity from this connection. However, this divinity was not permanent. In the same way, the stability of the Shilluk social order was also not permanent, so the complete failure of that power would cause the danger to the entire society. When the new king ascended the throne, the social order would be re-established. So, to kill the old king when he could no longer take responsibility for the whole of society was the way for the Shilluk to release the tension and handle the danger which resulted from their king’s death and to keep the social order. Several decades after the publication of The Golden Bough, Evans - Pritchard gave a talk at The Frazer Lecture ( 1948 ) . He looked at the Shilluk custom of killing their king together with the social structure of the Shilluk kingdom, and pointed out some of the unreasonable explanations made by James Frazer. He believed that this cus-tom, which Frazer explained as the way the Shilluk maintained the divinity of kingship, had political reasons and social functions. Based on his field-work, Evans - Pritchard described the political structure of Shilluk as follows: Shilluk hamlets consisted of one to fifty different families. Each hamlet was occupied by members of an extended family or a small lineage. The headman of a hamlet was also the head of a lineage in the settlement. All the Shilluk settlements composed a common polity, i. e. the land belonging to the Kingdom of Shillukland. There were two chiefs in the hierarchy between the king and the settlements. These were the Ger, who represented northern Shillukland, and the Luak, who represented the southern shil-lukland. Those two chiefs each ritually represented half of the kingdom, and they played a very impor-tant role in the election of the new king. Evans-Prichard discovered that there were very close con-nections between the kings, the princes and their villages where they were born. The pregnant wives of the kings would be sent back to their natal villa-ges to bear their children, and the princes were brought up by the headmen of their natal villages. Except them, all of the princes had their royal cli-ents ( Ororo) in the villages. These were the com-panions of the prince, so they would live in the capital with the prince if he was chosen to be the king, and would return to their village to guard the king’s tomb. This information will help us to see and understand the social structure of Shilluk soci-ety. The dual balanced structure of Shilluk society was represented by the southern-northern opposi-tion. We find that the Shilluk kingdom had a double configuration-one that was politically re-flected in its territorial division, which was divided into northern and southern parts, and the other one was ritually reflected in the rituals related to the cult of Nyikang. The king and the capital specific-ally stayed in the center. As Evans - Pritchard said, Northern Shillukland and Southern Shil-lukland were the arches of the kingdom of Shilluk, and kingship was the keystone. This duality was clearly represented in the election system and in-vestiture. The investiture of the new king would take place about a year after his election. Since this ceremony was meant to rebuild the social or-der, all the hamlets would participate in it. After the old king’s death, the spirit of Nyikang would no longer stay in his body. Instead, it would move to an effigy of a hamlet which was in a far north dis-trict of Shillukland. The effigy would be sent by the army of north to the outskirts of the capital, where there would be a ceremonial war with the king’s army. Since Nyikang was in the northern army, it was obvious that the king would fail. Then, the ef-figy of Nyikang would be put on the king’s chair. Then, the king would sit on the chair, and, as a result, the spirit of Nyikang entered into the body of the new king. Now, there would be another war- because Nyikang had entered into the body of the new king, the northern army failed, and, they would then take the effigy back to the shrine. This ceremony not only illustrated the tension be-tween the north and the south of Shillukland, but also the tension between the god Nyikang and the human king. And all these tensions were resolved through a unified kingship. We find that Shilluk society, no matter whether within the vertical and horizontal structure of the southern -northern op-position, or among the different hamlets, they all had different objects to show their loyalty. Howev-er, all these differences would be reduced when they faced a unified national symbol- Nyikang or divine kingship. The king did not belong to any single tribe or hamlet after the ceremony. He be-came the symbol of the happiness and continuity of all the Shilluk people. From this ceremony, Evans -Pritchard re -explained the reason for the special custom of the Shilluk. He asserted that in Shilluk society, the king’s death would cause chaos and many dangers. The king had died in the way they described be-cause they were afraid of exposing the tensions hid-den within the social structure. So, this tradition was only a political myth hidden under the facts. The second kind of death of the king was that he was killed by a prince. Evans-Pritchard believed that all Shilluk princes received support from their natal villages. If all the tribes had their own king, the Shilluk kingdom would definitely be torn apart. So, they still needed a center from which to build the whole kingdom, i. e. the kingship. In a king-dom of this kind, if the king attached himself to one hamlet, other hamlets would fight for their own rights. So, because the kingship was permanent and ensured the unity of the whole kingdom, it should be emphasized. In contrast to Evans-Pritchard’ s structural-functionist explanation, the American archaeolo-gist, Henri Frankfort, made his analysis of the customs of the Shilluk based upon the methodology of mythology. He compared the divine kingship of Egypt and Shilluk in his book Kingship and the Gods. And, based upon the process of the combi-nation and separation of the king and the gods, he discussed the function of divine kingship. In E-gypt, the pharaoh was called “the Lord of Two Lands”. This title involved two gods who were en-emies:Horus and Seth. They were respectively the Kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. Even when Seth had been defeated by Horus, it did not mean that he totally disappeared. This is because he had his own function within the existing order. Horus was not only a mythological figure, but also was one which reflected on the pharaoh. The pharaoh was always regarded as Horus or his embodiment. This idea is quite similar to the connection of Nyikang with the Shilluk king. However, in Egypt, there was another god who had a close connection with the kingship, that is, Osiris. In Egypt, the dead king was believed to change into Osiris, and the king on the throne, just as Horus, was regarded as the son of Osiris. Beside this connection, in the myths, Osiris was said to be the “Ka ” of Horus, which was something like energy, and for the king, it was somewhat like a kind of ruling power. This kind of father-son relationship also ex-isted among the Shilluk people. When Evans -Pritchard described the ceremony, he mentioned that Dak, the son of Nyikang, was also honored. However, in Shilluk, Nyikang meant all the kings, no matter whether dead or alive. What was more important is that Shilluk kings themselves were not gods, they were just processed by Nyikang, and it was Nyikang who was the real ruler. That was the reason why the accession ceremony of the king was so important. However, in the Egyptian view, the concept of kingship itself was more complicated than that of the Shilluk. All the Egyptian kings themselves were gods, and their orders, as god’s order, must be obeyed. So, although there was a stable kingship in the two societies, the roles played by the king were totally different. However, we can still find some basic elements of the divine kingship from these two cases. Because the king himself was a human being, he would definitely turn old and die. In order to resolve the social stress caused by the succession of the kingship, the kingship had to be stable. So, the king must have a relationship with the gods. It was the god and the kingship that maintained the unity of this structure. In 2011 , David Graeber published his paper titled The Divine Kingship of the Shilluk in which he used theories from political science to discuss the relationship between Nyikang and the Shilluk king . He tried to use this case to understand the e-mergence of the state and power. He compared the political status of Shilluk with their myth and cos-mology. He proposed three very important con-cepts:i) divine kingship which was absolutely dic-tatorial and had god-like authority-and was one in which this divine god went beyond the morality;ii) the sacred kingship which was ritualized and exemplary-this was a kind of prophetic and legis-lative king ; iii) violence and antagonism with no reason - the subject of the violence was the sover-eign and the people. All of these three concepts, David Graeber said, could be found in the Shilluk Kingdom. That was not because they were so -called primitive ethnic groups, but because this kingdom was a “Utopian State”. In other words, this kingdom, or the construction of its main cit-ies, was an imitation to the cosmic order, and, therefore, did not need a management institution to rule it. However, because this could never exist in the real world, violence appeared. David Graeber divided the kingship into two types: the divine and the sacred. In the former, the king was believed to be the god itself. And, in the latter, the kings were those who brought and created order. However, if order was set up by a king, it was asked whether or not the king himself still stayed within the order? So, the extreme type of sacred kingship would be the denial of the limi-tation of the king’s life. David Graeber suggested that the King of Shilluk did not have real power. The responsibility the Shilluk king undetook was the order of the whole cosmos. When he became weak, he could no longer judge and rule based on the cosmology. This is the reason why he had to be killed. We can see that the king who ruled the state according to the cosmology was more like a divine king, so his fate was that he must be killed by people. However, after he was killed, the for-mer “scapegoat” became the god and was wor-shiped by the people. The social order was rebuilt because of the king’s death, and in doing so he be-came the embodiment of the strength needed to re-build the social order. So, we can note that in Shilluk society, although people expect stability and order, they cannot allow the rule to become a central control and monopoly. The king should be in the center of order, but because the king would definitely become old, people tried to reduce the disorder through killing him. Due to the limitations of the king, he was trapped in the absolute authori-ty of the divine kingship, and the infinite order of the order. Hence, he was killed again and again. The appearance of the king was to resolve the dilemma within this society. He tried to build a U-topia, but was trapped in it because of his own limitations. Just like the kings were killed con-stantly, the conflict between sovereignty and the people would never stop. David Greaber pointed out that this constant opposition was the origin of state. This opinion totally refuted existing political theories, o matter whether they were that of Max Weber or of those who believe that it was through making law and rules to solve the conflict or the so-cial tensions in Africa, for their opinions were based on the perspective of nation state. However, in Africa, at least in Nilotic Sudan, they were u-sing this conflict to build their state. Graeber’s ar-ticle indicated that in the war between the sover-eign and the people, the sovereign is limited, and can never win truly. It reveals a new possibility for the construction of a nation state and political sys-tem. To sum up the discussions above, we have found that in those societies with divine kingship, the reason for the king’s divinity was because he undertook the people’s expectation of a stable soci-ety, and the fertility of crops, and livestock. Be-cause these expectations were not stable in them-selves, people either believed that their king him-self was a god, or tried to ensure that their king was in a healthy state. The similarity between them was that people had to keep the kingship stable and reduce the tension and chaos caused by the king’s death. From their fear of disorder and the fear of powerful order, we can even find a variety of ways of thinking about a perfect and eternal order, as well as on an imperfect and limited life. Thus the King always connected with a stone, for people al-ways expect a stable and changeless eternity.