No
wonder, that with such a danger before their eyes the Shilluk should
be most careful not to let the king die what we should call a
natural death of sickness or old age. It is characteristic of their
attitude towards the death of the kings that they refrain from
speaking of it as death: they do not say that a king has died but
simply that he has "gone away" like his divine ancestors Nyakang and
Dag, the two first kings of the dynasty, both of whom are reported
not to have died but to have disappeared. The similar legends of the
mysterious disappearance of early kings in other lands, for example
at Rome and in Uganda, may well point to a similar custom of putting
them to death for the purpose of preserving their life.
On the whole the theory and practice of the divine kings of the
Shilluk correspond very nearly to the theory and practice of the
priests of Nemi, the Kings of the Wood, if my view of the latter is
correct. In both we see a series of divine kings on whose life the
fertility of men, of cattle, and of vegetation is believed to
depend, and who are put to death, whether in single combat or
otherwise, in order that their divine spirit may be transmitted to
their successors in full vigour, uncontaminated by the weakness and
decay of sickness or old age, because any such degeneration on the
part of the king would, in the opinion of his worshippers, entail a
corresponding degeneration on manking, on cattle, and on the crops.
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