Aiwel Longar is the great culture hero and archetypal ancestor of the Dinka masters of the fishing spear. According to the widely attested myth, his mother was a mortal woman and his father a divinity of the river; as a child he was taken into the river to his father, and he later returned to his people during a devastating drought leading a multicoloured ox named Longar, from which he took his ox-name. He established the hereditary priesthood by giving chosen men fishing-spears, the power of effective invocation, the blessing of his spittle and the cursing of his tongue, and the divinity Flesh; their descendants form the spear-master clans. Because his prayers unfailingly upheld the life and fertility of people, cattle and land, and because in myth he masters death rather than simply succumbing to it, he stands at the boundary between humanity and Divinity, and the ritual of the willing burial alive of aged spear-masters re-enacts his triumph over mortality.