Aiwel Longar
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.
Domains
- priesthood
- life and fertility
- blessing and curse
Powers
- to bless the living with his spittle
- to keep people, cattle and land fertile through effective invocation
- to give the divinity Flesh and the fishing-spears to the founding priests
Epithets
- bany bithLienhardt, R. Godfrey, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), p. 171. (secondary)
Relations
- subordinate to: NhialicAiwel's life-giving powers were understood as derived from and answerable to Divinity, though tradition also records his contest with Divinity's ordering of life and death.Lienhardt, R. Godfrey, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), chs. 4-5. (secondary)
- creator of: FleshAiwel bestowed the divinity Flesh upon the men who became the founding spear-masters.Lienhardt, R. Godfrey, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), pp. 171-184. (secondary)
Sources
- Aiwel Longar is the semi-divine culture hero of the Dinka, son of a mortal woman and a river-divinity, who became the first Master of the Fishing Spear and founded the hereditary spear-master priesthood.: Lienhardt, R. Godfrey, Divinity and Experience: The Religion of the Dinka (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), chs. 4-5. (secondary); Deng, Francis Mading, Dinka Cosmology (London: Ithaca Press, 1980). (secondary); Encyclopaedia Britannica, 'Aiwel' (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica). (secondary)