Supreme Sky-Being (Nuba High God)
The Nuba of the Kordofan hills are not one people but a mosaic of distinct communities speaking Kordofanian and Eastern Sudanic languages, and their religion is correspondingly localized. Almost all of them, however, acknowledge a single supreme being conceived as creator of the world and of humankind and identified with the sky and the rain. This being is characteristically remote: it is credited with having made and ordered the world, yet it stands apart from daily life, is the object of little regular worship, and is turned to mainly in extremity, above all when the rains fail. It is seldom personified in narrative and in many communities is named by, or simply equated with, the everyday word for 'sky' or 'the above' rather than by a proper name, so that scholars differ on whether a true theonym exists at all. The weight of religious attention among the Nuba falls not on this distant creator but on the ancestral dead, on the rain, and on the spirit-powers that seize the diviner.
Domains
- sky
- rain
- creation
Powers
- sends the seasonal rains
- withdraws into remoteness
Relations
- ally: The Rain (Nuba Rain-Cult Numen)Sources differ on whether the rain is a distinct power or simply the agency and gift of the sky god.S. F. Nadel, The Nuba (Oxford University Press, 1947) (secondary)
Sources
- Most Nuba hill communities recognise a remote supreme being associated with the sky and the sending of rain, invoked chiefly in drought and calamity.: S. F. Nadel, The Nuba (Oxford University Press, 1947) (secondary); C. G. Seligman & B. Z. Seligman, Pagan Tribes of the Nilotic Sudan (Routledge, 1932) (secondary); John S. Mbiti, Concepts of God in Africa (SPCK, 1970) (secondary)
- The high god is generally otiose, without elaborated myth or a single fixed personal name, and receives far less cult than the ancestors and the rain.: S. F. Nadel, The Nuba (Oxford University Press, 1947) (secondary)