Mulungu
Shambaa · deity · Shambaa traditional religion; continuing · Recorded classification
Mulungu is the remote creator god of the Shambaa, one form of the widely shared Bantu name for the maker who set the world in its proper order. In Shambaa religious life the high god is a distant figure, rarely petitioned directly; the two active classes of unseen powers are the spirits of the ancestors and the spirits associated with the natural world. Devotion is concentrated on the lineage dead through the ancestral rite of mufika, so that Mulungu presides as the ultimate ground of order rather than as a deity of daily cult.
Domains
- creation
- the heavens
Powers
- establishes the order of the world
Epithets
- Mulungu — the CreatorEdgar V. Winans, Shambala: The Constitution of a Traditional State (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962). (secondary)
Sources
- The Shambaa recognise a distant high god, Mulungu, a pan-Bantu creator name shared across much of East and Central Africa, standing above the ancestor and nature spirits who receive the community's active devotion.: Edgar V. Winans, 'Shambaa,' Encyclopedia of World Cultures (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1995). (secondary); Steven Feierman, The Shambaa Kingdom: A History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1974). (secondary)