The prepuce is split, the flaps are turned back and brought together on the ventral aspect of the phallus so that the remainder of the prepuce forms an irregular mass of tissue of considerable size projecting beyond the glans.³

This practice, so extraordinary as to suggest that it was not invented twice, is represented on a very early Egyptian slate palette, reproduced by Seligman.⁴

The custom of killing African kings when they begin to show signs of physical decay (gray hair, loss of teeth, loss of sexual power, etc.), mentioned in Chap. XIV, represents the magical concept that the king symbolizes and mediates all blessings—crops, cattle, rain, the fertility of the earth and of women—and that as he declines these blessings will decline. A practice of this general kind might originate independently many times. The concept resembles that of Indian manitou and Polynesian roana, but in Africa the practice is more or less bound up with the belief that the king incarnates a particular divinity, and its concentration in Africa and the practical identity of the pattern in many regions seem to indicate extensive diffusion, as was doubtless the case with the mana and manitou formulations of the concept.

Seligman⁵ has suggested that the practice of killing kings may be represented on an Egyptian relief, which he reproduces, but the arrows shot in that scene are apparently no more than part of a coronation ceremony.⁶

³Seligman, C.G.n/an/an/an/a, "Ethnic Relationships of the Vanquished Represented on Certain Proto-Egyptian Palettes," . 7: 45.

⁴Ibid., 43–49.

⁵Egypt and Negro Africa.

⁶Cf. Gardiner, "The Nature . . . of . . . Hieroglyphic Writing," 121–126.