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Again, traces of human sacrifice appear in the ritual of Israel, and it is only relatively late that the great prophets, justly declaring Jehovah to be indifferent to the blood of bulls and rams, try to bring back his service to that of the unpropitiated, unbought Dendid, or Ahone, or Pundjel. Here is degeneration, even in Israel.
Moreover, only malevolent chiefs were deified, so apparently a Fijian god is really a well-born human scoundrel, so considerable that he for one is not forgotten just as if we worshipped the wicked Lord Lyttelton! Of course a god like Ahone could not be made out of such materials as these, and, in fact, we learn from Mr. Thomson that there are other Fijian gods of a different origin.
In the cult of Darumulun, and of other highest gods of lowest savages, nothing answers to the Hebrew technical priestly word for sacrifice, 'food of the deity. Nobody feeds Puluga, nobody fed Ahone. We hear of no Fuegian sacrifices. Mr. Mr. Robertson Smith had a celebrated theory that cereal sacrifice is a tribute to a god, while sacrifice of a beast or man is an act of communion with the god.
He threw one of the buffalo robes over the man, and poured a few drops of whiskey down his throat, while the boys made up a blazing fire. Marks turned poor Pat round and round before it, rubbing and beating him. As soon as Pat could speak, he cried out, "Arrah, it was the whiskey, the whiskey did it all; ahone, ahone! if it wasn't for that, Pater Disney might have been alive and well."
Nyankupon cannot be explained apart from Taaroa, Puluga, Ahone, Ndengei, Dendid, and Ta-li-y-Tochoo, Gods to be later described, who cannot, by any stretch of probabilities, be regarded as of European origin.
But that magistrate can be, and is, appeased by sacrifices, which it would be impious, or, at all events, useless, to offer to the Supreme Being, Ahone. It is a logical creed, but how was the Supreme Being evolved out of the ghost of a 'people-devouring king' like Powhattan? The facts, very fairly attested, do not fit the anthropological theory.
"Ochone! what has become of the master?" he exclaimed. "Shure, he hasn't been drowned? Ochone! ahone! what will become of us?" None of us could answer Tim's question. My father and the brave skipper had disappeared with the vessel, which, with too much reason, we feared had gone down. Tim only knew that he had found himself suddenly swept off the deck, and struggling in the water.
"Why, do you see, Pater and I was going to do some work for a new settler at the farther end of the lake, and so we hired a boat to make a short cut a long cut it'll be for Pater, seeing he'll never get there; och, ahone, ahone!
This could not be understood while Ahone was left out of the statement. Probably Mr. Strachey's narrative justifies, by analogy, our suspicion of Major Ellis's theory that the African Supreme Being is of European origin. The purpose in the Ahone-Okeus creed is clear. How are these to be explained? Clearly as penalties for men's sins, inflicted, not by Ahone, but by his lieutenant, Okeus.
It may therefore be tentatively suggested that early Israel had its Ahone in a Being perhaps not yet named Jehovah. Israel entertained, however, perhaps by reason of 'nomadic habits, only the scantiest concern about ancestral ghosts. We then find an historical tradition of secular contact between Israel and Egypt, from which Israel emerges with Jehovah for God, and a system of sacrifices.
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