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Thus, the African Supreme Being is unpropitiated, while inferior spirits are constrained by magic or propitiated with food. We meet our old problem: How has this God, in the conception of whom there is so much philosophy, developed out of these hungry ghosts? The influence of Islam can scarcely be suspected, Allah being addressed, of course, in endless prayers, while the African god receives none.
All this, it must be emphatically insisted on, is propounded 'under all reserves. While these four stages, say the Australian unpropitiated Moral Being, the African neglected Being, still somewhat moral, the relatively Supreme Being involved in human sacrifice, as in Polynesia, and the Moral Being reinstated philosophically, as in Israel, do suggest steps in evolution, we desire to base no hard-and-fast system of ascending and descending degrees upon our present evidence.
In any case we ask for evidence how, in the 'impenetrable forests' did a new Supreme Deity become universally known? Why was Nyankupon, the supposed new god of a new powerful set of strangers, left wholly unpropitiated? The reverse was to be expected.
The distinction between the Australian deity, at his highest power, unpropitiated by sacrifice, and the ordinary, waning, easily forgotten, cheaply propitiated ghost of a tribesman, is essential. It is not easy to show how, in 'the dark backward' of Australian life, the notion of Mungan-ngaur grew from the idea of the ghost of a warrior.
Such a God, being usually unpropitiated by sacrifice and lucrative private practice, is precisely the kind of deity who does not suit a priesthood. For these reasons that a priesthood 'sees no money in' a God of this kind, and that Gods of this kind, ethical and creative, are found where there are no priesthoods we cannot look on the conception as a late one of priestly origin, as Mr.
Now, Strachey's evidence is early , is that of a well-educated man, fond of airing his Greek, and not prejudiced in favour of these worshippers of 'Sathan. In Virginia he found the unpropitiated loving Supreme Being, beside a subordinate, like Nyankupon beside Bobowissi in Africa.
Interesting as a proof of Inca crystal-gazing, this legend of Christoval's cannot compete as evidence with Acosta and Garcilasso. The reader, however, must decide as to whether he prefers Garcilasso's unpropitiated Pachacamac, or Christoval's Uiracocha, human sacrifices, and all. Mr. Tylor prefers the version of Christoval, making Pachacamac a title of Uiracocha.
Remembering the sentence incurred, in far less superstitious times, by the generals at Arginusai, it is impossible to believe that any conclusion which left Patroklos's manes unpropitiated, and the mutilated corpse of Hektor unransomed, could have satisfied either the poet or his hearers. For further particulars I must refer the reader to the excellent criticisms of Mr.
Among these was again the excellent Richardson, who seems to have been wholly unpropitiated by the olive branch held out to him in the Jacobite's Journal. His vexation at the indignity put upon Pamela by Joseph Andrews was now complicated by a twittering jealousy of the "spurious brat," as he obligingly called Tom Jones, whose success had been so "unaccountable."
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