image; I am all the same as God; and He appointed me a king.”[1]
Sometimes, at the death of the human incarnation, the divine spirit transmigrates into another man. In the kingdom of Kaffa, in Eastern Africa, the heathen part of the people worship a spirit called Deòce, to whom they offer prayer and sacrifice, and whom they invoke on all important occasions. This spirit is incarnate in the grand magician or pope, a person of great wealth and influence, ranking almost with the king, and wielding the spiritual, as the king wields the temporal, power. It happened that, shortly before the arrival of a Christian missionary in the kingdom, this African pope died, and the priests, fearing that the missionary would assume the position vacated by the deceased pope, declared that the Deòce had passed into the king, who henceforth, uniting the spiritual with the temporal power, reigned as god and king.[2] Before beginning to work at the salt-pans in a Laosian village, the workmen offer sacrifice to a local divinity. This divinity is incarnate in a woman and transmigrates at her death into another woman,[3] In Bhotan the spiritual head of the government is a person called the Dhurma Raja, who is supposed to be a perpetual incarnation of the deity. At his death the new incarnate god shows himself in an infant by the refusal of his mother’s milk and a preference for that of a cow.[4] The Buddhist Tartars believe in a great number of living Buddhas, who officiate as Grand Lamas at the head of the most
- ↑ Allen and Thomson, Narrative of the Expedition to the River Niger in 1841, i. 288.
- ↑ G. Massaja, I miei trentacinque anni di missione nell’ alta Etiopia (Rome and Milan, 1888), v. 53 sq.
- ↑ E. Aymonier, Notes sur le Laos, p. 141 sq.
- ↑ Robinson, Descriptive Account of Assam, p. 342 sq.; Asiatic Researches, xv. 146.
