the good god will always be favourable, it is the god of evil who must be appeased, and it is for his satisfaction that men abstain some from one kind of food and some from another.[1] Among accounts of the two rival deities in West Africa, one describes the Guinea negroes as recognizing below the Supreme Deity two spirits (or classes of spirits), Ombwiri and Onyambe, the one kind and gentle, doing good to men and rescuing them from harm, the other hateful and wicked, whose seldom mentioned name is heard with uneasiness and displeasure.[2] It would be scarcely profitable, in an enquiry where accurate knowledge of the doctrine of any insignificant tribe is more to the purpose than vague speculation on the theology of the mightiest nation, to dwell on the enigmatic traces of ancient Egyptian dualism. Suffice it to say that the two brother-deities Osiris and Seti, Osiris the beneficent solar divinity whose nature the blessed dead took on them, Seti perhaps a rival national god degraded to a Typhon, seem to have become the representative figures of a contrasted scheme of light and darkness, good and evil; the sculptured granite still commemorates the contests of their long-departed sects, where the hieroglyphic square-eared beast of Seti has been defaced to substitute for it the figure of Osiris.[3]
The conception of the light-god as the good deity in contrast to a rival god of evil, is one plainly suggested by nature, and naturally recurring in the religions of the world. The Khonds of Orissa may be counted its most perfect modern exponents in barbaric culture. To their supreme creative deity, Būra Pennu or Bella Pennu, Light-god or Sun-god, there stands opposed his evil consort Tari Pennu the Earth-goddess, and the history of good and evil in the world is the history of his work and her counterwork. He created a world paradisaic, happy, harmless; she rebelled against him, and to blast the lot of his new creature, man,
- ↑ Proyart, 'Loango,' in Pinkerton, vol. xvi. p. 504. Bastian, 'Mensch,' vol. ii. p. 109. See Kolbe, 'Kaap de Goede Hoop,' part i. xxix.: Waitz, vol. ii. p. 342 (Hottentots).
- ↑ J. L. Wilson, 'W. Afr.' pp. 217, 387. Waitz, vol. ii. p. 173.
- ↑ Birch, in Bunsen, vol. v. p. 136. Wilkinson, 'Ancient Eg.' &c.
