ws
very little about the matter.

The legendary tales say 'all things in this world were made by "God."'
'At first there were not people, but "God" and beasts.' 'God' here,
is Mlungu. The other statement is apparently derived from existing
ancestor-worship, people who died became 'God' (Mlungu). But God is prior
to death, for the Yao have a form of the usual myth of the origin of
death, also of sleep: 'death and sleep are one word, they are of one
family.' God dwells on high, while a malevolent 'great one,' who disturbed
the mysteries and slew the initiated, was turned into a mountain.[12]

In spite of information confessedly defective, I have extracted from Mr.
Spencer's chosen authority a mass of facts, pointing to a Yao belief in a
primal being, maker of mountains and rivers; existent before men were; not
liable to death--which came late among them--beneficent; not propitiated
by sacrifice (as far as the evidence goes); moral (if we may judge by the
analogy of the mysteries), and yet occupying the religious background,
while the foreground is held by the most recent ghosts. To prove Mr.
Spencer's theory, he ought to have given a full account of this being, and
to have shown how he was developed out of ghosts which are forgotten in
inverse ratio to their distance from the actual generation. I conceive
that Mr. Spencer would find a mid-point between a common ghost and Mtanga,
in a ghost of a chief attached to a mountain, the place and place-name
preserving the ghost's name and memory. But it is, I think, a far cry from
such a chief's ghost to the pre-human, angel-served Mtanga.

Of ancestor worship and ghost worship, we have abundant evidence. But the
position of Mtanga raises one of these delicate and crucial questions
which cannot be solved by ignoring their existence. Is Mtanga evolved
out of an ancestral ghost? If so, why, as greatest of divine beings, 'Very
Chief,' and having powerful ministers under him, is he left unpropitiated,
unless it be by moral discourses at the mysteries? As a much more advanced
idea than that of a real father's ghost, he ought to be much later in
evolution, fresher in conception, and more adored. How do we explain his
lack of adoration? Was he originally envisaged as a ghost at all, and, if
so, by what curious but uniform freak of savage logic is he regarded as
prior to men, and though a ghost, prior to death? Is it not certain that
such a being could be conceived of by men who had neve