There could not be better evidence of the presence of the ethical element in the religious mysteries.  Among the Yao, as among the Australian Kurnai, the central secret lesson of religion is the lesson of unselfishness.

It is not stated that Mtanga instituted or presides over the mysteries.  Judging from the analogy of Eleusis, the Bora, the Red Indian initiations, and so on, we may expect this to be the belief; but Mr. Macdonald knows 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 never dreamed of ghosts?  Is there any logical reason why Mtanga should not be regarded as originally on the same footing as Munganngaur, but now half forgotten and neglected, for practical or philosophical reasons?