Nyam, like Major Ellis’s class I., appoints a subordinate god to do his work:  he is truly good, and governs the malevolent spirits.[31]

The spread of Nyankupon, as described by Major Ellis, is the more remarkable, since ’five or six miles from the sea, or even less, the country was a terra incognita to Europeans,’[32] Nyankupon was, it is alleged, adopted, because our superiority proved Europeans to be ’protected by a deity of greater power than any of those to which they themselves’ (the Tshi races) ‘offered sacrifices.’

Then, of course, Nyankupon would receive the best sacrifices of all, as the most powerful deity?  Far from that, Nyankupon received no sacrifice, and had no priests.  No priest would have a traditional way of serving him.  As the unlucky man in Voltaire says to his guardian angel, ’It is well worth while to have a presiding genius,’ so the Tshis and Bantu might ironically remark, ‘A useful thing, a new Supreme Being!’ A quarter of a continent or so adopts a new foreign god, and leaves him plante la; unserved, unhonoured, and unsung.  He therefore came to be thought too remote, or too indifferent, ’to interfere directly in the affairs of the world.’  ’This idea was probably caused by the fact that the natives had not experienced any material improvement in their condition ... although they also had become followers of the god of the whites.’[33]

But that was just what they had not done!  Even at Magellan’s Straits, the Fuegians picked up from a casual Spanish sea-captain and adored an image of Cristo.  Name and effigy they accepted.  The Tshi people took neither effigy nor name of a deity from the Portuguese settled among them.  They neither imitated Catholic rites nor adapted their own; they prayed not, nor sacrificed to the ‘new’ Nyankupon.  Only his name and the idea of his nature are universally diffused in West African belief.  He lives in no definite home, or hill, but ‘in Nyankupon’s country.’  Nyankupon, at the present day, is ‘ignored rather than worshipped,’ while Bobowissi has priests and offerings.

It is clear that Major Ellis is endeavouring to explain, by a singular solution (namely, the borrowing of a God from Europeans), and that a solution improbable and inadequate, a phenomenon of very wide distribution.  Nyankupon cannot be explained apart from Taaroa, Puluga, Ahone, Ndengei, Dendid, and Ta-li-y-Tochoo, Gods to be later described, who cannot, by any stretch of probabilities, be regarded as of European origin.  All of these represent the primeval Supreme Being, more or less or altogether stripped, under advancing conditions of culture, of his ethical influence, and crowded out by the horde of useful greedy ghosts or ghost gods, whose business is lucrative.  Nyankupon has no pretensions to be, or to have been a ’spirit.’[34]

Major Ellis’s theory is a natural result of his belief in a tangle of polytheism as ‘the original state of religion.’  If so, there was not much room for the natural development of Nyankupon, in whom ’the missionaries find a parallel to the Jahveh of the Jews.’[35] On our theory Nyankupon takes his place in the regular process of the corruption of theism by animism.