16). In other African societies, such as the Nyarwanda and Rundi of central Africa, the creator god lived with the first people at the beginning of time (or the first people lived in the sky with the god). For one reason or another, the god moved away from the company of his creatures—upstream, downstream, to a mountaintop, or to the sky (R. Bourgeois,
Banyarwanda et Barundi, Brussels, 1957, vol. 3, pp. 19–25).
Most forms of the deus otiosus cluster around the symbolism of the sky. The manifestation of the sacred in the sky and the belief in supreme beings of the sky is most often overwhelmed and replaced by other sacred forms. We do not mean to say that devotion to the beings of the sky was the first and only religious practice of archaic humankind. In the first place, we do not have the data we need to reconstitute the first forms of religious practice and belief in human history.
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