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Deus Otiosus

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About 13 pages (3,931 words)
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More important, the study of histories that we know more fully indicate the unlikelihood that a belief in a supreme being of the sky would exclude all other religious forms. The point to begin with is that the experience of the sky as a religious reality, in fact as the divine sphere, places emphasis on the religious value of withdrawal and transcendence. The sky itself, as a symbol of sacred being, embraces or constitutes these elemental structures of a deus otiosus, withdrawal and transcendence. For this reason, countless other hierophanies can coexist with this sacred manifestation of the remote sky.

For example, Puluga is an omniscient sky-dwelling divinity revered in the Andaman Islands. After a stormy relationship with the first people, Puluga reminded them of his commands and withdrew. Men have never seen him since that time of estrangement at the beginning (Paul Schebesta, Les Pygmées, Paris, 1940, pp. 161–163). In a similar way, Témaukel, the eternal and omniscient creator of the Selk'nam of Tierra del Fuego, is called so'onh-haskan ("dweller in the sky") and so'onh kas pémer ("he who is in the sky"). Témaukel created mythical ancestors who took over the process of creating the world. Once creation was accomplished, he withdrew beyond the stars.

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Deus Otiosus from Encyclopedia of Religion. Copyright © 2001-2006 by Macmillan Reference USA, an imprint of the Gale Group. All rights reserved.

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