propitiate

So when an epidemic gets underway, we don’t waste time on sacrifices to propitiate angry gods or fretting about deadly miasmas seeping in with the night air.

From Washington Post ● Jan. 28, 2020

I suspect that Oskar probably still believes that it was just something in my nature: that somebody needed to be sacrificed on the altar on the way to propitiate whatever, and that that was him.

From Slate ● Jun. 28, 2016

Was it just to tell the date or propitiate some mountain deity?

From The Guardian ● Feb. 8, 2013

Mr. Talbott, who won the first Laurents/Hatcher Foundation Award for a new play with “The Submission,” understands the conflicting urges to propitiate and attack that spring from the insecurities of a life in the theater.

From New York Times ● Sep. 28, 2011

Roger’s daemon anxiously wagged her terrier tail to propitiate him.

From "The Golden Compass" by Philip Pullman

Sacrifice propitiates God, but mercy imitates Him, and imitation is the perfection of divine service.

From Expositions of Holy Scripture : St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII by Alexander Maclaren

One of nobler birth propitiates only the spirits of his own ancestors.

From The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell

Is it not that Christ is again offered in sacrifice, and that the pain he endures in being so propitiates God in your behalf?

From Pilgrimage from the Alps to the Tiber Or The Influence of Romanism on Trade, Justice, and Knowledge by James Aitken Wylie

While it powerfully propitiates the reader, it almost converts condemnation into compassion.

From Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey by Joseph Cottle

And nothing so effectually as an evening bath, as my experience testifies, cures fatigue and propitiates to dreamless slumber....

From With the World's Great Travellers, Volume 3 by Various

True to form, Iranians haven't been propitiated by such gestures.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

I promise I won't let our multithreaded discussion veer too far down the red carpet, but the Oscars are the Oscars; their vestal fires burn, their gods must be propitiated.

From Slate ● Jan. 16, 2014

For 700 years the Romans propitiated a special god of stem rust, Robigo.

From Time Magazine Archive

They must be fed and put to sleep, propitiated with hymns, songs and prayers.

From Time Magazine Archive

The gods had to be propitiated, and a vast industry of priests and oracles arose to make the gods less angry.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan

He suggests that they may have perceived the cave walls as a kind of membrane between their world and the spirits, and thus created their paintings as a means of propitiating them.

From The Guardian ● May 23, 2020

On this teacher’s advice, the Dalai Lama had himself been propitiating this dangerous spirit – along with innumerable other esoteric rituals – as part of his daily four hours of meditation and spiritual exercise.

From Newsweek

He builds first a small hut, and after propitiating him with a small piece of flesh, he asks Dungu that he may be successful.

From My Dark Companions And Their Strange Stories by Henry M. (Henry Morton) Stanley

At this point, moreover, had ceased the pretended influence of Mohammad ibn Mohammad, Sultán of Tajúra, the utter futility of propitiating whom had long been sufficiently apparent.

From The Highlands of Ethiopia by William Cornwallis Harris

He had the contradictory ends to answer of propitiating Mrs. Whiteway and concealing the truth, and his language, like everything he wrote on the question, is consequently vague and evasive.

From The Works of Alexander Pope, Volume 1 New Edition by Alexander Pope