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

But under the logic of the bailout, the markets were in charge, and the overarching aim of the government was to propitiate them to avoid disaster.

From New York Times ● Jun. 25, 2010

Especially I felt this when I made any attempt to propitiate him.

From "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë

The Indian yields to it a sort of worship, propitiates it with offerings of tobacco, thanks it in prosperity, and upbraids it in disaster.

From The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century by Parkman, Francis

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

From The Soul of the Far East by Lowell, Percival

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

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

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 Maclaren, Alexander

Ages, empires, civilisations pass, and leave some members even of educated mankind still, in certain points, on the level of the savage who propitiates with gifts, or addresses with prayers, the spirits of the dead.

From Cock Lane and Common-Sense by Lang, Andrew

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

Villagers prevailed upon construction workers to stop work until the dragon had been propitiated.

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

IT had aspects of a secular, almost pagan holiday�a sense of propitiating an earth increasingly incapable of forgiving what man has inflicted upon it.

From Time Magazine Archive

They trace their origin to the same source whence come the notions of propitiating the fairies by euphemistic names.

From British Goblins Welsh Folk-lore, Fairy Mythology, Legends and Traditions by Sikes, Wirt

The germ and core of the Aztec religion was the idea of the constant necessity of propitiating the gods by means of human sacrifice, and to this aspect of their religion we will return later.

From The Mythologies of Ancient Mexico and Peru by Spence, Lewis