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

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

From Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, Volume 2 by Harriet Beecher Stowe

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 Andrew Lang

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

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

From The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell

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

In India, however, the accused was feared and terribly propitiated by millions as Kali, goddess of death and catastrophe, wife-conqueror of the eternal Siva, the dancer.

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 crept cautiously up to the fence, and put out a propitiating hand.

From The Tobacco Tiller A Tale of the Kentucky Tobacco Fields by Sarah Bell Hackley

Next he has the resource of prayer, and the power of propitiating Heaven by customary rites and sacrifices, and by a life of piety and innocence.

From The Roman Poets of the Augustan Age: Virgil by W. Y. Sellar

The former dropped a propitiating hand on Soane’s shoulder.

From The Moonlit Way by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers