Chapter III: Fetishism as a Form of Religious Worship

Fetishism is a stage of religious development associated with a low grade of consciousness and of civilisation, and it forms a basis from which many other modes of religious thought have developed, so that it is difficult to point out where fetishism ends and nature-worship, ancestor-worship, totemism, polytheism, and idolatry begin, or to distinguish between a fetish, an idol, and a deity.

It includes conceptions which are purely magical, coercion of the supernatural by means of natural objects; and it also includes conceptions which persist into higher forms of religion, such as the worship of the symbol of an unseen power.

It is an early product of the primitive religious instinct of humanity, developing at a low grade of culture among a people of a highly imaginative temperament.

The fundamental religious feeling which is everywhere part of the mental equipment of man has been called by Marett supernaturalism, and is perhaps best indicated in English by the term awe, in which word are implicated fear, wonder, admiration, interest, respect, even love, perhaps. The object of this religious ‘sense,’ or, as many would call it, ‘instinct,’ is the supernatural. The recognition of the supernatural, the fundamental religious feeling of awe, develops in two ways. ‘There arises in the region of human thought a powerful impulse to objectify, and even personify, the mysterious or ‘supernatural’ something felt; and in the region of will a corresponding impulse to render it innocuous, or, better still, propitious, by force of constraint, communion, or conciliation’ (50, 168).

So man personifies the power which he cannot understand, calling it by names which we translate as spirit or god, and he worships it, propitiating and conciliating it by offerings and sacrifice, and entering into communion with it by prayer. Thus are produced the two fundamental factors of religion, the belief in some mysterious power, and the desire to enter into communication with the power by means of worship. The worship of different groups of peoples expresses itself in different ways, reflecting the mental type of the worshippers, their civilisation, their culture, their character and temperament.

The cold, practical, phlegmatic Northerners worship within bare walls, while the fervour of the imaginative South demands expression in an elaborate ritual, with richness of decoration, warmth of colour, dim lights and soft music.

The extraordinarily vivid imagination and the childlike capacity for ‘make-believe’ of the negro, load him further still; the lively fancy of the West African demands a visible object to which worship may be directed. He wishes really and sensibly to behold and even to possess his god, so he incorporates him in a tangible object, and satisfies his religious ardour by directing his worship to that object. Thus fetishism and the fetish are evolved.

FOOTNOTES

[1] _Philosophie Positive._

[2] _Historische Nachrichten zur Kenntniss der Menschen._

[3] For the references to the suggestive use of the word by Plautus, I am indebted to Miss Rachel White of Newnham College.

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