So the fetish consists of a queer-shaped stone, a bright bead, a stick, parrots’ feathers, a root, claw, seed, bone, or any curious or conspicuous object.
In Benin they take everything which seems extraordinary in nature for a god, and make offerings to him, and each is his own priest, in order to worship his gods in what manner pleases him best ([54, xvi. 530]).
Or the object may have attracted attention by its behaviour.
A visitor to a fetish hut took up a stone about as big as a hen’s egg, and its owner told its history. ‘He was once going out on important business, but crossing the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt himself. Ha, ha! thought he, art thou here? So he took the stone, and it helped him through his undertaking for days’ ([71, ii. 158]).
Sometimes the object to be chosen is revealed to a man in a dream, as among the natives of the Gold Coast, where a dead relation will return to direct a man to go to a certain spot and there select a certain stone, or piece of a tree, which he is to bring home with him, and guard and reverence as the habitation of a protecting deity ([15, 90]).
This connects the fetish with the guardian spirits of the North American Indians, which appear to young men in dreams, or visions, after prayer and fasting. The vision generally takes the form of some tangible object, often an animal, a portion of which is preserved by the man as his most precious possession, and if not, some concrete form is taken to represent the subject of the vision. A guardian spirit differs, however, from a fetish, in that it is a life-long possession, some men are not privileged to obtain one, and no man could possess more than one; while any man could obtain a fetish, and could discard one and adopt another if it proved to be unavailing.
2. It consists of a symbolic charm with sympathetic properties. ‘There is a relation between the selected substances and the object to be obtained: to give the possessor bravery or strength, some part of a leopard or an elephant; to give cunning, some part of a gazelle; to give wisdom, some part of a human brain; to give courage, some part of a heart; to give influence, some part of an eye,’ etc. etc. ‘These substances are supposed to lure some spirit (being in some way pleasing to it) which thenceforward is satisfied to reside in them and to aid the possessor in the accomplishment of some specific wish’ ([53, 82]).
For convenience of carriage these substances are put into snail-shells, nut-shells, or the small horns of gazelles, or of goats, and the whole then forms the fetish.
Bosman describes the way in which a fetish, consisting of a pipe filled with various substances, was generally made on the Guinea Coast in 1705.
‘They have a great wooden pipe filled with earth, oil, blood, bones of dead men and beasts, feathers, hair, and to be short, all sorts of excrementitious and filthy trash, which they do not endeavour to mould into any shape, but lay it in a confused heap in the pipe’ ([54, xvi. 398]).