Religions of Primitive Peoples

by Daniel G. Brinton

This expression, universal in primitive conditions, is called fetishism, polytheism, and idolatry, the worship of stocks and stones. But I wish to impress upon you that nowhere in the world did man ever worship a stock or a stone, as such. Every fetish, be it a rag-baby or a pebble from the road-side, is adored, not as itself, but as possessing some mysterious, transcendental power, by which it can influence the future. In some obscure way it is the medium or agent of that supernatural Will, the recognition of which is at the basis of every religion.

The relation of the fetish to the spiritual power behind it, though everywhere recognised, was not easy to define. The Melanesians believe that the souls of the dead act through bones; while the independent spirits (vui) choose stones as their mediums; and they say that these objects are, as it were, limbs or members of these incorporeal powers.[152]

That the fetish itself is something else than the mere object, and is certainly not identified with it (as writers have often asserted), is evident from the words and actions of fetish worshippers. A South African negro offered food to a tree in the presence of an European traveller. The latter observed that a tree cannot eat. “Oh,” replied the negro, “tree not fetish. Fetish spirit; not seen; live in tree.”[153]

If a fetish does not bring good luck, it is thrown away, burned, or broken, as having lost its virtue, ceased to be the abode of power. One of efficacy, on the other hand, will bring a good price, and such are often sold and bought. Among the Papuans of New Guinea the fetishes are small wooden dolls dressed in coloured rags. They are believed to be the media through which the ancestral spirits operate. But if a man has bad luck, he will beat, or break, or cast away, as of no account, such an impotent object.[154]

These and scores of other examples which could be adduced disprove the assertion that man, even in his lowest phases of religious life, ever worshipped an object as an object. Even then, his intellectual insight penetrated to the recognition of something higher than phenomena in the world about him. As has been well said by a German writer, what is really worshipped in the object anywhere is not itself but “a transcendental x,” within and beyond it.[155]

It has been abundantly shown that amid the tribes of the West Coast of Africa, to whose gods the term fetish, feitiço, was first applied by the Portuguese, the recognition and worship of tribal and national divinities and even of a Supreme Being, ruler and creator of the world, are clearly displayed.[156]

The house of cards therefore, erected by Auguste Comte, to represent the religious progress of the race, the first floor of which was fetishism, the second polytheism, and the third monotheism, falls helplessly to the ground.

There is no real distinction between fetishism and idolatry, unless we choose to say that the latter refers to the worship of objects artificially shaped; but many fetishes are so likewise.

Nor can we say, with Professor Rialle, that fetishism confounds the unseen agent with the thing itself, while the idolatry of developed polytheism regards the agent as something exterior to the object, an independent existence.[157] For not only does fetishism recognise the power of the supernatural outside of all objects, but the idols of polytheism are unquestionably just as holy, just as much limbs of the gods, as the dolls of the Melanesians.

We cannot even take fetishism as a special form of the cult or external worship; for it goes hand in hand with every phase of objective religion. It is quite as prevalent now, in proportion to the general strength of the religious sentiment, as it ever was, and is visible in the sacredness which all sects of the highest religions attach to certain objects and places. When the Christian touches the bone of a saint that he may be healed of an infirmity, or when he speaks of his church edifice as “the house of God,” or when he packs in his trunk a Bible “for luck’s sake,” he is as much a fetish worshipper as the negro caboceer who collects around him a thousand pieces of rubbish because he thinks they have brought him good fortune.[158]