Thou shalt not go too lightly to thy God,
But heavy with full sheaves. (Text.)
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FETISHISM
Miss F. M. Dennis writes from Ebu Owerri, a place about seventy miles southeast of Onitsha, North Africa:
It is a custom in this Ibo country when a child is born for the parents to go into the bush, cut a stick from a tree and plant it. When the child is old enough to walk and know anything it worships this young tree. All the Ibo people have them. But until the child comes to man’s estate and has a household, this is the only idol he has.
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The negroes of the Gold and Slave Coasts, like every other people low in the stage of civilization, believe that inanimate, as well as animate, objects have souls or ghosts, a belief which is proved by the practise of burying arms, implements, utensils, etc., for the use of the dead in Dead-land, and there continues the former pursuit of the man, using the souls or ghosts of the weapons buried with him; but the negroes have gone beyond this, and just as they believe man to possess a third element, or indwelling spirit, so do they believe that every natural object, everything not made by human hands, has, in addition to its soul or ghost, a third element of spiritual individuality. They hold that just as, when the man dies, the kra of the man enters a new-born child, and the soul, or ghost-man, goes to Dead-land; so, when the tree dies, the kra, so to speak, of the tree enters a seedling, and the ghost-tree goes to join the ranks of the shadowy forest in Dead-land. And it is these animating or spiritual tenants of natural objects and natural features that the negro fears and consequently worships.—A. B. Ellis, The Popular Science Monthly.
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Fetters Worn for Others—See [Hardship Vicariously Borne].