Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 18, 2025
"Frequently," says the President de Brosses, who was at Rome during the conclave which elected Benedict XIV. in 1740, in the charming published volume of his letters "Frequently at the accessit everything which was done at the preceding ceremony is reversed; and it is at the accessit that the most subtle strokes of policy are practiced.
This work has been translated into English. The travels of De Brosses and Barthelemi were performed in the middle of the eighteenth century. Voyage dans le Montaniata et le Siennois. Par G. Santi. Lyons, 1802. 2 vols. 8vo. This work, translated from the Italian, relates to mineralogy, botany, agriculture, and statistics. Voyage sur la Scène des six derniers livres de L'Eneide.
But De Brosses is distinctly scientific when he attempts to explain the animal- worship of Egypt, and the respect paid by Greeks and Romans to shapeless stones, as survivals of older savage practices. The position of De Brosses is this: Old mythology and religion are a tissue of many threads. Sabaeism, adoration of the dead, mythopoeic fancy, have their part in the fabric.
De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought the word fetishism into use as a term for the type of religion of the lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been applied by Comte and other writers to the worship of the heavenly bodies and of the great features of nature.
It is difficult to conceive how Burney could have expressed such an opinion, unless he was led to that conclusion by some errors in Callender's translations. There is, in fact, a passage having reference to the descriptions of the head-dress worn by the native women, in which the Scotch geographer has given the following version of Des Brosses' original:
After Des Brosses, we are ready for Henri Beyle, and Ampere, and Hillard, and About, and Gallenga, and Julia Kavanagh; "Corinne" only makes us hungry for George Sand. That no one can tell us anything new is as undeniable as the compensating fact that no one can tell us anything too old.
Portugal, beginning nearly five hundred years ago, had the honor of sending the first ships and crews to explore the coasts of Africa and Asia, and her sailors by this word, now Englished as fetich, described the native charms or talismans. The word "fetichism" came into the European languages through the work of Charles de Brosses, who, in 1760, wrote on "Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches."
Modern writers on the theme had been anticipated by the less systematic students of the eighteenth century Goguet, de Brosses, Millar, Fontenelle, Lafitau, Boulanger, or even Hume and Voltaire. As pioneers these writers answer to the early mesmerists and magnetists, Puységur, Amoretti, Ritter, Elliotson, Mayo, Gregory, in the history of Psychical Research.
We need not linger over the names of other writers, who indeed are now little more than mere shadows of names, such as La Condamine, a scientific traveller of fame and merit in his day and generation; of Du Marsais, the poverty-stricken and unlucky scholar who wrote articles on grammar; of the President Des Brosses, who was unfortunate enough to be in the right in a quarrel about money with Voltaire, and who has since been better known to readers through the fury of the provoked patriarch, than through his own meritorious contributions to the early history of civilisation.
Max Muller will not look at religion in this way. Mr. Max Muller's remarks on 'Zoolatry, as De Brosses calls it, or animal- worship, require only the briefest comment. De Brosses, very unluckily, confused zoolatry with other superstitions under the head of Fetichism. This was unscientific; but is it scientific of Mr. Max Muller to discuss animal-worship without any reference to totemism?
Word Of The Day
Others Looking