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Updated: May 31, 2025
I do not forget that Negro sculptors have had to work in a very strict convention. They have been making figures of tribal gods and fetiches, and have been obliged meticulously to respect the tradition. But were not European Primitives and Buddhists similarly bound, and did they not contrive to circumvent their doctrinal limitations?
The common and characteristic mark of their superstition, is the system of Fetiches, by which an individual appropriates to himself some casual object as divine, and which, with respect to himself, by this process, becomes deified, and exercises a peculiar fatality over his fortune.
He had overcome great difficulties, of which the most significant was his own set of social fetiches, and he had learned his weaknesses by exercise of his strength. He had made new friends, and brought the old ones closer to him and this by virtue of honest plugging, and determination.
Fetiches and gri-gris were hung over his door, and in one of his huts there was a square stool, supported on two sides by four little wooden effigies of men. The character, manners, and costumes of the people of Borghoo differ essentially from those of the natives of Yarriba.
Now, as then, the solemn front of the Hill of Dreams still rises, dominating calmly the wide land, keeping watch always out over the plains for those who are to come, for that which is to be. Warden of destiny, it well might smile at any temples we may build, at any fetiches that we may offer up! Toward the Hill of Dreams Franklin journeyed, because it had been written.
The spirits of fetichism, according to Höffding, become eventually the gods of polytheism: such a spirit, so long as it is a fetich, is "the god of a moment," and must come to be permanent if it is to attain to the ranks of the polytheistic gods. But fetiches, even when their function becomes permanent, remain fetiches and do not become gods.
Finally, the kind's cortege comprised, in the last place, the court magicians and the instrumentalists. The sorcerers, the "mganngas," are the doctors of the country. These savages attach an absolute faith to divinatory services, to incantations, to the fetiches, clay figures stained with white and red, representing fantastic animals or figures of men and women cut out of whole wood.
To hold these views of the origin of the supernatural predicate of fetiches is not 'to take for granted that every human being was miraculously endowed with the concept of what forms the predicate of every fetich. Thus we need not be convinced by Mr. What, then, is the subjective element of religion in man? How has he become capable of conceiving of the supernatural?
Sunday was vaguely associated in his mind with such popular fetiches as a frock coat and a roast of beef; and if the roast had been absent from dinner, he would have felt precisely the same indefinite disquietude that troubled him when the sermon was left out of the service.
Finally, if, as Höffding believes, the word "god" originally meant "he who is worshipped," and gods are worshipped by the community, then fetiches, as they are nowhere worshipped by the community, are in no case gods. The function of the fetich is anti-social; of the gods, to promote the well-being of the community.
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