Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 23, 2025
As Hermann Usener has strikingly called it, it is 'the god of a moment." But though Professor Höffding adopts this definition of a fetich, it is obvious that the course of his argument requires us to understand it as subject to a certain limitation. His argument in effect is that fetichism is not polytheism, but something different, something out of which polytheism was evolved.
That, I take it, is the ultimate stage in the evolution, the fine flower, of fetichism. And it is not religion, it has no value as religion, or rather its value is anti-religious.
Egypt, notwithstanding an apparent kind of Fetichism, had very early metaphysical dogmas and a lofty symbolism. But doubtless these interpretations of a refined theology were not primitive.
To say that an emotional element also must be present is true; but neither will that serve to mark off fetichism from religion. Fetichism also is emotional in tone: it is in hope that the savage picks up the thing that may prove to have the fetich power; and it is with fear that he recognises his neighbour's suhman.
Is nothing said about the spirits of the dead and their cult in the Vedas? Much is said, of course. But, were it otherwise, then other elements of savage religion may also have been neglected there, and it will be impossible to argue that fetichism did not exist because it is not mentioned.
Africa is only now emerging from the basest fetichism; the negro priest is still a sorcerer and rain-maker. The Egyptian religion, as is well known, provided for the vulgar a suitable worship of complex idolatry, but for those emancipated from superstition it offered true and even noble conceptions.
In this connection it may be mentioned that there is a peculiar form of sexual perversion, called by Binet "fetichism," in which the subject displays a perverted taste for the odors of handkerchiefs, shoes, underclothing, and other articles of raiment worn by the opposite sex. Binet maintains that these articles play the part of the "fetich" in early theology.
Muller says that De Brosses 'holds that all nations had to begin with fetichism, to be followed afterwards by polytheism and monotheism. This sentence would lead some readers to suppose that De Brosses, in his speculations, was looking for the origin of religion; but, in reality, his work is a mere attempt to explain a certain element in ancient religion and mythology.
Ebrard himself, in summing up the results of these prolonged investigations, says: "We have nowhere been able to discover the least trace of any forward and upward movement from fetichism to polytheism, and from that again to a gradually advancing knowledge of the one God; but, on the contrary, we have found among all the peoples of the heathen world a most decided tendency to sink from an earlier and relatively purer knowledge of God toward something lower."
Scatalogy in Folk-lore. The Obscene as Derived from the Mythological. The Immature Sexual Impulse Tends to Manifest Itself in Scatalogic Forms. The Basis of Physiological Connection Between the Urinary and Genital Spheres. Urinary Fetichism Sometimes Normal in Animals. The Urolagnia of Masochists. The Scatalogy of Saints. Urolagnia More Often a Symbolism of Act Than a Symbolism of Object.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking