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Miss Kingsley, a lively, observant, and unprejudiced, though rambling writer, gives this very account of the Bantu races. Oblivion, or neglect, will show itself in leaving the Supreme Being alone, as he needs no propitiation, while devoting sacrifice and ritual to fetishes and ghosts.
Fetishism was thrown aside sooner than polytheism: for it was an expression not only inadequate but contradictory to the idea that gave it birth. The emotions of fear and suspicion, with which the community regarded fetishes, were emotions different from the awe or reverence with which the community approached its gods.
Max Muller had got as far as accepting Fontenelle; on pp. 197, 198 he burns, as it were, that to which he had 'gladly subscribed. Conclusion as to our Method All this discussion of fetishes arose out of our author's selection of the subject as an example of the viciousness of our method. Now, first, a method may be a good method, yet may be badly applied.
Again, Anthropology, while fixing her gaze on totems, on worshipped mummies, adored ghosts, and treasured fetishes, has not, to my knowledge, made a comparative study of the higher and purer religious ideas of savages. These have been passed by, with a word about credulous missionaries and Christian influences, except in the brief summary for which Mr. Tylor found room.
The theory which has hitherto been generally accepted by mythologists, even by those who profess Comte's great principle of historical evolution, is that man began with special fetishes, that these were combined in comprehensive types to form polytheistic hierarchies, and hence he rose by an analogous process to a more or less vague conception of monotheism.
In the pursuit of these, our path should wind, had we time to take the longest, among deserts and lands of darkness, phoenixes and griffins and sphinxes, human monsters, and more monstrous gods, the courts of Akbhar and Aurengzebe, palaces of the Mogul and the Kathayan Khan, pigmies, monkey-gods, mummies, Fakeers, dancing-girls, tattooed warriors, Thugs, cannibals, Fetishes, human sacrifices, and the Evil Eye, Chinese politeness, Bedouin honor, Bechuana simplicity, the plague, the amok, the bearding of lions, the graves of hero-travellers, flowers in the desert, and the universal tenderness of women.
Again, we have plainly shown that man, by the intrinsic reduplication of his psychical faculty, spontaneously retains and personifies the inward phantasm generated by such a projection of special natural objects on his perception. In the genesis of such fetishes, and also when, by an effort of will, he recalls them to his mind, this faculty with its constituent elements is brought into action.
These mythical ideas have their special reproduction in the mythology of the Finns. Thus we see that the process of myth is similar, even in different races. By the primitive personification of the special fetishes whence he was evolved, the Indra of Vedic India is shepherd of the herd of heavenly kine.
Among all historic and savage peoples it was the general practice to use exorcism by means of magic formulas and incantations, combined with the noise of rude instruments; this was part of the pathology, meteorology, and demonology which dated from the beginning of speech, and the first rude ideas of fetishes and spirits have persisted in various forms down to our days.
There is a jest nearly half a century old, and yet ever fresh and poignant. Why? Can it be that the secret, serious voice of mankind proclaims the jest truth in masquerade? Can it be that marriage, as an institution, has indeed proved itself in experience such a terrible failure? We worship many fetishes, we of the superior civilization, and the institution of marriage is the chief of them.
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