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Updated: July 27, 2025
Crucifixes are used as potent fetish charms or as symbols of power passing down from chief to chief; whilst every native has a "Santu" or Christian name and is dubbed dom or dona. Fetishism is the prevailing religion throughout the province.
During this era of decomposition there will commence the reconstruction of human opinion on new and more solid foundations; and the transition from Monotheism to Positive Science will be the greatest achievement of the race, greater far than the advancement from Fetishism to Polytheism, or even from Polytheism to Monotheism itself.
As in man the reflex power slowly and gradually grows although at first in an exclusively empirical form so he slowly and gradually accepts the first form of fetishism, which consists in the permanent and fixed individuation of a phenomenon or object of nature, as a power which he reflectively believes to be the artificer of good or evil.
Grouping, then, his facts under the dubious title of le magnetisme, M. Lefebure finds in savage observation of such facts 'the chief cause of fetishism. But probably Major Ellis's researches into the religion of the Tshi-speaking races throw most light on the real ideas of African fetishists. The subject is vast and complex.
If they were born mediocre and servile, even genius became mediocre in its passage through their souls, and the shout of freedom of the hero breaking his bonds became the act of slavery of succeeding generations. Christophe could mot refrain from expressing his feelings. He let no opportunity slip of jeering at fetishism in art.
He would have seen that "the positive explanation of phenomena has played in every period a preponderant role, though latent, in the march of the human mind." The gravest weakness perhaps in his historical sketch is the gratuitous assumption that man in the earliest stage of his existence had animistic beliefs and that the first phase of his progress was controlled by fetishism.
Pigmy and misshapen gods belong to that fetishism which has always had charms for the Hamitic nations; and it may be suspected that the Phoenicians adopted the Cabeiri from their Canaanite predecessors, who were of the race of Ham. The connection between these pigmy deities and the Egyptian Phthah, or rather Phthah-Sokari, is unmistakable, and was perceived by Herodotus.
M. Comte conceives that the religious spirit has been steadily decreasing throughout the whole course of human development, from the time when it was universal, in the form of Fetishism, till it reached its most abstract, but least influential form in Monotheism; and that now the period of its decline and fall has arrived, when it is subjected to the powerful solvent of a Metaphysical and Skeptical Philosophy, and when its ultimate extinction is certain under the action of Positive Science.
It is evident that fetishism in its earliest and most primitive form was always inspired by special objects, since the external perception of animals and of man is special and concrete.
Max Muller, in his Lectures on the Origin of Religion page 59, stated that De Brosses coined three valuable words, "fetishism," "Polynesia," and "Australia." He certainly did not originate the word Australia, which does not occur anywhere in his book.
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