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Updated: June 27, 2025
From these beliefs and facts, drawn from different peoples and different parts of the world, we can understand how a vague and inorganic fetishism gradually became classified into types which constitute the first phase of polytheism.
In that case, religion would forsake the line of polytheism, as it had previously abandoned that of fetishism. A certain presumption that myths tend to the degradation of religion is created by the mere use of the term 'mythology. It has come to be a dyslogistic term, partly because all myths are lies, but still more because some of them are ignoble lies.
So far as we can judge, the primitive form of fetishism left but feeble traces in the religion of civilized Chaldæa and Assyria.
Such a complex elaboration takes time, since it involves a previous creation of powers, spirits or the shades of men; these lead to the belief in independent spirits of various origin, which people the heavens and all parts of the world. Hence arose the belief in transmigration, the necessary prelude to the theory of the incarnation, which was ultimately constituted by fetishism.
For five troubled years he had been staring religion in the face, and now he saw that it must mean this or be no more than fetishism, Obi, Orphic mysteries or ceremonies of Demeter, a legacy of mental dirtiness, a residue of self-mutilation and superstitious sacrifices from the cunning, fear-haunted, ape-dog phase of human development. But it did mean this.
We shall encounter this type again when we come to speak of Cappadocia. Demons; from the palace of Assurbanipal at Kouyundjik. British Museum. This belief in spirits is the second phase that the primitive religion, which we studied in Egypt under the name of fetishism or animism, has to pass through. In the beginning mere existence is confounded with life.
The religion of Africa is the universal animism or fetishism of primitive peoples, rising to polytheism and approaching monotheism chiefly, but not wholly, as a result of Christian and Islamic missions. Of fetishism there is much misapprehension. It is not mere senseless degradation. It is a philosophy of life.
Arising, like all other kinds of knowledge, and out of the action and interaction of man's mind, with that which is not man's mind, it has taken the intellectual coverings of Fetishism or Polytheism; of Theism or Atheism; of Superstition or Rationalism.
But how does the unscientific conduct attributed to De Brosses implicate the modern anthropologist? Sometimes the so-called fetish had an accidental, which was taken to be a causal, connection with a stroke of good luck. 'Telekinetic' Origin of Fetishism As I write comes in Melusine, viii. 7, with an essay by M. Lefebure on Les Origines du Fetichisme.
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.
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