r door; or an Obeah bottle under their
doorstep; and either Brinvilliers in their pottage, or such an
expectation of it, and of plague and ruin to them and all their
worldly belongings, in their foolish souls, as would be likely
enough to kill them, in a few months, of simple mortal fear.

Here perhaps I may be allowed to tell what I know about this curious
custom of Obeah, or Fetish-worship. It appears to me, on closer
examination, that it is not a worship of natural objects; not a
primeval worship; scarcely a worship at all: but simply a system of
incantation, carried on by a priesthood, or rather a sorcerer class;
and this being the case, it seems to me unfortunate that the term
Fetish-worship should have been adopted by so many learned men as
the general name for the supposed primeval Nature-worship. The
Negro does not, as the primeval man is supposed to have done, regard
as divine (and therefore as Fetish, or Obeah) any object which
excites his imagination; anything peculiarly beautiful, noble, or
powerful; anything even which causes curiosity or fear. In fact, a
Fetish is no natural object at all; it is a spirit, an Obeah, Jumby,
Duppy, like the 'Duvvels' or spirits of the air, which are the only
deities of which our Gipsies have a conception left. That spirit
belongs to the Obeah, or Fetish-man; and he puts it, by magic
ceremonies, into any object which he chooses. Thus anything may
become Obeah, as far as I have ascertained. In a case which
happened very lately, an Obeah-man came into the country, put the
Obeah into a fresh monkey's jaw-bone, and made the people offer to
it fowls and plantains, which of course he himself ate. Such is
Obeah now; and such it was, as may be seen by De Bry's plates, when
the Portuguese first met with it on the African coast four hundred
years ago.

But surely it is an idolatry, and not a nature-worship. Just so
does the priest of Southern India, after having made his idol,
enchant his god into it by due ceremonial. It may be a very ancient
system: but as for its being a primeval one, as neither I, nor any
one else, ever had the pleasure of meeting a primeval man, it seems
to me somewhat rash to imagine what primeval man's creeds and
worships must have been like; more rash still to conclude that they
must have been like those of the modern Negro. For if, as is
probable, the Negro is one of the most ancient varieties of the
human race