January 14, 1895.]

[Footnote 21: _Proceedings_, vi. 605, 606.]

[Footnote 22: _Proceedings_, S.P.R, part xxxiii. vol. xiii.]

[Footnote 23: Op. cit. part xxxiii. p. 406.]

[Footnote 24: See 'Fetishism.' Compare Callaway, p. 328.]

[Footnote 25: Callaway, pp. 361-374.]

[Footnote 26: _Cock Lane and Common Sense_, p. 66.]

[Footnote 27: Brough Smyth, i. 475. This point is disputed, but I did not
invent it, and a case appears in Mr. Curr's work on the natives.]

[Footnote 28: _Prim. Cult_. i. 152.]

[Footnote 29: Eusebius, _Prap. Evang_. v. 9.]

[Footnote 30: Brough Smyth, i. 100, 113.]

[Footnote 31: Kirk, _Secret Commonwealth_ 1691.]

[Footnote 32: Crantz, p. 209.]

[Footnote 33: Pere Arnaud, in Hind's _Labrador_, ii. 102.]

[Footnote 34: Major Swan, 1791, official letter on the Creek Indians,
Schoolcraft, v. 270.]

[Footnote 35: Crantz, p. 237.]

[Footnote 36: _Polynesian Researches_, i. 519.]

[Footnote 37: 1 Kings xviii. 42.]

[Footnote 38: Carver, pp. 123, 184.]

VIII

FETISHISM AND SPIRITUALISM

It has been shown how the doctrine of souls was developed according to the
anthropological theory. The hypothesis as to how souls of the dead were
later elevated to the rank of gods, or supplied models after which such
gods might be inventively fashioned, will be criticised in a later
chapter. Here it must suffice to say that the conception of a separable
surviving soul of a dead man was not only not essential to the savage's
idea of his supreme god, as it seems to me, but would have been wholly
inconsistent with that conception. There exist, however, numerous forms of
savage religion in addition to the creed in a Supreme Being, and these
contribute their streams to the ocean of faith. Thus among the kinds of
belief which served in the development of Polytheism, was Fetishism,
itself an adaptation and extension of the idea of separable souls. In this
regard, like ancestor-worship, it differs from the belief in a Supreme
Being, which, as we shall try to demonstrate, is not derived from the
theory of ghosts or souls at all.

_Fetish_ (_fetiche_) seems to come from Portuguese _feitico_, a talisman
or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects
regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious
reverence. These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of
incongruous reasons. They may be tokens, or may be of value in sympathetic
magic, or me