who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll:
this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead man, and becoming
inspired at full moon, in fact lunatic, it danced about convulsively, like
a table or a hat at a modern spirit seance.'[1] Now M. Lefebure has
pointed out (in 'Melusine') that, according to De Brosses, the African
conjurers gave an appearance of independent motion to small objects, which
were then accepted as fetishes, being visibly animated. M. Lefebure
next compares, like Mr. Tylor, the alleged physical phenomena of
spiritualism, the flights and movements of inanimate objects apparently
untouched.

The question thus arises, Is there any truth whatever in these world-wide
and world-old stories of inanimate objects acting like animated things?
Has fetishism one of its origins in the actual field of supernormal
experience in the X region? This question we do not propose to answer,
as the evidence, though practically universal, may be said to rest on
imposture and illusion. But we can, at least, give a sketch of the nature
of the evidence, beginning with that as to the apparently _voluntary_
movements of objects, _not_ untouched. Mr. Tylor quotes from John Bell's
'Journey in Asia' (1719) an account of a Mongol Lama who wished to
discover certain stolen pieces of damask. His method was to sit on a
bench, when 'he carried it, or, as was commonly believed, it carried him,
to the very tent' of the thief. Here the bench is innocently believed to
be self-moving. Again, Mr. Rowley tells how in Manganjah the sorcerer, to
find out a criminal, placed, with magical ceremonies, two staffs of wood
in the hands of some young men. 'The sticks whirled and dragged the men
round like mad,' and finally escaped and rolled to the feet of the
wife of a chief, who was then denounced as the guilty person.[2]

Mr. Duff Macdonald describes the same practice among the Yaos:[3]

'The sorcerer occasionally makes men take hold of a stick, which, after a
time, begins to move as if endowed with life, and ultimately carries them
off bodily and with great speed to the house of the thief.'

The process is just that of Jacques Aymard in the celebrated story of the
detection of the Lyons murderer.[4]

In Melanesia, far enough away, Dr. Codrington found a similar practice,
and here the sticks are explicitly said by the natives to be moved by
_spirits_.[5] The wizard and a friend hold a bamboo stick by each end, and
ask what man's g