Please help support the mission of New Advent and get the full contents of this website as an instant download. Fetishism means the religion of the fetish. Old English fetys in Chaucer. From facio are derived many words signifying idol, idolatry , or witchcraft.
Later Latin has facturari , to bewitch, and factura , witchcraft. The word was probably first applied to idols and amulets made by hand and supposed to possess magic power. In the early part of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese, exploring the West Coast of Africa, found the natives using small material objects in their religious worship. Every Congo leader has his m'kissi ; and in other tribes a word equivalent to "medicine" is used. He compared the phenomena observed in the negro worship of West Africa with certain features of the old Egyptian religion.
This comparison led Pietschmann to emphasize the elements of fetishism in the Egyptian religion by starting with its magic character. Basthold claimed as fetish "everything produced by nature or art, which receives divine honor, including sun, moon, earth, air, fire, water, mountains, rivers, trees, stones, images, animals, if considered as objects of divine worship".
Thus the name became more general, until Comte employed it to designate only the lowest stage of religious development. In this sense the term is used from time to time, e. Taking the theory of evolution as a basis, Comte affirmed that the fundamental law of history was that of historic filiation, that is, the Law of the Three States. Thus the human race , like the human individual, passed through three successive stages: the theological or imaginative , illustrated by fetishism, polytheism , monotheism ; the metaphysical or abstract, which differed from the former in explaining phenomena not by divine beings but by abstract powers or essences behind them; the positive or scientific, where man enlightened perceives that the only realities are not supernatural beings, e.
God or angels , nor abstractions, e. Under fetishism, therefore, he classed worship of heavenly bodies, nature-worship, etc. This theory is a pure assumption, yet a long time passed before it was cast aside.
