Fetishes, Charms, and Magic

88:0.1The con­cept of a spirit’s en­ter­ing into an inan­i­mate ob­ject, an an­i­mal, or a hu­man be­ing, is a very an­cient and hon­or­able be­lief, hav­ing pre­vailed since the be­gin­ning of the evo­lu­tion of re­li­gion. This doc­trine of spirit pos­ses­sion is noth­ing more nor less than fet­ish­ism. The sav­age does not nec­es­sar­ily wor­ship the fe­tish; he very log­i­cally wor­ships and rev­er­ences the spirit res­i­dent therein.

88:0.2At first, the spirit of a fe­tish was be­lieved to be the ghost of a dead man; later on, the higher spir­its were sup­posed to re­side in fe­tishes. And so the fe­tish cult even­tu­ally in­cor­po­rated all of the prim­i­tive ideas of ghosts, souls, spir­its, and de­mon pos­ses­sion.