Fetishes, Charms, and Magic

88:2.1It was a sup­posed pref­er­ence of ghosts to in­dwell some ob­ject which had be­longed to them when alive in the flesh. This be­lief ex­plains the ef­fi­cacy of many mod­ern relics. The an­cients al­ways revered the bones of their lead­ers, and the skele­tal re­mains of saints and heroes are still re­garded with su­per­sti­tious awe by many. Even to­day, pil­grim­ages are made to the tombs of great men.

88:2.2Be­lief in relics is an out­growth of the an­cient fe­tish cult. The relics of mod­ern re­li­gions rep­re­sent an at­tempt to ra­tio­nal­ize the fe­tish of the sav­age and thus el­e­vate it to a place of dig­nity and re­spectabil­ity in the mod­ern re­li­gious sys­tems. It is hea­then­ish to be­lieve in fe­tishes and magic but sup­pos­edly all right to ac­cept relics and mir­a­cles.

88:2.3The hearth—fire­place—be­came more or less of a fe­tish, a sa­cred spot. The shrines and tem­ples were at first fe­tish places be­cause the dead were buried there. The fe­tish hut of the He­brews was el­e­vated by Moses to that place where it har­bored a super­fe­tish, the then ex­is­tent con­cept of the law of God. But the Is­raelites never gave up the pe­cu­liar Ca­naan­ite be­lief in the stone al­tar: “And this stone which I have set up as a pil­lar shall be God’s house.” They truly be­lieved that the spirit of their God dwelt in such stone al­tars, which were in re­al­ity fe­tishes.

88:2.4The ear­li­est im­ages were made to pre­serve the ap­pear­ance and mem­ory of the il­lus­tri­ous dead; they were re­ally mon­u­ments. Idols were a re­fine­ment of fet­ish­ism. The prim­i­tives be­lieved that a cer­e­mony of con­se­cra­tion caused the spirit to en­ter the im­age; like­wise, when cer­tain ob­jects were blessed, they be­came charms.

88:2.5Moses, in the ad­di­tion of the sec­ond com­mand­ment to the an­cient Dala­ma­tian moral code, made an ef­fort to con­trol fe­tish wor­ship among the He­brews. He care­fully di­rected that they should make no sort of im­age that might be­come con­se­crated as a fe­tish. He made it plain, “You shall not make a graven im­age or any like­ness of any­thing that is in heaven above, or on the earth be­neath, or in the wa­ters of the earth.” While this com­mand­ment did much to re­tard art among the Jews, it did lessen fe­tish wor­ship. But Moses was too wise to at­tempt sud­denly to dis­place the olden fe­tishes, and he there­fore con­sented to the putting of cer­tain relics along­side the law in the com­bined war al­tar and re­li­gious shrine which was the ark.

88:2.6Words even­tu­ally be­came fe­tishes, more es­pe­cially those which were re­garded as God’s words; in this way the sa­cred books of many re­li­gions have be­come fetishis­tic pris­ons in­car­cer­at­ing the spir­i­tual imag­i­na­tion of man. Moses’ very ef­fort against fe­tishes be­came a su­preme fe­tish; his com­mand­ment was later used to stul­tify art and to re­tard the en­joy­ment and ado­ra­tion of the beau­ti­ful.

88:2.7In olden times the fe­tish word of au­thor­ity was a fear-in­spir­ing doc­trine, the most ter­ri­ble of all tyrants which en­slave men. A doc­tri­nal fe­tish will lead mor­tal man to be­tray him­self into the clutches of big­otry, fa­nati­cism, su­per­sti­tion, in­tol­er­ance, and the most atro­cious of bar­barous cru­el­ties. Mod­ern re­spect for wis­dom and truth is but the re­cent es­cape from the fe­tish-mak­ing ten­dency up to the higher lev­els of think­ing and rea­son­ing. Con­cern­ing the ac­cu­mu­lated fe­tish writ­ings which var­i­ous re­li­gion­ists hold as sa­cred books, it is not only be­lieved that what is in the book is true, but also that ev­ery truth is con­tained in the book. If one of these sa­cred books hap­pens to speak of the earth as be­ing flat, then, for long gen­er­a­tions, oth­er­wise sane men and women will refuse to ac­cept pos­i­tive ev­i­dence that the planet is round.

88:2.8The prac­tice of open­ing one of these sa­cred books to let the eye chance upon a pas­sage, the fol­low­ing of which may de­ter­mine im­por­tant life de­ci­sions or projects, is noth­ing more nor less than ar­rant fet­ish­ism. To take an oath on a “holy book” or to swear by some ob­ject of su­preme ven­er­a­tion is a form of re­fined fet­ish­ism.

88:2.9But it does rep­re­sent real evo­lu­tion­ary prog­ress to ad­vance from the fe­tish fear of a sav­age chief’s fin­ger­nail trim­mings to the ado­ra­tion of a su­perb col­lec­tion of let­ters, laws, leg­ends, al­le­gories, myths, po­ems, and chron­i­cles which, af­ter all, re­flect the win­nowed moral wis­dom of many cen­turies, at least up to the time and event of their be­ing as­sem­bled as a “sa­cred book.”

88:2.10To be­come fe­tishes, words had to be con­sid­ered in­spired, and the in­vo­ca­tion of sup­posed di­vinely in­spired writ­ings led di­rectly to the es­tab­lish­ment of the au­thor­ity of the church, while the evo­lu­tion of civil forms led to the fruition of the au­thor­ity of the state.