Fetishes, Charms, and Magic

88:3.1Fet­ish­ism ran through all the prim­i­tive cults from the ear­li­est be­lief in sa­cred stones, through idol­a­try, can­ni­bal­ism, and na­ture wor­ship, to to­tem­ism.

88:3.2To­tem­ism is a com­bi­na­tion of so­cial and re­li­gious ob­ser­vances. Orig­i­nally it was thought that re­spect for the totem an­i­mal of sup­posed bi­o­logic ori­gin in­sured the food sup­ply. Totems were at one and the same time sym­bols of the group and their god. Such a god was the clan per­son­i­fied. To­tem­ism was one phase of the at­tempted so­cial­iza­tion of oth­er­wise per­sonal re­li­gion. The totem even­tu­ally evolved into the flag, or na­tional sym­bol, of the var­i­ous mod­ern peo­ples.

88:3.3A fe­tish bag, a med­i­cine bag, was a pouch con­tain­ing a rep­u­ta­ble as­sort­ment of ghost-im­preg­nated ar­ti­cles, and the med­i­cine man of old never al­lowed his bag, the sym­bol of his power, to touch the ground. Civ­i­lized peo­ples in the twen­ti­eth cen­tury see to it that their flags, em­blems of na­tional con­scious­ness, like­wise never touch the ground.

88:3.4The in­signia of priestly and kingly of­fice were even­tu­ally re­garded as fe­tishes, and the fe­tish of the state su­preme has passed through many stages of de­vel­op­ment, from clans to tribes, from su­zer­ainty to sov­er­eignty, from totems to flags. Fe­tish kings have ruled by “di­vine right,” and many other forms of gov­ern­ment have ob­tained. Men have also made a fe­tish of democ­racy, the ex­al­ta­tion and ado­ra­tion of the com­mon man’s ideas when col­lec­tively called “pub­lic opin­ion.” One man’s opin­ion, when taken by it­self, is not re­garded as worth much, but when many men are col­lec­tively func­tion­ing as a democ­racy, this same mediocre judg­ment is held to be the ar­biter of jus­tice and the stan­dard of righ­teous­ness.