the history of religions

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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: power." So spittle is mingled with a goat's blood for sacrifice and is curative. Bone, blood, and grave-dust commingled make " medicine " to harm a foe and is buried under his threshold. Toe-nails and bones of European saints still conserve a similar power, but not quite the same; for the saint's mana was a general power, not sub-divided into souls as separate powers. AFRICAN RELIGION. II. FETISH AND IDOL Fetishism is not a religion but the expression of a mental attitude. Fear and hope sway man. Taboo is the religious expression of fear; fetishism, of hope. Applied originally to the talismans of Portuguese sailors, the word fetish1 means a charm to bring luck. Many writers use the word loosely to indicate any material object from which, like a mascot, the savage expects good luck; but properly a fetish is portable and it is unlike a mascot in that it possesses power and will to bless. Hence it is coddled, abused, prayed to and stormed at, exactly as one would treat a recalcitrant spirit who may or may not aid. But at this point there is a very general error to be corrected. All the scholars of the animistic school say that a fetish contains a spirit. On the contrary, the primitive fetish is itself a quasi-personified power or potency. It is a spiritual power; it does not contain a spirit. The object itself, even when a collection of objects, has, as a whole, volition. It is almost impossible for the savage not to impart will to anything which appears to be an entity. Even his monda, which is apparently an unconscious object, is treated, like the grisgris, joujou, mokissos, as a conscious volitive power. Even when the fetish will not work and is abandoned, it36 THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS 1 Literally factitious, feitifo (fetish) was the sailor's own amulet, and by him ...
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Unknown

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1478128070

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