Fetichism, the worship of a fetich, or more strictly the belief that the possession of a thing can procure the services of a spirit lodged within it. The fetich is an object capable of being appropriated by an individual, and counted as animate and conscious. We find fetichism flourishing not only in Africa, but among the natives of both Americas, the Polynesians, Australians, and Siberians, and indeed in the lower strata of all known civilisations. The word itself is ultimately due to the Portuguese, the first Europeans to trade on the west coast of Africa, who expressed their conception of the religion of the natives by the Portuguese word feitição, 'magic'; but it received its currency through the medium of the French, the well-known treatise of Charles de Brosses, Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches (Dijon, 1760), having carried the word over Europe. Comte used it as a term to describe what he believed to be a necessary stage in the development of all religions in which all external bodies, natural or artificial, are supposed to be animated by souls essentially analogous to our own. Sir John Lubbock's definition of fetichism is closer to its modern scientific sense—'that stage of religious thought in which man supposes he can force the deities to comply with his desires.' He makes it the next stage in the ascent of religion from pure atheism through totemism and shamanism into idolatry. But it is impossible to admit this transition from fetichism to idolatry, because the latter necessarily implies the superiority of the god over the man; the former, on the contrary, the superiority of the man over the god. Idolatry is properly the worship paid to an image which is taken to be the usual or merely temporary abode of a superhuman personality. Mr Tylor's definition—'the doctrine of spirits embodied in, or attached to, or conveying influence through certain material objects'—includes the meaning, but is not expressed with his usual exactness and point.
Fetichism may be said to be primitive when man, personifying everything around him, chooses among these imaginary personalities an object capable of being appropriated to himself, the spirit of which becomes his protector or his slave. Again, that may be called secondary fetichism which implies belief in the incorporation of a spirit in some object chosen as a fetich, either by a simple act of spontaneous choice or through a magical operation. The latter is far more widespread than the former, and obviously presupposes a belief in animism in Mr Tylor's sense of the word. Any object may become a fetich, provided only it is capable of being appropriated literally or metaphorically by an individual. Such objects are flints, shells, claws, feathers, earth, salt, plants, manufactured articles, anything peculiar or unknown or not understood, trees, streams, rocks, and even certain animals, as the serpents of Whlydah. All savage thinking is of course based on fancied analogies, and it is quite enough for an object to be accidentally associated with an event for it to be regarded as the cause and even the author of that event, whence its elevation to the rank of a fetich. Again, fetiches are attached to individuals, to families, or to tribes, and it is even not unusual to see them beaten and kicked as a warning when they have failed to bring the luck that was expected. Even in the crooked sixpences which we carry in our purses, and in the luck-tokens of our gamesters, there is something more than an analogy to the fetich of the savage.
See ANIMISM; Fr. Schultze, Der Fetichismus (Leip. 1871); Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der niederen Naturvölker (ib. 1880); Bastian, Der Fetisch an der Küste
Guineas (Berlin, 1884); Baudin, Fétichisme et Féticheurs (Lyons, 1884); and A. B. Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast: their Religion, &c. (1887).