III.] THE AFRICAN NEGRO : I. SUDANESE. 57 



On the contrary it represents rather an advanced stage, as 

 Ellis discovered after four or five years of careful observation on 

 the spot. A fetish, he tells us, is something tangible and inani- 

 mate, which is believed to possess power in itself, and is wor- 

 shipped for itself alone. Nor can such an object be picked up 

 anywhere at random, as is commonly asserted, and he adds that 

 the belief " is arrived at only after considerable progress has been 

 made in religious ideas, when the older form of religion becomes 

 secondary and owes its existence to the confusion of the tangible 

 with the intangible, of the material with the immaterial ; to the 

 belief in the indwelling god being gradually lost sight of until the 

 power originally believed to belong to the god, is finally attributed 

 to the tangible and inanimate object itself." 



But now comes a statement that may seem paradoxical to 

 most students of the evolution of religious ideas. We are assured 

 that fetishism thus understood is not specially or at all character- 

 istic of the religion of the Gold Coast natives, who are in fact 

 "remarkably free from it" and believe in invisible intangible 

 deities. Some of them may dwell in a tangible inanimate object, 

 popularly called a "fetish"; but the idea of the indwelling god is 

 never lost sight of, nor is the object ever worshipped for its own 

 sake. True fetishism, the worship of such material objects and 

 images, prevails, on the contrary, far more " amongst the Negroes 

 of the West Indies, who have been christianised for more than 

 half-a-century, than amongst those of West Africa. Hence the 

 belief in Obeah, still prevalent in the West Indies, which formerly 

 was a belief in indwelling spirits which inhabited certain objects, 

 has now become a worship paid to tangible and inanimate objects, 

 which of themselves are believed to possess the power to injure. 

 In Europe itself we find evidence amongst the Roman Catholic 

 populations of the South, that fetishism is a corruption of a former 

 culte, rather than a primordial faith. The lower classes there 

 have confused the intangible with the tangible, and believe that 

 the images of the saints can both see, hear and feel. Thus we find 

 the Italian peasants and fishermen beat and ill-treat their images 

 when their requests have not been complied with.... These appear 

 to be instances of true fetishism 1 ." 



1 The Tshi-speaking Peoples, ch. XII. p. 194 and passim. 



