Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/163

 The Fetish View of the Human Soul. 139

It is impossible for me in the time at my disposal to speak with anything like fullness of this great form of religion — Fetish. But I must detain you a few minutes to explain what I mean by Fetish ; for the word now-a-days is getting very loosely used in England, and I now and again come across it applied to cases of sympathetic magic.

When the Portuguese early navigators — under the patron- age of Henry the Navigator — re-discovered the West Coast of Africa in the early part of the fifteenth century, they found, as you will find in the latter part of the nineteenth century, the natives using in their religious exercises numbers of material objects. These the Portuguese called Feitigo; and from this word comes our word Fetish. There is another name for this religion sometimes used in the place of Fetish, namely, Ju Jm. The origin of this word is by no means so clear as that of Fetish, some authorities holding it comes irom grou-grou^ which they say is a native word, but which natives say is a "white-man-word," and so on. I believe it has a similar history to Fetish, and that Ju Ju comes from the French word for a doll or ioy—jou-jou. For the French claim to have visited the West African Coast before the Portuguese, namely, in the latter part of the fourteenth century ; and, whether this claim can be sustained or no, the French were certainly on the West Coast pretty frequently in the fifteenth ; and no doubt called the little objects they saw the natives valuing so strangely, jou-j'ou, as I have heard many a Frenchman do in my time. Now I merely beg to explain that when I say Fetish or Ju Ju, I mean the religion of the natives of West Africa. I am not a comparative ethnologist, so I do not pretend to express an opinion about Fetish being a universally diffused form of religion, and so on. It is not necessary for me as a student of Fetish to look up what people do in other parts of the world besides West Africa, in order to understand what they mean by what they do in West Africa, for there is all the material there at hand. All that is necessary is the ability to understand it. It is, I own,