Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 8, 1897.djvu/164

 140 The Fetish View of the Human Soul.

no easy thing to understand Fetish : probably it can only be thoroughly done by a white whose mind is not a highly civilised one, and who is able to think black. I beg you will not think from my claiming this power I am making an idle boast ; for I have risked my life for months at a time on this one chance of my being able to know the way people were thinking round me, and of my being able to speak to them in a way that they would recognise as just, true and logical. Fetish is, when viewed from the outside, complex and strange ; but I think I may say it is very simple in its underlying idea, very logically thought out, and very reasonable to the particular make of mind possessed by those who believe in it; and you will soon see, when studying it at close quarters, that, given an animistic view of nature and that logical form of human mind possessed by the African, all those seemingly weird forms and ceremonies of Fetish are but necessary consequences — that, in fact, the religion has made the Fetish-priest and the witch-doctor, not they the religion they serve under.

There is a point that will strike you early in your investi- gation of Fetish; and that is that the African does not divide up the world, as many European and Asiatics seem to, into three divisions, God, man, and nature. To him there is no sharp division between. these things, they are parts of a great whole. Man is a very important part, he belongs to a very high order of spirits, but not to the highest ; for there are above and beyond his absolute control two classes — there is a great class equal to him — and lower than him in power there are many classes.

During my first study of Fetish in Africa itself in 1893, I recognised that, in order to gain a clear conception of Fetish, it would be necessary to gain a conception of the grades of the spirit-world of Fetish ; and, so far as I haye gone, I think, I may say fourteen classes of spirits are clearly discernible. I will not weary you with this matter. Dr. Nassau, of Gaboon, thinks the spirits commonly affect-