Note 78 — Chapter I

This was perceived by the President de Brosses, a savant with few advantages but a bold and inquiring spirit, to whom the language is indebted for the use of the term fetishism as a name for a definite state of religious conception. We can still read with interest the book which he published anonymously in 1760, under the title: Du Culte des Dieux fétiches; ou, Parallèle de l'Ancienne Religion de l'Égypte avec la Religion actuelle de Nigritie (12mo). The study of the fetish elements of the Egyptian religion has been resumed lately with competent knowledge and talent by a German egyptologist, Herr Pietschmann, in an essay which appeared in 1878 in the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, which is published in Berlin under the direction of M. Virchow. It is called Der Ægyptische Fetischdienst und Götterglaube—Prolegomena zur Ægyptischen Mythologie (28 pp. 8vo). A great many judicious observations and curious facts are to be found in it; the realistic and materialistic character of the Egyptian conceptions are very well grasped; it is perhaps to be regretted that the author has not endeavoured to make the creeds to which he gives this name of fétichisme somewhat clearer, and to show by what workings of the mind they were adopted and abandoned. With regard to the Egyptian religion, we shall find treated, in the excellent Manuel de l'Histoire des Religions, by Tiele, which M. Maurice Vernes has just translated from the Dutch (1 vol. 12mo, Ernest Leroux, 1880), views much the same as those which we have just described. The author denominates the religious state which we call fetishism animism, but he points out the fact that this class of conceptions had a perennial influence over the Egyptian mind. "The Egyptian religion," he says, "like the Chinese, was nothing to begin with but an organised animism." He finds traces of this animism in the worship of the dead, the deification of the kings, and the adoration of animals. From his point of view the custom of placing a symbol of the divinity rather than an image in the temple, must be traced to fetishism (pp. 44 and 45 of the French version).