Here perhaps I may be allowed to tell what I know about this curious custom of Obeah, or Fetish-worship.  It appears to me, on closer examination, that it is not a worship of natural objects; not a primeval worship; scarcely a worship at all:  but simply a system of incantation, carried on by a priesthood, or rather a sorcerer class; and this being the case, it seems to me unfortunate that the term Fetish-worship should have been adopted by so many learned men as the general name for the supposed primeval Nature-worship.  The Negro does not, as the primeval man is supposed to have done, regard as divine (and therefore as Fetish, or Obeah) any object which excites his imagination; anything peculiarly beautiful, noble, or powerful; anything even which causes curiosity or fear.  In fact, a Fetish is no natural object at all; it is a spirit, an Obeah, Jumby, Duppy, like the ‘Duvvels’ or spirits of the air, which are the only deities of which our Gipsies have a conception left.  That spirit belongs to the Obeah, or Fetish-man; and he puts it, by magic ceremonies, into any object which he chooses.  Thus anything may become Obeah, as far as I have ascertained.  In a case which happened very lately, an Obeah-man came into the country, put the Obeah into a fresh monkey’s jaw-bone, and made the people offer to it fowls and plantains, which of course he himself ate.  Such is Obeah now; and such it was, as may be seen by De Bry’s plates, when the Portuguese first met with it on the African coast four hundred years ago.

But surely it is an idolatry, and not a nature-worship.  Just so does the priest of Southern India, after having made his idol, enchant his god into it by due ceremonial.  It may be a very ancient system:  but as for its being a primeval one, as neither I, nor any one else, ever had the pleasure of meeting a primeval man, it seems to me somewhat rash to imagine what primeval man’s creeds and worships must have been like; more rash still to conclude that they must have been like those of the modern Negro.  For if, as is probable, the Negro is one of the most ancient varieties of the human race; if, as is probable, he has remained—­to his great misfortune—­till the last three hundred years isolated on that vast island of Central Africa, which has probably continued as dry land during ages which have seen the whole of Europe, and Eastern and Southern Asia, sink more than once beneath the sea:  then it is possible, and even probable, that during these long ages of the Negro’s history, creed after creed, ceremonial after ceremonial, may have grown up and died out among the different tribes; and that any worship, or quasi-worship, which may linger among the Negroes now, are likely to be the mere dregs and fragments of those older superstitions.

As a fact, Obeah is rather to be ranked, it seems to me, with those ancient Eastern mysteries, at once magical and profligate, which troubled society and morals in later Rome, when