Fetish (fetiche) seems to come from Portuguese feitico, a talisman or amulet, applied by the Portuguese to various material objects regarded by the negroes of the west coast with more or less of religious reverence.  These objects may be held sacred in some degree for a number of incongruous reasons.  They may be tokens, or may be of value in sympathetic magic, or merely odd, and therefore probably endowed with unknown mystic qualities.  Or they may have been pointed out in a dream, or met in a lucky hour and associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons.  For our present purpose, as Mr. Tylor says, ’to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do habitually think this of such objects; or it must be shown that the object is treated as having personal consciousness or power, is talked with, worshipped...’ and so forth.  The in-dwelling spirit may be human, as when a fetish is made out of a friend’s skull, the spirit in which may even be asked for oracles, like the Head of Bran in Welsh legend.

We have tried to show that the belief in human souls may be, in part at least, based on supernormal phenomena which Materialism disregards.  We shall now endeavour to make it probable that Fetishism (the belief in the souls tenanting inanimate objects) may also have sources which perhaps are not normal, or which at all events seemed supernormal to savages.  We say ‘perhaps not normal’ because the phenomena now to be discussed are of the most puzzling character.  We may lean to the belief in a supernormal cause of certain hallucinations, but the alleged movements of inanimate objects which probably supply one origin of Fetishism, one suggestion of the presence of a spirit in things dead, leave the inquiring mind in perplexity.  In following Mr. Tylor’s discussion of the subject, it is necessary to combine what he says about Spiritualism in his fourth with what he says about Fetishism in his fourteenth and later chapters.  For some reason his book is so arranged that he criticises ‘Spiritualism’ long before he puts forward his doctrine of the origin and development of the belief in spirits.

We have seen a savage reason for supposing that human spirits inhabit certain lifeless things, such as skulls and other relics of the dead.  But how did it come to be thought that a spirit dwelt in a lifeless and motionless piece of stone or stick?  Mr. Tylor, perhaps, leads us to a plausible conjecture by writing:  ’Mr. Darwin saw two Malay women in Keeling Island, who held a wooden spoon dressed in clothes like a doll:  this spoon had been carried to the grave of a dead