The transmigration of the human soul was first believed to take place in the body of a new-born child, since at the moment of death the soul of the dying person entered into the foetus.  The Algonquins buried the corpses of their children by the wayside, so that their souls might easily enter into the bodies of the pregnant women who passed that way.  Some of the North American tribes believed that the mother saw in a dream the dead relation who was to imprint his likeness on her unborn child.  At Calabar, when the mother who has lost a child gives birth to another, she believes that the dead child is restored to her.  The natives of New Guinea believe that a son who greatly resembles his dead father has inherited his soul.  Among the Yorubas the new-born child is greeted with the words:  “Thou hast returned at last!” The same ideas prevail among the Lapps and Tartars, as well as among the negroes of the West Coast of Africa.  Among the aborigines of Australia the belief is widely diffused that those who die as black return as white men.

Primitive and ignorant peoples perceive no precise distinction between man and brutes, so that, as Tylor observes, they readily accept the belief of the transmigration of the human soul into an animal, and then into inanimate objects, and this belief culminates in the incarnation of the true fetish.  Among some of the North American tribes the spirits of the dead are supposed to pass into bears.  An Eskimo widow refused to eat seal’s flesh because she supposed that her husband’s soul had migrated into that animal.  Others have imagined that the souls of the dead passed into birds, beetles, and other insects, according to their social rank when still alive.  Some African tribes believe that the dead migrate into certain species of apes.

By pursuing this theory, as we shall presently show more fully, the transition was easy to the incarnation of a spirit, whether that of a man or of some other being, into any object whatever, which was thereby invested with beneficent or malignant power.  It is easy to show that in this second stage of fetishism, which some have believed to be the primitive form of myth, there would be no further progress in the mythical elaboration of spirits, their mode of life, their influence and possible transmigrations.  This elaboration is indeed a product of the mythical faculty, but in a rational order; it is a logical process, mythical in substance, but purely reflective in form.  For which reason it was impossible for animals to attain to this stage.

Some peoples remained in this phase of belief, while others advanced to the ulterior and polytheistic form.  This may also be divided into two classes; those who classify and ultimately reduce fetishes into a more general conception, and those whose conception takes an anthropomorphic form.  Let us examine the genesis of both classes.