Fetichism is by no means confined to these ignorant barbarians. The curious in such matters can find ample traces of it in civilized life. Charms and amulets are popular among the common people everywhere. The horseshoe, which in a half-serious mood so many hang over their doors, is a fetich. The chestnut or potato, carried in the pocket as a cure for rheumatism, is another. All these objects, it is believed, exert some other than their known natural powers, and this shows that they are sur vivals of the fetichistie period of religious thought.
Certain natural objects, on account of some prominent peculiarities, have been selected with singular unanimity all over the world as objects of adoration in this sense. Such are trees, serpents, and birds. In the myths or cult of nearly every religion on the globe these will be found to reappear as objects possessing mysterious power and in some way con nected with the nature of divinity. The " tree of life " figures among those of the Garden of Eden in ancient Semitic records, and before they rose to a civilized condition the Accads of Mesopotamia gave to their chief city, afterward Babylon, the name "Place of the Tree of Life" (Lenormant). Painted on the sarcophagi of the Chaldees, it intimated the immortality of the soul; and the juice of its fruit was the magic bev erage which would stay the hand of death. Compare this with the wor ship of their sacred tree by the Abnakis of Maine. It stood by the sea shore, and its boughs were constantly laden with their offerings. They said it could never die, and was the good genius who granted them their wishes (Lafitau). Such examples could be quoted by scores.
The serpent and the bird must have first attracted attention by their singular powers of locomotion—one, without legs, upon the ground, the other through the air. Even wise King Solomon counted among the four matters which were too wonderful for him " the flight of an eagle through the air, the path of a serpent upon a rock ;" and to this day mathematics has not solved the problems of motion they present. The venomous bite of many serpents and the melodious voices of some birds increase the mys tery of their power. Hence everywhere we find them associated with the symbolism, and often constituting the centre, of religious life—sometimes representing the beneficent, at other times the maleficent, deities. Exam ples are so familiar that it is needless to quote any.
In all such cases it was the mere mystery that surrounded the object, not any effect that it had upon his life, that led man to select it for the object of his adoration. He witnessed the use of powers and faculties different from those he possessed; he knew not their nature or extent, and willingly supposed that they were far wider-reaching than his limited abilities.
Worship of Natural Forces.—But those writers who have asserted that fetichism is the exclusive form of the religion of the lower tribes have been misled by a superficial study of savage life. When the votary
fixes his attention no longer on the object itself, but on the influence which it exerts, he has advanced from fetichism to a recognition of natural forces, and has learned to esteem them as manifestations of the divine—a great stride. This advance is found among many, even the rudest, nations.
Perhaps the earliest as well as the most universally recognized of all such forces was 77:g-ht. The simplest myths, the most pristine rites, deify light, and surround it with countless holy associations. It is the har binger of the day, the father of the dawn. By it sight is made possible and men can ply their busy arts. It shows man his path through the forests and stimulates his observation and his reason. Therefore it was a universal god to the race; their imaginations were tasked to invent the myths of the conquest of day over night and of the coining of the dawn. From it arose the worship of the sun and fire, with their widespread asso ciations. They are both secondary to the light and merely its ministers.
Another great and ever-present mystery was the force of life, exempli fied in the reproduction of animal and vegetable organisms. This was too intimately connected with man's own existence and with some of the strongest impulses of his nature to escape his early contemplation. It led to those genesiac cults which recur with marked similarity of myth and ritual the world over. Arising from feelings and observations com mon to man everywhere, they naturally present close parallelisms, which by some have been supposed to point to the same historic origin. Fre quently their rites degenerated into licentious orgies, and to modern cul ture nothing could be more " irreligious " than their teachings and their artistic expressions. But they had no such debasing significance in primitive ages. The Pawnee woman, when she has planted her patch of corn, waits until the dusk of the evening has arrived, then strips herself and walks naked around the field, thus, she believes, imparting a share of her fecundity to the grains in the hills (Schoolcraft). So in ancient Greece, when the corn was sown, the house-master brought forth the image of the sacred phallus and bore it aloft over the fields, while his daughters and the maidens of his house danced around it and sang songs to the gods of the harvest. We may be sure that in neither case did a thought of impro priety enter the minds of the participants in these holy rites. In India, among the sixteen million worshippers of Siva, whose symbol is the lin gam, it is matter of record that unchastity is far less prevalent than among most sister sects of the Hindoo faiths (Fergusson). But when, as in " Babylon, mother of harlots," it was enjoined on every woman to yield herself, at least once in her life, for money to a stranger in the gar dens of the goddess Melitta, we see how certainly such a religion would lead to the depravation of woman, and with that to the degradation of the nation.