the Creeks, the -llbordinate Sea-godS of tile latter, etc.
I i i Abstract notions personified, which presuppose the tendency to give full personality to real objects. Ex- amples of these are furnished by the Creek religion, I liermis and Dike, personified law and justice ;
Metis, Mnemosyne, Thanatos, the daunons of battle J
and a great number in the theogony of Hesiod. The Roman religion is full of vague, misty shapes floating
between reality and abstraction, -neb as Pavor and
Pallor, to whom in a battle the third king of Koine vowed to erect shrine-: Honor and Virtus. Pax and Victoria, to the two las) of whom Important temples were built in the later days ,,f Roman history. (5) The personified force- of inanimate nature. Here, as in the case of the abstractions just now mentioned, the cause "i' force was conceived of a- an agent. Tim- the wind-, especially Boreas, were more or less worshipped : and the same i- true of volcanic or other Bubterranean phenomena. In India, and even anion; our Red men, a -imil n- kind of nature-w or-hip prevail- ed : iii -.'in. of the North American Indian tribes the
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north-west wind attained to a high rank among the divinities, was confounded even with the Great Spirit, and played quite an important role in the mythologies. (G) Evil, that is malevolent, spirits, had a place in some religions of the more cultivated races, but in general not a very important place, nor were they worshipped except by way of propitiation. Such were the rakskas of India, the dcvvas of Iran, the god Typhon of Egypt, the larvcc and lemures of Roman superstition — the former of whom were bad spirits of departed men, and scarcely to be distinguished from the latter, to whom the propi- tiatory rites of the Lemuria on the ninth of May were offered. (7) Finally we mention certain house-spirits, who may be included under (3) as the attendants of family gods, such as the Roman Vesta. Such were the penates, the spirits presiding over the penus or the fam- ily stores and inner part of the houses of the Romans ; and the lares, protectors of the house, the cross-road, etc. Such, too, may have been the ttraphim of Scrip- ture, or rather the beings represented by the teraphim, a kind of family gods answering somewhat to the pro- tecting saints of the Roman Catholic Church.
We have come in the course of our subject to the religions of the uncultivated races, a department of the religions of mankind, where it is difficult to solve all the problems or to get upon entirely satisfactory ground. These religions have been divided, as by W'uttke (Gesch. d. lleidenth. vol. i.), into feiichi&m and shamanism ; but as authors differ greatly in the mean- ing which they attach to the first of these words, and as what is called shamanism ma}' be found everywhere, we cannot make much headway in our subject by the help of these words. We shall come upon fetich- ism again when we speak of worship ; at present we content ourselves with saying that a fetich, as first used by Des Brosses in his Essai sur It Culte des Dleux Fetiches (1760), signified any object, however worthless, in which a god or spirit was supposed for the time to reside, and which might be used as a pre- servative against evil or malignant influences. The word — in the Portuguese form ftitico, connected with the Italian Jaitizio, made by art, from the Latin facticius — denoted a charm, or object employed as a charm ; and it was used to set forth a striking characteristic of the religions of Western Africa with which the Portuguese at an early day came into contact. Wuttke (u. s.), after Stuhr, in his Relitj',vns Si/ items of the Heathen Peoples of the East (Berlin, 1836, p. 257)* regards a/e- . tich as an outward object of worship, selected at will or by accident. The fetich-worshipper chooses and discards, according to a freak, the object in which his divinity is supposed to lodge. To use Wuttke's lan- guage, while in sun or star worship the heavenly body says to the man, "I am thy god," the worship- per of a fetich says to the worshipped object, "thou mayest be, I will permit thee to lie, my god"(f<. s. vol. i, § 36). Others, as Meiners (Allff. Geschichte d. Religion [Hanover, 1806], vol. i, bk. ii) and J. G. Miiller (Amer. Urrelig. p. 74, 75), regard the fetich as in the belief of the worshipper a divine essence ; not a symbol of divin- ity, but, like the sun or moon, a god. The fetich-wor- shipper carries his subdivision of nature, which is di- vine to the rude heathen, further down than the higher races do; he worships man}7 worthless objects. These definitions are not satisfactory to us, nor do they point out any generic difference between the fetich- worshipper and the worshipper of an image of Athene Polius by a principal artist of Greece. For (1) if the fetich were a precious thing in itself, doubtless the Ne- gro would be constant in the respect he paid it. The selection and rejection need to be accounted for, but the woithlessness of the object must greatly contribute to the inconstancy of the devotee: (2) There are vil- lage as well as house fetiches in Africa, and these seem to have a more fixed hold on the religious feeling. (3) The use of the fetich as a charm or amulet is not essentially unlike the use of saints' bones for the same