RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Polychrome Bible Polytheism
II. Classification: Granted that the theory of evolution is legitimate in the domain of natural science, the question arises whether it applies as well to this sphere in view of the facts of religious history. From the time of David Hume (q.v.) and the English deists and of the German G. L. Bauer, the theory of the origin of monotheism from polytheism has passed through three definite stages : gods were derived either from fetishes, dead ancestors or other spirits, or from the heavenly bodies. These three theories may conveniently be termed fetishism, animism (with its varieties of spiritism, Shamanism, q.v., ancestor worship, hero cult), and Sabaism.
The theory of Fetishism (q.v.), dating from the period of Voltaire and Hume, was essentially established by Charles De Brosses in his Du
i. Fetish- culte des dieux fetiches (Paris, 1760), ism. and was further developed by Auguste Comte (especially in the fifth volume of his Cours de philosophic positive (Paris, 1830-42), who assumed that from the worship of rude objects of a childlike superstition in magic, or fetishes, was developed first the polytheism of more civilized pagan nations, while from the latter was evolved monotheism as the highest ethical form of religion. This has become a favorite dogma of positivists in France, England, and North America as well as Germany, as illustrated by Lord Avebury's Origin of Civilization (London, 1870); S. Baring Gould's Origin and Development of Religious Belief (1869); C. Meiners, who held, in his Allgemeine kritische Geschichte der Religionen (Hanover, 1806), that fetishism was not only the oldest but also the most general form of worship; G. P. C. Kaiser in his Biblische Theologie (Erlangen, 1813-21); Hegel in his Vorlesungen uber Philosophie der Religion (Berlin, 1832) maintaining that magic, constantly changing its objects of worship in the form of fetishism, creates the first and lowest type of religion; and T. Waitz, in his Anthropologie der Naturvolker (Leipsic, 1859-65). The fetishistic theory was developed into a formal system by F. Schultze in Der Fetischismus, ein Beitrag zur Anthropologie und Religionsgeschichte (Leipsic, 1871), in which an interpretation of the individual tendencies of fetishism is attempted, on the assumption that the rudest fetishism of modern aborigines is necessarily the closest in approximation to the primitive type of all religions. This theory of fetishism has exercised more or less influence on historians of civilization like K. Twesten and F. von Hellwald, natural philosophers likeC. Sterne, E. Haeckel, and investigators of religions like A. Wuttke, whose Geschichte des Heidentums (Breslau, 1852-53), while proceeding from a rigidly monotheistic basis, regards fetishism as the oldest and most primitive type of religion known to history; and G. Roskoff in Geschichte des Teufels (Leipsic, 1869) and Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvolker (1880). In opposition to the frequent assumption after Darwin that there are numerous primitive peoples without any trace of religion, so that absolute atheism is alleged to be the real basis and starting period of the entire religious and ethical development of mankind, Roskoff, in the latter work, marshaled an array of facts confirmed by a company
of scholars; but he falls in also with the naturalistic view, regarding magic as the prototype of all religious activity. The theory of fetishism is scientifically false. The fetish is not, according to De Brosses and the other naturalists, an enchanted and therefore prophetic object (as if from fari, fanum, or fatum), but is something artificially made (Portuguese, feitico — Latin facere) especially for religious purposes, such as an amulet, cross, or idol. Properly speaking, fetishes are devotional or cultic objects which imply a relatively developed stage of religion, and are even typical of an incipient decay of religious life. They are invariably relics of an older and more perfect concept of the deity; for some sort of an idea of a higher being to be invoked must have been present before steps could be taken to make a fetish. The stone, block, bone, or rag, which forms such a magic idol for the African, was never anything but an idol capriciously adapted to a long developed, even though rough and vague, concept of God. The worship of fetishes forms a rude parallel to the veneration of relics and objects of superstition like the tooth of Buddha in Ceylon, Mohammedan talismans, Greco- Roman amulets, or the teraphim or earthern serpents of the peoples with whom the Israelites came in contact. Far from belonging to the childhood of religion, as Meiners, Hegel, Lord Avesbury, and others have held, on the ground of the puppet shape of the fetishes and the childish homage of dances and drummings in their honor, fetishism is decadent, even as senility frequently assumes an appearance of childishness. Neither fetishism nor the primitive atheism assumed by Avesbury can rationally be made the foundation of religious development either of mankind as a whole or of individual stocks or peoples (cf. J. Happel, Die Anlage des Menschen zur Religion, pp. 112, 134 sqq., Leyden, 1877; O. Pfleiderer, Religionsphilosophie, pp. 318- 319, 742-743, Berlin, 1878; F. M. Muller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, especially vol. ii., London, 1878; P. Schanz, Apologie des Christentums, 2d ed., ii. 37, 297, and passim, Freiburg, 1887-88; and C. von Orelli, Allgemeine Religionsgeschichte, pp. 15, 265-266, 841-842, Bonn, 1899). [For another view of the subject, see Fetishism.]
The animistic hypothesis, or soul-cult, as the source of all religious development is considerably later than that of fetishism. As introduced into comparative religion by E. B. Tylor 2. Ani- in his Primitive Culture (London, 1871; mism. new ed., 1903) and Anthropology (1881) animism denotes a belief, wide-spread among the primitive peoples throughout the world, in more or less powerful souls or spirits dwelling in material objects, in a word, " spirit worship " (cf. J. Lippert, Der Seelenkult nach seinen Beziehungen zur hebrdischen Religion, Berlin, 1881; O. Seeck, Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, pp. 339- 377, Berlin, 1901). Logically, this form of religion is a grade higher than fetishism, regarding its cultic objects as filled with, or possessed of, certain spiritual beings, which human magic can cause to appear and become operative. At the same time, cruder fetishistic views and usages are found in animism, especially in the magic character of the
Polytheism Pomerius