Introduction

In the words of R. Sutherland Rattray in his book Ashanti Proverbs: The Primitive Ethics of Savage People (1917), “But there is one term the indiscriminate use of which, I believe, has done infinite harm, the word ‘fetish.’

Contrary to the modern notion of the word fetish, it has not always been associated with repugnant and scandalous connections with human sexuality. Like every other conceivable word known to man, the word fetish started out with its own unique etymology so far removed from the modern day connotation we know today as something theoretically suggestive and often riddled with sexual promiscuity. This paper seeks to provide the introductory discussion to an extensive dissection of this history, an exploration that must commence with the origins of fetish both as a word and as a historically essential object (Pietz, 1985).

The word “fetish” hails from the cross-cultural spaces of the West African coast during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. While origins are, arguably, never absolute, according to William Pietz, through the development of the pidgin word “Fetisso”, a linguistic and conceptual lineage was traced. “Fetisso” is derived from the Portuguese word “feitico” which meant magical practice or witchcraft during the Middle Ages. Its French equivalent “fétiche” also comes from the Portuguese feitiço and this in turn from Latin facticius which means "artificial" and facere or "to make."  All these words tell one single story—fetish is an object believed to have supernatural powers, or in particular, a man-made object that has power over others. Essentially, fetishism denotes inherent value or powers to an object.

• The Doctrine of Spirit Possession

The idea of a spirit’s entering an inanimate object whether it be an animal, or a human being, is a very primitive and honorable belief, having survived other attacks on paganism since the dawn of religious evolutions.  This doctrine of spirit possession is placed at par with fetishism. During the doctrine’s infancy, it was believed that the spirit of a fetish belonged to the ghost of a deceased human being, with the higher spirits thought to reside therein in future days to come. As such, the fetish cult, in the long run, incorporated all the ancient ideas of spirits, souls, ghosts and demonic possession.

1. First Fetishes

Ancient man always fancied converting the extraordinary into a fetish and as such, chance paves way to innumerable origins and back stories. When an individual is sick, an intervening event occurs, and he miraculously recovers. The same can be said with the healing powers of medicine as well as the machinery of “chance” in curing illnesses. Objects associated with dreams have a high likelihood of being transformed into fetishes in the likes of volcanoes, comets and what-not as primitive man fervently believed that shooting stars and meteors are vessels acting as signal fires for the arrival of special visiting spirits on planet earth.

The first fetishes were oddly marked pebbles and stones regarded as sacred by early man in the form of beads composed of sacred stones, often worn as necklaces. Many African tribes kept and wore fetish stones. However, only a few managed to survive such as the Kaaba and the Stone of Scone. Apart from sacred stones, fire and water also joined the ranks of the earliest recorded fetishes. Fire worship, along with the present belief in the sanctity, healing and protective powers enshrined in holy water are still popular practices widely known today.

Later on, belief in tree fetishes flourished, although among some tribes, the constant practice of nature worship eventually led to the belief in charms with some form of nature spirit dwelling therein. Plants and fruits were also not spared from being regarded as fetishes and when they were classified as one, identifying them as taboo became a necessary consequence. The apple was among the first fruits declared as taboo which were never classified as edible by the Levantine people.

If a brute devours human flesh, the animal is converted into a fetish. This ushered the classification of dogs as a sacred animal of the Parsees. Moreover, if the fetish is an animal and the permanent indwelling resident is a ghost, fetishism is believed to have an effect on reincarnation. Similarly, when animals became fetishes, the taboo that is attached on fetish fruits or trees attaches. Hence, monkeys and apes, due to their close physical semblance with humans, were among the first few classified fetish animals together with the dogs in Parsees. Later, snakes birds and swine were also similarly identified as such. The Phoenicians in Palestine highly revere the serpent, in stark contrast to the Jews who regard them as the mouthpiece of the evil incarnate. Chinese not only in Mainland China but also Indians and Arabians believe in the magical charm of reptilian beasts. In countless ways, savages grew envious of the animals as they often adopt names after their favorite brutes.  

Other than inanimate objects and animals, particular days of the week were also classified as fetishes. For eons, Friday has been associated with an unlucky cloak with the number thirteen as the devil’s number. Conversely, from later revelations, three and seven were identified as lucky numerals with four as the lucky pick for the primitive human, largely derived from the early discovery of the four points of the compass. What was held unlucky though was the act of counting cattle, other earthly possessions and even human beings, as the ancients disapproved of numbering the people.

1. Sexual fetish in the early days

Unlike today, primitive man did not create an intemperate fetish out of sex. The reproductive aspect garnered only a limited amount of attention. The ancestors of modern humans were logically, natural-minded, not lewd or scandalous.

Anthropologists claim that saliva was a potent fetish and devils were driven out of human vessels by the simple act of spitting on a possessed person. The compliment goes higher as the age or tribal position of the person spitting goes up. Hence, a superior or elder’s saliva and/or spit was held of paramount regard. Other than saliva, there were parts of the human body that were seen as potential fetishes. Lengthy fingernails of chieftains were highly regarded and the trimmings thereof were an equally powerful fetish. In later-day head-hunting, the skulls of fallen headhunters were also converted into skull fetishes. Aside from skulls, a newborn’s umbilical cord was also a prized fetish—a practice that is well and alive today in the African continent. It was thought that mankind’s first toy was a preserved umbilical cord of a newborn, adorned with pearls and worn as a necklace, similar to its more ancient predecessor, the sacred stones.

Along with the other string of disturbing fetishes, hunchbacked and crippled children were also identified as fetishes. Idiots, on the other hand, were either beaten to death or branded as fetish personas. With this, hysteria exponentially cemented the popular notion in witchcraft and to make things even more absurd, the savage or primitive man held drunkenness as a form of spirit possession so that when he went on a spree, a leaf is brandished in his hair—symbolizing a disavowal on the repercussions of his actions while inebriated. Ingestion of poisons and intoxicants was therefore equivalent to being possessed as the former were believed to be fetishes on its own.

Similarly, geniuses were looked upon as fetish personalities possessed by a wise spirit. However, it was not long before abuse of authority and privilege clutched its way into the psyche of these so-called talented humans as they soon resort to trickery and other fraudulent acts to feed their selfish interests. In sum, a fetish man was thought to be more than human whether he be classified as a divine personality or as a lunatic. The polarity of possibilities couldn’t be more glaring, and the chances of being identified as one, seemed endless. As a result, priests, kings, chiefs, prophets, and church leaders were vested with great, unbounded power and authority, with the majority of the people looking up to them, subject to their whims and fancies.

1. Evolution of fetish according to William Pietz

From an idiom used to describe objects spawned from the interaction between European travelers and Africans during the early modern period to an analytical parlance that played a pivotal role in the perception and study of non-Western art and African art, fetishism in the anthropological sense has evolved.

William Pietz drew a curious distinction between actual African objects labeled as fetishes in Europe along with the indigenous theories tethered to them and on the "fetish," as an idea—an  idea of a kind of object, to which the same applies. According to him, the post-colonial concept of "fetish" sprung from an encounter between Europeans and Africans—the former with their feudalistic society and Catholic theological tradition and the latter, with its specific historical context and African material culture.

In introducing the complex history of the word, Pietz (1985) argues that “the fetish could originate only in conjunction with the emergent articulation of the ideology of the commodity form that defined itself within and against the social values and religious ideologies of two radically different types of noncapitalist society, as they encountered each other in an ongoing cross-cultural situation. This process is indicated in the history of the word itself as it developed from the late medieval Portuguese feitiço, to the sixteenth-century pidgin Fetisso on the African coast, to various northern European versions of the word via the 1602 text of the Dutchman Pieter de Marees... The fetish, then, not only originated from, but remains specific to, the problematic of the social value of material objects as revealed in situations formed by the encounter of radically heterogeneous social systems, and a study of the history of the idea of the fetish may be guided by identifying those themes that persist throughout the various discourses and disciplines that have appropriated the term.”

On the other hand, Peter Stallybrass, author of Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, posits that what Pietz showed was fetish as an elaborated concept intended to “demonize the supposedly arbitrary attachment of West Africans to material objects.”

• Totemism

Fetishism ran coursed through all the primitive cults from the earliest known belief in sacred stones, via cannibalism, idolatry, nature worship up to totemism.

Totemism is a mixture of social and religious observances originally thought to have biologic origins of the totem animal insuring the food supply. Totems symbolized such group and their corresponding god, a god which personifies the clan. Totemism was one phase of the attempted socialization of otherwise personal religion. Eventually, over time, totems evolved into a national symbol or a flag of several modern nations.

• Sexual Feet

Foot fetishism, foot worship, foot partialism, or podophilia is an overwhelming sexual interest in feet. Known as the most common form of sexual fetishism wherein the object of fetish is a non-sexual body part, scholars believe that podophilia have existed in as early as the 13^th century.  However, other textual evidence shows that foot fetishism was already practiced at an even earlier time, dating back to 1220 AD where it was first mentioned by Bertold of Regensburg. Aside from Casanova, famous authors in the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Thomas Hardy are also one of the known literary personalities smitten by the charms of the human feet.

1. Health and disease

Some experts and researchers have hypothesized that foot worship increases as a response to the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases. According to one study conducted by Dr. A James Giannini at Ohio State University, there was an increased interest in feet and association thereof as sexual objects during the great gonorrhea epidemic of twelfth-century Europe and during the syphilis epidemics of the 16th and 19th centuries in Europe. Likewise, an exponential increase in the interest of foot worship was noted at the dawn of the current AIDS epidemic. In these cases, sexual foot play was seen as a safe-sex alternative. Clearly, blistered gangrenous feet, warts and all, was the preferred solution.

1. Sigmund Freud and the sexual feet

According to psychosexual analyst Sigmund Freud, people sexualize feet because they resemble penises. Today, neuroscientist Vilanayar Ramachandran, director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego presents a more scientific approach. Ramachandran claims to have solved the mystery surrounding foot fetishes while incidentally studying brain aberrations that lead to phantom limb syndrome, a condition plaguing amputees where they still feel the amputated limb as if it is still attached to their bodies.

In connection with this, Ramachandran found that the amputees' brain maps not only failed to remove the missing foot from their body image map but they accidentally rewired the map in a manner that caused the patient's phantom foot to be viewed as something sexy thereby leading to reports of feeling sexual pleasure, and even orgasms with their missing feet. In his book "Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind" (Harper, 1999) Ramachandran said, "Maybe even many of us so-called normal people have a bit of cross-wiring, which would explain why we like to have our toes sucked."

1. Characteristics

Sigmund Freud considered foot binding as a form of fetishism. In the eyes of a foot worshipper, points of attraction include the size and shape of the foot and toes, jewelry, treatments such as pedicures or massaging, state of dress whether barefoot or not and finally, sensory interaction. The last point of attraction involves smelling the foot, licking, rubbing, kissing, tickling, biting and sucking of toes among others.

As to the cause of foot fetishism, neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran argued that foot fetishism is caused by the feet and the genitals situated in adjacent areas of the somatosensory cortex of the brain, possibly signaling some form of neural crosstalk between the two the body parts. Desmond Morris, on the other hand, attributed foot fetishism as the result of mal-imprinting at an early age similar to Freud's. However, the latter considered the smell of feet paramount in this. The foot was seen as a penis-symbol/surrogate.

• Female Worship

1. The adoration of woman

The adoration of woman is a primitive tradition with several theories put forward over the years explaining why so many men are aroused by the idea of kneeling down to kiss a woman’s feet.  While many modern critics find the notion of men showing respect to women through profound methods of kissing the latter’s feet, the same is regarded as a primeval and equally powerful act bearing great symbolism and potency.

Considering society's attitude to womanhood over centuries past, for some, the symbol of woman worship such as kissing the feet and other extreme forms of veneration are oftentimes misconstrued as threatening, while some equating the act as a form of foot fetishism and thereby totally discounting the act as a form of woman worship. Therefore, to contemplate the explanation that foot fetishism is more directly related to the object of that fascination is elevated to an even greater height of anthropological discourse.

Essentially, woman worship toys on the idea that many men are aroused by worshipping women because it is a natural result and a logical consequence of the power of the feminine. That woman worship involves a constant and ancient ritual for showing worship (i.e. kissing the foot). That is as an act passionately charged with staggering amounts of spiritual and sexual intensity.

1. Isis

In the past couple of years, a substantial amount of work has gone into the subject of primitive attitudes towards the feminine. Archaeologists have found evidence that posits women played a much more pivotal role in ancient societies. The deeper we dig into historical archives, the further we go back to the roots of dominant Goddess worship revealing the more central  role played by women. Anthropologists Evelyn Reed interposed that matrilineal kinship systems allowing passage of name and wealth through the female bloodline are common amongst ancient societies, suggesting natural leanings of the human person to respect the female figure and vest on women leadership roles. Maria Gimbutas, another notable anthropologist has contributed convincing studies evidencing that in old Europe (pre 4000BC), Goddess worship was the norm, further cementing the notion that ancient Europe was predominantly matrilineal and that Goddess worship was a dominant practice.

The names of these female deities are numerous. Isis, Athena, Cybele, Demeter, Artemis, Kali, Bridget, Ceridwen, are some of the female deities with temples and remains in their respective sanctuaries still standing today.

Conclusion

The ancient world previously filled with charms did much to demolish nearly all personal ambition and initiative with the fruits of extra labor and natural gift of intellect seen as a fetish or a charm. Indeed, during the barbaric era, it was dangerous to know very much as it was relatively easy to be executed as a black artist. Gradually, science is little by little getting rid of the gambling element from life, a life where humans largely relied on chance, dreams, charms and well, fetishes.  But if modern methods and techniques of educating an ignorant human should fail, an almost immediate reversion to primitive beliefs and norms is the resulting consequence. Undoubtedly, these superstitions still hover in the minds of many civilized societies today, a concrete example of which are the Chinese where a marriage of the ancients and the modern is a daily scenario in their bustling cities. Language is home to innumerable fossils which show that the gap has long been widened in magical superstition—words in the likes of spellbound, ill-starred, possessions, inspiration, spirit away, ingenuity, entrancing, thunderstruck, and astonished. Even learned and intellectual human beings still believe in the magic of good luck, the repercussions of staring straight into an evil eye, and astrology.

Ancient magic was the unexplainable flask of modern science, once indispensable in its golden era but now rendered inconsequential to most modern societies. As such, the phantasms of ignoramus superstition disturbed the primitive minds of mankind until the intricate concepts of science and technology was born.

References

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