"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Colonel that Jeb had replied directly to the thing which most concerned him. The draft was his evil fetish; second in importance came the question of what he should do, or whether Mr. Strong might return and be a witness to his disgrace—yet the Colonel even now was unwilling to call it this. Applied to any one ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... emperor was placed upon them. On the statue of Olympic Jove appeared the bust of the contemptible Caligula; and this incongruous adaptation represented the change of the popular faith from its former heavenly idealisations to the most grovelling fetish worship of the time. This deification of the emperors avenged its terrible blasphemy by the sublime wickedness of those who were so raised above humanity. Here, in this last pagan temple of Rome, converted into one of the earliest Christian ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... how will they shake the fabric of your wife's confidence and peace! A thousand things unpleasing went on in the chiaroscuro of a life that you shrank from too particularly realising; you did not care, in those days, to make a fetish of your conscience; you would recognise your failures with a nod, and so, good day. But the time for these reserves is over. You have wilfully introduced a witness into your life, the scene of these defeats, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... invisible powers, which are not immediately derived from, and absolutely coincident with, the reverence due to the supreme reason of the universe, are all alike dangerous superstitions. The worship founded on them, whether offered by the Catholic to St. Francis, or by the poor African to his Fetish differ in form only, not in substance. Herein Bruno speaks not only as a philosopher, but as an enlightened Christian;—the Evangelists and Apostles every where representing their moral precepts not as doctrines then first ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... force of nature was to assimilate other forces as he assimilated food. He called it the love of power. He felt his own feebleness, and he sought for an ass or a camel, a bow or a sling, to widen his range of power, as he sough fetish or a planet in the world beyond. He cared little to know its immediate use, but he could afford to throw nothing away which he could conceive to have possible value in this or any other existence. He waited for the object to teach him ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... that I dined at seven, not at eight," was his cold greeting, for Mr. Knight, a large eater like many teetotallers, was one of those people who make a fetish of punctuality at meals, and always grow ...
— Love Eternal • H. Rider Haggard
... to do with these savages and their troubles, lords? If a few of them are killed it is no matter, but as you should know, O Doctor, if you wish to hunt lions there are plenty in that land whither you travel, seeing that the lion is the fetish of the Fung and therefore never killed. But the desert about Zeu is dangerous and harm ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... ships in the stress of hungry war demand will be true of scores of articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary military service and the fetish of free trade. ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... some quaint fetish about the necessity for maintaining the usual diplomatic forms, there is no necessity for delay in emergencies of this description. If an ordinarily intelligent Englishman, with a fair knowledge of English history and a grasp of the traditions ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... to the advantage of humanity, they were largely negatived, and even reversed in value, just because the sense of proportion had been lost. The image which might have stimulated reverence had become a fetish. There were voices crying in the wilderness against a worship that had poisoned into idolatry, but they were unheard. Progressively the real things of life were blurred and forgotten and the things that were so obviously real that they were unreal became ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... dolmen form grave-stones; perhaps the religious employment of them in this wise led to the idea of the god-stone in many cases; but it is difficult to say in monolith-worship whether the stone itself be not a god; not a fetish, for (as has been said by others) a fetish is a god only so long as he is regarded as being useful, and when shown to be useless he is flung away; but a god-stone is always divine, whether it grants ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here she fretted out all her ill-humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish [Footnote: Fetish (also spelt "fetich"): a material object, venerated by certain African tribes; a sort of idol, which is sometimes punished by its owner in disappointment or anger.] which she punished for all her misfortunes. This was ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... objectors the only alternative to deductive thought from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince Buelow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is reported to have said:—'Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible dogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country did not depend either in whole or in part upon ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... proceeded to unbutton his fetish, to attack it with a penknife, and to thrust the new-found plans between the two layers of imitation Saxony flannel of which it was made. Then with the help of Mr. Butteridge's small shaving mirror and his folding canvas ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... formally communicate it to the Kazi. The dowry is then settled, and the bond of marriage is sealed. But when the parents of the bride are poor they receive a bride-price of Rs. 30, from which they pay the dowry. The Bhishtis worship their leather bag (mashk) as a sort of fetish, and burn incense before it on Fridays. [354] The traditional occupation of the Bhishti is to supply water, and he is still engaged in this and other kinds of domestic service. The name is said to be derived ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... even the most imperfect and degraded, has something that ought to be sacred to us, for there is in all religions a secret yearning after the true, though unknown, God. Whether we see the Papua squatting in dumb meditation before his fetish, or whether we listen to Firdusi exclaiming: 'The heighth and the depth of the whole world have their centre in Thee, O my God! I do not know Thee what Thou art: but I know that Thou art what Thou alone canst be,'—we ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... floor, and sat silent for a while. "Divine right," she began to murmur, "the fetish of the creatures made rich by our man-made social system! 'The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fullness thereof, thou hast founded them.' But, oh, what must be the concept of God held by the rich, a God who bestows these gifts upon a few, and with them the privilege ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... eternal Louis business is getting to be a ridiculous nuisance. Nothing can be done, no plans can be made, without some veto connected with that animal's whims or convenience being imposed. If you were a priest in attendance on some African fetish you couldn't set up a more elaborate code of restrictions. I believe you'd ask the Government to put off a General Election if you thought it would interfere with Louis's ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... unexplored countries; I see the savage types, the bow and arrow, the poisoned splint, the fetish, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... this rude fetish, between it and the altar, whereon lay some flowers, and in such fashion that the moonlight struck full upon her, was a white-robed woman. She was young and very beautiful both in shape and feature, and though her black hair streaming almost to the knees took from ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard
... the British Army in the field is as smart, in a military sense, as tidy—if it will forgive me the word—as well ordered, as efficiently cared for, as the German Army was in the beginning. Partly this is due to its splendid equipment. Mostly it is due to that fetish of the British soldier ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lend "Robinson Crusoe" to a boy, and warn him not to think of running away to sea. Still, I must even add my voice to the orthodox chorus, and affirm that warfare is bad, brutal, fraudful, a thing of meretricious gauds, a clay idol, fetish of humbug and havoc, whose feet are soaking in muddy gore and salt tears; yet in the privacy of my own study I might sadly admit that the Millennium is remote, that the Parliament of Nations exists but in the dreams of the poet, and that Longfellow's forecast of the days down through ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... oder villages respec' us very much. Dey come ober to see de village. Dey see dat de houses are comfortable, dat de gardens are bery well cultivated, dat de people are well dressed, not like common nigger, dat dey are happy and contented. Dey see dat dey no believe in fetish any more, but dat ebery ebening when de work is ober, dey gadder under de big tree and listen for half an hour while I read to dem and den sing a hymn. Once a year I send down to de coast and get up plenty cloth, and hoes for de gardens, and eberyting dey want. When I land ...
— By Sheer Pluck - A Tale of the Ashanti War • G. A. Henty
... for all kinds of mental work to be gained from protracted difficult formal education is now rejected by educational psychologists, but its prevalence in the popular mind serves to make "higher education" still something of a fetish, from which marvelous results, not capable of precise comprehension, are anticipated. We do not disparage the value of a college education, in saying that parents should not attach such importance to it as to lead them to ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... basis to formulate his theory. In order to help in the solution of this problem I shall state one or two facts about the natives of these regions. The Sherbros and Mendis, both of whom inhabit the vast territory known as Sherbroland, are, of all primitive Africans, the least given to fetish worship. This fact has always proved a stumbling-block to the spread of Mohammedanism in that part of the world. Arab as well as Negro Moslem missionaries have always found the Sherbro and Mendi man rather hard nuts to crack. Many an emissary of the prophet ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... image," said the man in black; "better reject his words than his image: no religion can exist long which rejects a good bodily image. Why, the very negro barbarians of High Barbary could give you a lesson on that point; they have their fetish images, to which they look for help in their afflictions; they have likewise a high ...
— The Romany Rye • George Borrow
... treasures—an album which she allowed him hurriedly to glimpse through, forbidding him, however, even to look at certain of the pages. It was a volume modestly bound in dark leather with silver clasps; but Rafael gazed upon it as on a wonderful fetish, and with all the awe-struck adoration inspired by great names. Kings and emperors were the least among the celebrities who had knelt in homage before the goddess. The overshadowing geniuses of art were there, dedicating ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... his sisters, but he has much of his mother's steadfast wisdom, and his father's instinct for the right side in considerable questions; and he has his father's prescience of the psychological moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a fetish; no Englishman can deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but he is a fetish with an uncommon share of the common man's divinity. The system which provides him for the people provides them the ...
— Seven English Cities • W. D. Howells
... Professor Bury observes, accustomed 'to take little and to give much'. They built up their civilization for themselves. We must listen with due attention to the critics who have pointed out all the remnants of savagery and superstition that they find in Greece: the slave-driver, the fetish-worshipper and the medicine-man, the trampler on women, the bloodthirsty hater of all outside his own town and party. But it is not those people that constitute Greece; those people can be found all over the historical world, commoner than blackberries. It ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... he set out from Accra, and proceeded as far as Yansong, the chief town of Acquimbo, distant from the coast about one hundred and forty miles. Here the natives were celebrating the Yam feast, a sort of religious ceremony, to witness which Park got up into a Fetish tree, which is regarded by the natives with fear and dread. Here he remained a great part of the day, exposed to the sun, and was observed to drink a great quantity of palm wine. In dropping down from one of the lower branches, he fell ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... front yards you see in suburban streets, the last contemptible vestige of the rolling park-lands and fair demesnes of a far-off feudal time. It is like the silly Latin mottoes and heraldic crests you see on the doors of automobiles. It is a fetish in England. The boy from the great public schools sets the fashion, and all the little tinpot grammar-schools and academies follow suit and ape the clothes and the manners and the speech, the mincing speech, ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... Massa Brace, a nebba heer anybody pray in de fashun you 'peak 'bout. Ob coas, I hab heer de nigga talk to da Fetish, de which I, tho' I be a nigga maseff, nebba belieb'd in. Dis child no belieb in anyting he no see, an' he see many ...
— The Ocean Waifs - A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea • Mayne Reid
... the lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed. People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller fetish was to be evolved. The most peaceful stockbroker or shopkeeper, who had never even been to a review in his life, could make calculations of man power with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope, which would convince the greatest pessimist that Germany and Austria were outnumbered by ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... representations of animals, and symbolic figures resembling those we saw in going down the Orinoco, at a small distance below Encaramada, near the town Caycara. Similar rocks in Africa are called by travellers fetish stones. I shall not make use of this term, because fetishism does not prevail among the natives of the Orinoco; and the figures of stars, of the sun, of tigers, and of crocodiles, which we found traced upon the rocks in spots now uninhabited, appeared to me in no way to denote the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... Britons of Britain. In the Imperial Light Horse the proportion was very much higher. But what may fairly be argued is that their exploits have proved, what the American war proved long ago, that the German conception of discipline is an obsolete fetish, and that the spirit of free men, whose individualism has been encouraged rather than crushed, is equal to any feat of arms. The clerks and miners and engineers who went up Elandslaagte Hill without bayonets, shoulder to shoulder with the Gordons, and who, according to ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Sam too hard," Monty continued. "Remember for the last two days he was doing all he could to get us out of the place. It was those fetish fellows who worked the mischief and he—certainly—warned us all he could. He took us safely to Bekwando and he worked ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... movement. Inter alia, it may be remarked here that a certain fretfulness of temper characterizes most of the critics of Socialism. Strict adherence to the letter of Marx is pronounced as a sign of intellectual bondage of the movement and its leaders to the "Marxian fetish," and, on the other hand, every recognition of the human fallibility of Marx by a Socialist thinker is hailed as a sure portent of a split in the movement. Yet the most serious criticisms of Marx have come from the ranks of his followers—perhaps ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... in the Khedive's palace whose admiration for Dicky was a kind of fetish, and Dicky loathed him. Twice had Dicky saved this Chief Eunuch's life from Ismail's anger, and once had he saved his fortune—not even from compassion, but out of his inherent love of justice. As ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Jumbo comes in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or where not, and flogs some woman who has been backbiting, or scolding, or with some other domestic mischief disturbing the general peace. Carlyle seems to confound him with the common Fetish; but he is quite another thing. He is a disguised man; and all about him is a freemasons' secret among the men."—"I finished the Scarlet Letter yesterday. It falls off sadly after that fine opening scene. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... fetch; he is greedy for the poor triumph of acquiescence; and so it comes about that many people who have been led to believe themselves religious, are in reality still keeping back their own souls and trying to use God for their own purposes. God is nothing more for them as yet than a magnificent Fetish. They did not really want him, but they have heard that he is potent stuff; their unripe souls think to make use of him. They call upon his name, they do certain things that are supposed to be peculiarly influential with him, such as saying prayers and repeating gross praises ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells
... and Rodier appropriating as trophies several spears and bows and arrows, and also some of the fetish charms hung at the entrance to the huts. The crew, having satisfied their hunger, hunted through the village for loot, and grumbled when they found nothing that they considered worthy the consideration of British sailormen. Then Rodier ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... like myself. There was a girl in the town who was beautiful; many asked for her as their wife, but her father had long promised her to my friend; he refused even the greatest warrior of the place, who went away in wrath to the fetishman, and throwing him his gold armlets asked for a fetish against his rival. It was given, and two days before he was to be married my friend died. His mother came to me, and it was enough. I put on my war dress, I seized my weapons, sat for a whole day with my skulls before me, working up my revenge, called out my men, and that night set off for ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Frederick Marryat
... part of their whole incomprehensible way of regarding themselves (in spite of their acute personal and parochial absorptions) as minor members of a powerful and indivisible whole, the huge voracious fetish ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... sticks from her medicine bag, and hands them to one of the Old Men. To each of the others who will dance with her (two or three) she gives a fetish from her bag. They have already put on appropriate headdresses and are prepared for dancing. She motions the rattles to begin. Behind her are the Old Men, with the drums and rattles; on each side, the ...
— The Arrow-Maker - A Drama in Three Acts • Mary Austin
... where they are going. I saw one die just now; a young woman. She was talking to another woman and seemed quite well, only tired, till suddenly she said in a loud voice, 'I am going to die, that I may come back as a spirit and bewitch these devils till they are spirits too.' Then she called upon the fetish of her tribe, put her hands to her breast and fell down dead. At least," added Hans, spitting reflectively, "she did not fall quite down because the slave-stick held her head off the ground. The Arabs were very angry, both because she had cursed them and was dead. One of ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... numerous than those of other employments. That the greatest number of these are at Kommendo, Mina, and Kormantin. From each of which places, there go out every morning, (Tuesday excepted, which is the Fetish day, or day of rest) five, six, and sometimes eight hundred canoes, from thirteen to fourteen feet long, which spread themselves two leagues at sea, each fisherman carrying in his canoe a sword, with bread, water, and a little fire on ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet
... over the headstall, and such a rope is carried by every Indian groom. I asked my groom one day to tie up with his leading rope a dog that would not follow. He absolutely refused, and I discovered that the rope was the fetish of his caste and was formerly adored and propitiated in the course of an annual caste festival. To touch a dog with it would ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... station it sheltered. Landing was no easy matter, and I waited a long time in a big canoe, manned by twenty paddlers kneeling forward, before the old negro in the stern decided the attempt to be possible. He never stopped invoking every fetish under the sun, and sprinkling the sea out of a brandy bottle, keeping his eye the while on the waves as they came rolling in. Then all at once he gave a great shout, loudly responded to by the twenty paddlers, who yelled in cadence, while the canoe flew before the united ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... nearly every human being; it has to be fought down, like the notorious ape and tiger. But he thought that Gideon and Katherine Varick had less of it than any one else he knew; the mediocre was repellent to them; cant and sentiment made them sick; they made a fetish of hard truth, and so much despised most of their neighbours that they would not experience the temptation to grab at popularity. In fact, they would dislike it if ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... hers the spirit of a Bruno? Was she convinced of the intellectual rightness of the stand she had taken? Was hers a steady, enlightened opposition to superstition? or—and a subtler thought—was she mastered by some vaster, profounder superstition, a fetish-worship of which the Alpha and the Omega was the ...
— The Strength of the Strong • Jack London
... Greek, there are only two religious possibilities—fetish-dances and spinning dervishes don't count—the Renaissance meant the revival of these two influences, and since the sixteenth century they have both been increasing steadily. Luther was a child of the Old Testament. Since the Exodus, Freedom has ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... volumes—the one a record of the interments of the past hundred years, the other containing the roll of Rehoboth communicants since the establishment of the Church. Laying the former aside, he took up the latter with a tenderness and devoutness becoming one who was touching the sacred books of some fetish of the East. It was, indeed, to him a book to be reverenced; and as he slowly and sadly turned over its time-stained pages, his eye rested on many names entered in his own small handwriting—names which carried him back to companionship with lives for ever past. Some he ...
— Lancashire Idylls (1898) • Marshall Mather
... prig—who doesn't touch posts, or count his steps on the pavement, or choose what tie he'll wear on certain days, or give way to some such human weakness when he's alone. We so-called 'men of science' are, I truly believe, the worst of the lot. You can't get rid of one fetish but you have instantly the impulse to kneel to another . ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... should come to an end and be superseded by something else, and that this change should be taking place under our very eyes. But, happily for me, the world-conflict which is now devastating Europe has begun to undermine in the soul of many the fetish-worship of civilization. And to assist further in breaking the spell which civilization may have cast over the imagination of most of my audience, I would remind you that civilization is, after all, a mere mushroom growth, ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit
... belongs to a late period. But Varro seems to have stated that there was originally only a spear; see a passage of Clement of Alexandria in the fragments of the Ant. rer. div., Agahd, p. 210, to which Deubner (l.c.) adds Arnobius vi. 11. Deubner calls this spear a fetish, which is not the right word if the deity were immanent in it in the sense suggested by "Mars vigila." See above, p. 116. If Servius correctly reports the practice, it must be compared with the clashing of shields and spears by the Salii, ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler
... Serbian language," laughed Alec. "It opposes me at every turn; it mocks at my best efforts; it swathes me like the bandages of a mummy,—and I am growing weary of its restraint. This is a question of self interest, too. Perhaps, if I can persuade our good Kosnovians to adopt some more up-to-date fetish, they may drop the hereditary habit of carving their chosen rulers into mincemeat whenever a change of Government ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... conversation with each caller. The emotional stability and the will to persevere even at considerable cost, which marked youth, are gone. At forty-five her life is objectlessly spasmodic, the old family-habit of talking of self and the family-fetish of discussing sickness have honeycombed her character and made her hopelessly tiresome. And her feeling-life is as ...
— Our Nervous Friends - Illustrating the Mastery of Nervousness • Robert S. Carroll
... shallowness, which may leave our age as it left the later Greeks, without an absolute standard of right or of truth, till it tries to escape from its own scepticism, as the later Neoplatonists did, by plunging desperately into any fetish-worshipping superstition which holds out to its wearied and yet impatient intellect, the bait of decisions already made for it, of objects of admiration already ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... terrible. I found myself sitting up in bed, staring at the dark. I found myself praying that the Heat-Ray might have suddenly and painlessly struck her out of being. Since the night of my return from Leatherhead I had not prayed. I had uttered prayers, fetish prayers, had prayed as heathens mutter charms when I was in extremity; but now I prayed indeed, pleading steadfastly and sanely, face to face with the darkness of God. Strange night! Strangest in this, that so soon as dawn had come, I, who had talked ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... authors, each of whom, like pioneers in a new country, left his stamp on subsequent works in the same field. Richardson's governing motive may be summed up in the word "sensibility," which means "delicacy of feeling," and which was a fashion, almost a fetish, in eighteenth-century society. Because it was deemed essential to display proper or decorous feeling on all occasions, Richardson's heroines were always analyzing their emotions; they talked like a book of etiquette; they indulged in tears, fainting, transports ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... for even Rome to people; and, indeed, some were merely attended on fixed ceremonial occasions, and a good many merely opened their doors once every year—on the feast day, that is, of their patron saint. Some also subsisted on the lucky possession of a fetish, an idol compassionate to human sufferings. Santa Maria in Ara Coeli possessed the miraculous little Jesus, the "Bambino," who healed sick children, and Sant' Agostino had the "Madonna del Parto," who grants a happy delivery to mothers. ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... followed, in which Clerambault took a final leave of the bloody old fetish falsely called Country; or rather in opposition to the great flesh-eater, the she-wolf of Rome, on whose altar men are now offered up, he set the august Mother of all living, ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... clean and fresh-coloured, he was good to look on in the eyes of his companion, and yet, perhaps, there was a ruffle in her soul that called for some answering disturbance on the part of that superbly tranquil young man, and certainly called in vain. Cicely had set up for herself a fetish of onyx with eyes of jade, and doubtless hungered at times with an unreasonable but perfectly natural hunger for something of flesh and blood. It was the religion of her life to know exactly what she wanted and to see that she got ...
— When William Came • Saki
... There was keenness about the exclamation which almost amounted to actual dislike. "I'm tired to death of having Tessa's welfare and Tessa's morals rammed down my throat. Why should I make a fetish of the child? What is good enough for me is surely good enough ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell
... fearless tongue. In the midst of an entourage composed of lying sycophants and of treacherous minions, the Caesar seemed to feel in the presence of the stranger a sense of security and of trust. Some writers have averred that Caligula looked on Taurus Antinor as a kind of personal fetish who kept the wrath of the gods averted from his imperial head. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that tyrant exerted his utmost power to keep Taurus near his person, showering upon him those honours and titles of which he would ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... remained exposed to view, and vast crowds passed before it; a whole people hastened to the convent, an interminable procession of devotees hungering after hope, who rubbed medals, chaplets, pictures, and missals against the dead woman's dress, to obtain from her one more favour, a fetish bringing happiness. Even in death her dream of solitude was denied her: a mob of the wretched ones of this world rushed to the spot, drinking in illusion around her coffin. And it was noticed that her left eye, the eye which at the time ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of praise, I cannot help feeling that the old idea that God demanded, so to speak, a certain amount of public recognition of His goodness and greatness is a purely savage and uncivilised form of fetish-worship; it is the same sort of religion that would attach material prosperity to religious observation; and belongs to a time when men believed that, in return for a certain number of sacrifices, rain and sun were sent ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... could have described in advance. Upon the door, done in the blind, morbid egotism of crime, which so often leaves open sign and signal for its own undoing, there showed, cut deep in the jamb, a rude sign, cabalistic, mysterious, fetish-like. To Eddring it seemed for the instant to be the same mark as that upon the handkerchief. He could not explain these things in his own mind. Others of the party were more interested in pointing out once more, in ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... the cart before the horse. 'Fetish' is really the Portuguese word feitico, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin factitius), applied to African ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... the West make a fetish of "progress," which is the ethical camouflage of the desire to be the cause of changes. If we are asked, for instance, whether machinery has really improved the world, the question strikes us as foolish: it ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... but legs no good below the knee. Couldn't make cavalry men of them." And after glancing down complacently at his own shanks, he always concluded: "Pah! Don't they stink! You, Makola! Take that herd over to the fetish" (the storehouse was in every station called the fetish, perhaps because of the spirit of civilization it contained) "and give them up some of the rubbish you keep there. I'd rather see it full of bone than ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... dysaemia, or impaired blood supply, as the governing cause of disease, has destroyed another idol of modern fetish ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... be allowed to tell what I know about this curious custom of Obeah, or Fetish-worship. It appears to me, on closer examination, that it is not a worship of natural objects; not a primeval worship; scarcely a worship at all: but simply a system of incantation, carried on by a priesthood, or rather a ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... reflectively, with the omniscient air of the Indian civilian. "He is too purely Scandinavian. He represents that part of the Continental mind which is farthest removed from the English temperament. To him, respectability—our god—is not only no fetish, it is the unspeakable thing, the Moabitish abomination. He will not bow down to the golden image which our British Nebuchadnezzar, King Demos, has made, and which he asks us to worship. And the British Nebuchadnezzar will ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... The noise they had made had scared away all the other elephants—however, they appeared pretty well satisfied with the four they had killed. They now assembled round the last elephant which had fallen, while one of their fetish-men, or priests, approached and cut off a portion which was carefully stowed away in a basket; this was intended, we understood, for an offering to their idols. A dance was now commenced, and was as savage as could well be imagined. They shrieked, they leaped, ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... Poussin, Milton, Wren, Jane Austen and Mozart are highly civilized artists, and that the creators of the Gothic cathedrals and the author of the Chanson de Roland, Villon, Webster, Rembrandt, Blake, Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Whitman, Turner, Wagner and the Congolese fetish-makers are not. But, whatever we may mean, assuredly we do not mean that one set is superior to the other. They differ widely; but they differ in the means by which they compass the same end. It is absurd to argue that civilization is either ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... plenty slipped past beneath them. This, he knew, had been the home of Wanderer. In what past age or at how great a distance it was from his own world, he could only imagine. But that the big man who called himself Wanderer loved this country there was not the slightest doubt. It was a fetish with him, a past he was in duty bound to revisit time and ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent
... purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling over a stone or buried branch, and I looked often to reassure myself that Raiere's gigantic ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... children, his bonne, and his kitchen wench issued forth, oblivious alike of dull care and of bombarding Prussians, to enjoy themselves after their wont by gossiping and lolling in the sun. The Strasburg fetish had its usual crowd of admirers. Every bench in the Champs Elysees was occupied. Guitars twanged, organs were ground, merry-go-rounds were in full swing, and had it not been that here and there some regiment was drilling, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... makes God different in nature from His work, really degrades the object of its worship. It puts mere power above the gifts of spirit, and it indicates that the worshipper has not been emancipated from the slavishness, which makes a fetish of its God. Such a religion is not free, and the development ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... fashion (loc. cit.). Heated sand is applied as a styptic and the patient is dieted with ginger-soup and warm drinks of ginger-water, pork being especially forbidden. The Fantis of the Gold Coast circumcise in sacred places, e.g., at Accra on a Fetish rock rising from the sea The peoples of Sennaar, Taka, Masawwah and the adjacent regions follow the Abyssinian custom. The barbarous Bissagos and Fellups of North Western Guinea make cuts on the prepuce without amputating it; while the Baquens and Papels circumcise like Moslems. The blacks ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... something," said Lathrop, to whom Harry confided his expectation, "this red thatch of mine is a nuisance. At school I was always Brick-top or Red-Head and out here the natives all look at my carrot-colored top-knot as if they'd like to scalp me and keep it for a fetish." ...
— The Boy Aviators in Africa • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... necessary to believe it I would say never read another line in it but just believe it and stick to it. And yet these people really think that there is something miraculous about the book. They regard it as a fetish—a kind of amulet—a something charmed, that will keep off evil spirits, or bad luck, stop bullets, and do a thousand handy-things ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-cocks! What a jade nature was . . . or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf of the race? The fetish of the body. Stark materialism. . . . However, it was not as hard on them as on women outgrown their primary function. Theirs at least the privilege of approach; and their deathless masculine conceit—when all was said, Nature's ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... forked lightning. During hundreds of years it passed over the continent of Africa to settle only at its northern coast line and its most southern cape; and, to-day, it has given Cuba all of its benefits, and has left the equally beautiful island of Hayti, only fourteen hours away, sunk in fetish ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... supposed. Those who hold it legitimate to argue from phenomena to noumena, may rightly contend that the Nebular Hypothesis implies a First Cause as much transcending "the mechanical God of Paley," as this does the fetish ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... from the north, which in old Persian religious belief blew to meet pure and wicked souls after death (Tylor's Primitive Culture, vol. II. pp. 98, 99). Mr. Tylor mentions also the Fanti negroes' belief that the men and animals they sacrifice to the local fetish are carried away in a whirlwind imperceptibly to the worshippers (ib. ...
— Indian Fairy Tales • Anonymous
... hab 'fweshments foh her comp'nay," broke in an insinuating little voice, in sweetest accents. "I comed back to tell you 'twould be perlite. Dat's de way my mamma does," and Dodo, first on one foot, then the other, performed a sort of fetish dance around the two, praying ...
— Joyce's Investments - A Story for Girls • Fannie E. Newberry
... clothes and wax dolls, or the thoughtless repetition of masses or rosaries, who believes in wonder-working relics, and purchases pardon for his sins by means of indulgence-money or Peter's pence, we willingly concede the claim to possess the "only saving religion"; but with such fetish-worshippers we will willingly submit ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... that fortified her—beyond her first gently tolerant glance at the boy there had been only indifference in her pale, composed face—and the lawyer was at last brought to the surprising conclusion that Fletcher's granddaughter was seeking to build herself a fetish of the mere idle bond of blood. The hopeless gallantry of the girl moved him to a vague feeling of pity, and he spoke presently with a chivalrous desire of making her ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow
... tell Massa Huggin. Him no kill pore black darkie. Iss, Caesar tell um," he whispered now, with his lips so close that the lad felt the hot breath hiss into his ear. "Dat Obeah, massa. Dat black man's Obeah. Come along now Caesar know. Find fetish. Plenty many black boy ...
— Hunting the Skipper - The Cruise of the "Seafowl" Sloop • George Manville Fenn
... history, as thus understood, confine itself to mere description; it also assumes the office of judge. While it pulls down much that passion and inaccuracy have reared, and thus restores respect for the past, it does not turn that past into a fetish. It looks it boldly in the face and questions it, instead of prostrating itself before it and worshipping it with downcast eyes. Thus, by plainly showing us the many bonds which tie us to ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... something in the history of the race. From the new-born baby which can hang easily by one hand from a broomstick with its legs drawn up under it, the whole evolution of mankind is re- enacted. You can trace clearly the cave-dweller, the hunter, the scout. What, then, does Wriggly represent? Fetish worship—nothing else. The savage chooses some most unlikely thing and adores it. This dear little savage adores ...
— Danger! and Other Stories • Arthur Conan Doyle
... as at a solemn service, when he shut himself up to compose. Beth had stepped away from the old forms by this time. She had escaped from the bondage of the letter that killeth into the realm of the spirit that giveth life. It is not faith in any particular fetish that makes a mind religious, but the quality of reverence. Churches Beth had come to look upon, not with distrust, but with indifference, as an ineffectual experiment of man's. She could find no evidence of a holier spirit or a more divine one in the church than in any ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... be mentioned the prayer of the hunter to his fetish when on the hunt; and that of the Priest of the Bow, formerly sung when he went to war with the Navajos. I also obtained a song of the She-vo-la dance, which bears ...
— Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folk-Lore • J. Walter Fewkes
... the black negroid type, their varieties being only imperfectly known. The tendency of some of the lower negroid types has been to drift towards the west coast, where they still practise cannibalistic and fetish rites. On the east coast are found much higher types approaching to the Christian races of Abyssinia, and from east to west there has been a wide admixture of Arab blood producing a light-brown type. In Uganda and Nigeria ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, aesthetic circles, of which the balladist was not ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... Mrs. Eddy as to the necessity of eliminating a medical fetish, but I disagree with her about religiously preserving a theological one. I have read "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" for twenty years, and I have also read the Scriptures for a much longer period. Also, I have lived ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... has not made a success as a concert artist takes up teaching as a last resort, without enthusiasm or the true vocational instinct. The false standards he sets up for his pupils are a natural result of his own ineffectual worship of the fetish of virtuosity—those of the musical mountebank of a hundred years ago. Of course such false prophets of the virtuose have nothing in common with such high-priests of public utterance as Ysaye, Kreisler and others, whose virtuosity is a true means for the higher development of the musical. ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... Ages"; the ancient culture was dead. Eight centuries of submergence with strange mysterious upfloatings were its fate until the Renascence, when its fragments were recovered, and soon did more harm than good to the fetish-worshipping ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... keynote of her song. To the tune of "Annie Roonie" and kindred fervid lay With mandolin and banjo, marching in bold array The devil's strongholds storming, battling to victory— With banners flying, the tambourine and drum Forever has she silenced the shamans vile tom-tom. All Fetish Spirit-medicine she has tabooed, banished away Except bourbon and rye, sour-mash, hand-made And copper-distilled, licensed, taxed and gauged, Then stored in bond to ripen, mellow, age. God bless the Army, rank and file ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... than the artificial niche into which some one may thrust him. The masses who are most helpfully reached by the Tuskegee Institute are coming to realize that education in its truest sense is no longer to be regarded as an emotional impulse, a fetish made up of loosely joined information, to be worshiped for its mere possession, but as a practical means to a definite end. They are being taught that mind-training is the logical helpmeet of hand-training, and that both, supplemented and sweetened by heart-training, make ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... reasons for this anomalous situation. One of them is our inheritance of a deep-rooted Puritan distrust of a liturgical service. That distrust is today a fetish and therefore much more potent that it was when it was a reason. Puritanism was born in the Reformation; it came out from the Roman church, where worship was regarded as an end in itself. To Catholic believers worship is a contribution to God, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... stud, hunk. one-night stand. pornography, porn, porno; hardcore pornography, softcore pornography; pin-up, cheesecake; beefcake; [magazines with sexual photos], Playboy, Esquire, Hustler. [unorthodox sexual activity] perversion, deviation, sexual abnormality; fetish, fetishism; homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality; sodomy, buggery; pederasty; sadism. masochism, sado-masochism; incest. V. mate, copulate; make love, have intercourse, fornicate, have sex, do it, sleep together, fuck [Vulg.]; sleep ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... depends upon our being able to clear it away, and to convince [xv] those who mechanically serve some stock notion or operation, and thereby go astray, that it is not culture's work or aim to give the victory to some rival fetish, but simply to turn a free and fresh stream of thought upon the whole matter in question. In a thing of more immediate interest, just now, than either of the two we have mentioned, the like misunderstanding prevails; ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... behind Pard through brush. She had pulled him from a quicksand bed,—made of cement that showed a strong tendency to "set" about his form before she could rescue him,—and she had fought with him on the edge of a cliff and had thrown him over; and his director, anxious for the "punch" that was his fetish, had insisted on a panorama of the fall, so that there was no chance for Gil to save himself the bruises he got. Gil Huntley's part it was always to die a violent death, or to be captured spectacularly, because ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... tingle with a sense of tolerant superiority when they say: "Of course this is not the kind of thing you would like." Sometimes these impressionable souls almost seem to make a sort of reputation for their fetish. ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... trembled into silence, and she stood there swallowing, her head bent, and her hands crossed over her breast, and clasped firmly there was the crucifix she had found in the guest room. Little pagan that she was, she regarded it entirely as a fetish of much potency with white people, and surely she needed help of all gods when she spoke for the whole pueblo to this man who had power over ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... get popular. It was rumored he was fabulously wealthy—a slight exaggeration—and this helped him through, for the money-worship fetish prevailed even among "noble lords." Cholmondeley, who knew all the ropes in this intricate mesh of British social life, intimated that a peerage might be bought for L50,000. But Jim wasn't ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild |
