"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Fetish, though used by the negroes themselves, is known to be a corrupt application of the Portuguese word for witchcraft, feitico; the vernacular name is Bossum, or Bossifoe. Upon the Gold Coast every nation has its own, every village, every family, and every ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXIX. - March, 1843, Vol. LIII. • Various
... Except for 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 and mentality ...
— With the "Die-Hards" in Siberia • John Ward
... 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 ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 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 ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... He often tells me, with a quiet, good-humoured sneer, as of one talking to a child, that it does not keep off the rain. His view is that I, in my incomprehensible Pakeha way, imagine the thing to be an anti-rain fetish; a notion which superior Maori wisdom ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... sacredness difficult to express in words. Loyalty to something is an ingredient in our moral constitution; and the more vague the object, the more rabid will be our devotion to the symbol. Any badge is good enough to adore, provided the worshipper has in some way identified the fetish with himself—anything, from the standard of St. George to the "forky pennon" of Lord Marmion; from the Star-spangled Banner to the Three Legs of the Isle ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... craving to serve with Indian Cavalry. To that end, his knowledge of the language, his horsemanship, his daring and resource in scout work, had stood him in good stead. Paul—who scarcely knew him at the time—very soon discovered that he had secured an asset for the Regiment—the great Fetish, that claimed his paramount allegiance, and began to look like ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, aesthetic circles, of which the balladist was ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... national growth, is a superstition borrowed from the West. Eating is a process just as vital as the other sanitary necessities of life. And if mankind had not, much to its harm, made of eating a fetish and indulgence we would have performed the operation of eating in private even as one performs the other necessary functions of life in private. Indeed the highest culture in Hinduism regards eating in that light and there are thousands of Hindus still living who will not eat their food in ...
— Freedom's Battle - Being a Comprehensive Collection of Writings and Speeches on the Present Situation • Mahatma Gandhi
... or 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
... throughout that we are dealing with the Atlantean race only, so that any reference would be out of place that bore on the still more degraded fetish-worship that even then existed—as it still does—amongst the debased representatives ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... thinking that the Court would rise, determined to wait for a little. But, at the last moment, a negro was put up to answer to a charge of participation in Fetish rites. The case seemed sufficiently clear from the outset, but somehow Hatteras delayed its conclusion. There was evidence and unrebutted evidence of the usual details—human sacrifice, mutilations and the like, but Hatteras pressed for more. He sat until it was dusk, ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... adoration, homage; idolatry, deification, apotheosis. Associated Words: liturgies, liturgy, ritual, cult, fetish, fetishism, totem, totemism. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... production; and what is true of 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 ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... coloured muffler, and it is to be feared that an officer from a battleship might have referred to them collectively as a "something lot of pirates." Pirates they may have been, but at the best of times a strict adherence to the uniform regulations is not a fetish of those serving on board the vessels of the Auxiliary Patrol. They are, it is perfectly true, granted a sum of money by a paternal Government wherewith to purchase their kit, but brass buttons and best serge ...
— Stand By! - Naval Sketches and Stories • Henry Taprell Dorling
... but now comes the party of modern ideas. "All that is very well," say they. "Our ancestors were worthy folk enough; they did the best they could in their time. But the world moves, and wise birds will move with it. Why should we make a fetish out of some dead forefather's example? We are alive now. To refuse to take advantage of increased light and improved conditions may look like filial piety in the eyes of some: to us such conduct appears nothing better than a distrust of the Divine ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... astonishing fact than would have been its formation after the artificial method vulgarly 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 of the savage. ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... of them, who have hitherto contrived to direct public opinion in this matter. We look upon Public Opinion with no superstitious reverence,—for Tom's way of thinking is none the wiser because the million other Toms and Dicks and Harries agree with him,—nevertheless, even a fetish may justly become an object of respectful interest to one who is to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... continued, airily. "You know perfectly well you do make a fetish of the Language Question; and that your back-veldt followers believe the Bible was written in Dutch for the Dutch race alone; and that you start having coffee at daybreak, with relays up to breakfast-time. And you don't expect your natives or your women to possess such a thing as ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... few, however, of his original Mongolian warriors followed Timour in the invasion of India. His armies latterly appear to have consisted chiefly of Turcomans and Persians. It was to obtain popularity amongst these soldiery that he abandoned his old religion, a kind of fetish, or sorcery, ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... 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 it, it escapes at once both the rashness of impatience and ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... aberrations as being akin to the crowd behavior mechanism at work in the "bobby-sox craze." Teen-agers don't know why they squeal and swoon when their current fetish sways and croons. Yet everybody else is squealing, so they squeal too. Maybe that great comedian, Jimmy Durante, has the answer: "Everybody wants to get into the act." I am convinced that a certain percentage of UFO reports come from people who see flying saucers because others ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... vagueness and 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 ...
— Alexandria and her Schools • Charles Kingsley
... of being restful and recreative, sitting in comfortable attitudes and at peace with themselves and each other, and now and again, perhaps three or four times in an hour, making a worthy and memorable remark, they are all haggard and intent upon keeping this fetish flow agoing. A fortuitous score of cows in a field are a thousand times happier than a score of people deliberately assembled for the purposes of happiness. These conversationalists say the most shallow and needless of things, impart aimless information, simulate interest they do not feel, and ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... was supposed to be a cojoor, or fetish. This was the grey bird of West Africa, that was unknown in these parts. The interpreter explained that "it could speak like a human being, and that it flew about the country and listened to what people said—all of which it repeated to its mistress and myself; thus we knew everything that occurred, ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker
... a time in this country, even in this country, when a boy or girl went to an institution of higher learning for only one reason: to get an education. And now! Stadia and bowls instead of laboratories and classrooms. Physical perfection has become a fetish and ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... the southern Koders the 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 prayers ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... baulked, as we have seen, by the supposed necessity of all the orbit planes passing through the earth, and if Copernicus had simply transferred this responsibility to the sun he would have done better. But he would not sacrifice the old fetish, and so, the orbit of the earth being clearly not circular with respect to the sun, he made all his planetary planes pass through the centre of the earth's orbit, instead of through the sun, thus handicapping himself in the same way though not in the same degree as Ptolemy. His thirty-four ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant
... struggles, from the shelter of their own roofs, on the plea that death would pollute their dwellings. Such compliances with Paganism, make Pagans of ourselves. Nor, again, ought the professed worship of devils to be tolerated, more than the Fetish worship, or the African witchcraft, was tolerated in the West Indies. Having, at last, obtained secure possession of the entire island, with no reversionary fear over our heads, (as, up to Waterloo, we always had,) that possibly at a general peace we might ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the preparation for victory in repentance and return. At the time of the first fight at Eben-ezer, Israel was full of idolatry and immorality. Then their preparation for battle was the mere bringing the ark into the camp, as if it were a fetish or magic charm. That was pure heathenism, and they were idolaters in such worship of Jehovah, just as much as if they had been bowing to Baal. Many of us rely on our baptism or on churchgoing precisely in the same spirit, and are as truly pagans. Not the name of ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... priestess or oracle of their worship. This worship evidently had its origin in Ancient Egypt since, although they did not seem to know it, the priestess was nothing less than a personification of the great goddess Isis, and the Ivory Child, their fetish, was a statue of the infant Horus, the fabled son of Isis and Osiris whom the Egyptians looked upon as the overcomer of Set or the Devil, the murderer of Osiris before his resurrection and ascent to Heaven to be the god of ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... if you make a fetish of the house, if the house stands in the way of your helping your own flesh ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker
... are led not by the bridle but by a thick cotton leading-rope which is passed 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 ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetish of the words 'the people,' so you make one of the word 'proletariat.' Like them, you substitute revolutionary phrases for revolutionary evolution."[18] This statement of Marx is one of the most significant documents of the period and certainly ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter
... stretched her grey hands over the sunlit city. Even 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 ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Institution Vergnes; our sorry subjection to which argues to my present sense an unmitigated surrounding aridity. To a "French school" must have been earnestly imputed the virtue of keeping us in patience till easier days should come; infinitely touching our parents' view of that New York fetish of our young time, an "acquisition of the languages"—an acquisition reinforcing those opportunities which we enjoyed at home, so far as they mustered, and at which I have briefly glanced. Charming and amusing to me indeed certain faint echoes, wavering images, of this ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... 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
... Elinor was different. In a strange way she had felt that it was an injustice toward her father, and she began to worship him like a fetish. Even though she but dimly remembered him, she recreated him for herself in most vivid fashion by becoming absorbed in everything she had ever heard about him. She asked Kastager about him and Tage, and every morning and night she kissed a medallion-portrait of his which ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen
... 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
... out, nowhere before nor since has pure legality been made such a fetish. It was a game played by lawyers, not an attempt to get justice done. Since, in all criminal cases at least, the prosecution was carried on by one man and his associates, poorly paid and hence of mediocre ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... 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 it, but there was no possible guarantee against her occasionally ...
— When William Came • Saki
... 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
... are many 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, pleasing to Him apart ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by which my heart might have ventured to intimate its distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony and joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my small bedroom at Mrs. King's lodgings, and they two should have been my household gods, from which my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the tender and the mighty, should never, either by softness or strength, have severed me. But this was ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... old priest who had seen and forgiven much, or men who knew and pitied youth, would have understood. Neither of the men to whom she spoke realized the significance of that childishly pitiful confession. Champneys felt that she had shamed his name, belittled the sacred Family which was his fetish; Glenn thought she had made a fool of him for her own amusement. Never again would he trust a woman, he told himself. And in his pain and shame, his smarting sense of having been duped, his hideous revulsion of feeling, he spoke out brutally. Nancy was left in no doubt as to the ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... request, but I knew his kindness, and felt I might ask the favour. Baron Martin, I should think, never in his life did an unkind act or refused to do a kind one. He instantly complied with my request, and did not listen for a moment to the "public interest," as the foolish fetish is called which sometimes does duty for its neglect. The "public interest" on this occasion was the interests of all those who had entrusted their business to my keeping. The public interests are the interests ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... this! Many's the time He came to us in them old days, lawless days! 'Tis different to-day. He'd not bait men savage naked now. The kingdoms of the earth, he'd offer—wealth an' success—wealth an' success—the fetish o' sons o' men to-day. 'Twould not be simple cards for drink y'd play! Bigger stakes—bigger stakes, boys! He'd bait men's souls wi' bigger stakes! If I were young I'd take his bet an' play for the biggest stakes outside ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... at Oom 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 the oracle ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... function as a 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 its use, or want of use, and the process was slow. He may have ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... of different systems of physic, the representatives of the various priesthoods, but in their too credulous—or shall we say, too faithful patients? —the representatives of all sects. There is, for example, the superstitious vulgar in medicine,—the gross worshipper of the Fetish, who believes in the efficacy of charm, and spell, and incantation, of mere ceremonial and opus operatum; then there is the polytheist, who will adore any thing in the shape of a drug, and who is continually quacking himself with some nostrum ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... him, the legislation of the country altered on his behalf, the taxation of the public judiciously contrived to steer clear of him. He is the typical 'working-man,' my dear, of whom demagogues are always prating:—the fetish, before which so-called 'liberal' statesmen ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... is not necessary to speak. The preceding volumes of this work have been written in vain, if the reader has not obtained from irrefragable testimony—the monarch's own especially—a sufficient knowledge of that human fetish before which so much of contemporary ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... Senegal, and we were very eager to go and see the 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 ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... day Germany will find herself at the level of European decay, before she has ever stood at the level of European emancipation. The phenomenon may be likened to a fetish-worshipper, who succumbs to the diseases ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... Truth a farthing rushlight, to be pinched out when you will With your deft official fingers, and your politicians' skill? Is your God a wooden fetish, to be hidden out of sight That his block eyes may not see you do the thing that is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... pompous big stiff," complained Jack, "the kind that makes a fetish of morning and evening dress ... wears kid gloves ... and a top hat ... he has both ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... 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 ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... developing in what is being done this side the sea, a rediscovery of native art of the sort that is occurring in all countries. The artist is being taught by means of war that there is no longer a conventional center of art, that the time-worn fetish of Paris as a necessity in his development has been dispensed with; and this is fortunate for the artist and for art in general. It is having its pronounced effect upon the creative powers of the individual in all countries, almost obliging him to create his own impulse upon his own soil; ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley
... 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 ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... experience in knowledge is not possible without it. That is only to say that the reason why we assume that nature is a connected system of uniform laws, lies in the fact that we ourselves are self-conscious personalities. When the naturalists say that the notion of cause is a fetish, an anthropomorphic superstition which we must eliminate, we have to answer: 'from the realm of empirical science perhaps, but not from experience as a whole.' Indeed, a glance at the history, and particularly at the popular literature, of science affords the interesting spectacle of the ...
— Edward Caldwell Moore - Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant • Edward Moore
... to his 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 have been equally ready to deprive him had the ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... you when it is discovered that you know a little something of pack-trains is, "Do you throw the Diamond Hitch?" Now the Diamond is a pretty hitch and a firm one, but it is by no means the fetish some people make of it. They would have you believe that it represents the height of the packer's art; and once having mastered it, they use it religiously for every weight, shape, and size of pack. The truth of the matter is that the style of hitch should be varied according to the ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... 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 ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... certain intolerable nastiness about the real Ibsen: the same thing is in Strindberg and in most of the Norwegian and Swedish writings. It is with them a sort of phallic worship also, but now the worship is mental and perverted: the phallus is the real fetish, but it is the source of uncleanliness and corruption and death, it is the Moloch, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... punch on the nose from him. Fine arms, 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 ...
— Tales of Unrest • Joseph Conrad
... yet done anything like justice to the old soldier cult in the post-bellum South. Doubtless it may lie out of the province of you historians, but what a theme for a new Thackeray! With such a fetish your priestcraft of the Middle Ages is not to be compared for a moment. There is no parallel among civilized nations; to find one you must go to the Voodooism of the savage black. For more than a generation all the intelligence of the South has been asked, nay compelled, ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... the Colonel is not here. Never speak of the big drum in that irreverent tone to him, I pray. It would well-nigh give him a fit. The big drum is his fetish, though he nearly smashed it ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... minor restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing that has reached to the roots of the matter—probably because of the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England, the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of alcoholism and have taken real ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... 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
... free, energetic, wild-falcon spirit had never as yet troubled itself with thoughts of such kind. She had made a hero for herself out of the Dictator—she almost adored him; but it was with the most genuine hero-worship—or fetish-worship, if that be the better and harsher way of putting it—and she had never thought of being in love with him. Her highest ambition up to this hour was to be his friend and to be admitted to his confidence, and—oh, happy recognition!—to ...
— The Dictator • Justin McCarthy
... work for. Now fate was so unkind as to make me a country squire, and not only that, but one bound down, like Gulliver among the Liliputians, with all manner of cords by all the dear good excellent folks, who look on that old mediaeval den with a kind of fetish-worship, sprung of their having been kept out of it so long, and it would be an utter smash of all their hearts if I uttered a profane word against it. I would as soon be an ancient Egyptian drowning a cat as move a stone of it. It is ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... some superstitious rites employed by Fetish-men for the detection of crime; and whether it is that these people really possess such powerful influence over their wretched dupes, as to frighten into confession of his guilt the perpetrator of crime, or whether it is that they manage by their numerous spies to obtain ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... who are, with all their faults, at any rate true to the faith they profess—and lastly—more than all—of the thousands upon thousands of Christians in Christian lands, who no more believe in Him whose holy name they take in vain, than in any Mumbo-Jumbo fetish of untaught barbarians. Were these to perish utterly? Had THEY no immortal souls to save? Had the churches been at work for eighteen hundred years and more, to bring about no better results than this,—namely that there were only "A FEW NAMES IN SARDIS"? If so, were ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... Badagry. Progress up the River. Arrival at Wow Regulations of the Fetish at Wow. The Village of Sagba. Passage of a Swamp. Basha. Soato. Arrival at Bidjie. Bad Faith of Adooley. Introduction to the Chief of Bidjie. Departure from Bidjie Arrival of a Messenger from Jenna. Laatoo. Larro. The Chief of Larro. ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... decapitated and the head of the 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 churches, ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... the packed front room into the passage, and then into a sort of bar parlour. Malim and I also made our way there. "That's the fetish of the club," said Malim, pointing to a barrel standing on end; "and I'll introduce you to the man who is sitting on it. He's little Michael, the musical critic. They once put on an operetta of his at the Court. It ran about two nights, ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... in his chair. The plotting waters were deepening swiftly, much too swiftly for him. Loyalty to his superior officer, the unquestioning loyalty that disregards motives entirely and does not look too closely at methods, was his fetish. But these men were not merely loyal to Mr. North. They were criminals—he stuck at the word, but there was no other—fighting for their ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... Shakespeares and the Arthur Ortons and the Mrs. Eddys. We get them all at second-hand, we reason none of them out for ourselves. It is the way we are made. It is the way we are all made, and we can't help it, we can't change it. And whenever we have been furnished a fetish, and have been taught to believe in it, and love it and worship it, and refrain from examining it, there is no evidence, howsoever clear and strong, that can persuade us to withdraw from it our loyalty ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... 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 to be ranked ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... Christianity to have proclaimed this truth, through all their aberrations. But the worship of a God who needs forgiveness and help, and deserves pity every hour of his existence, is no better than that of any other voluntarily selected fetish. The Emperor Julian's project was hopeful in comparison with the prospects of ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... population being about 2000. In the coast towns the majority of the white inhabitants are Portuguese. The Mushi-Kongo and other divisions of the Ba-Kongo retain curious traces of the Christianity professed by them in the 16th and 17th centuries and possibly later. Crucifixes are used as potent fetish charms or as symbols of power passing down from chief to chief; whilst every native has a "Santu" or Christian name and is dubbed dom or dona. Fetishism is the prevailing religion throughout the province. The dwelling-places of the natives are usually small huts of ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various
... receive degrees and public advancement upon ability to transcribe from memory without the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than anything else. Learning is a kind of fetish, and it has no influence whatever upon the great inert ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not a deliberate lie. The lawyer thinks he owes a moral obligation to his client and to himself to cross-examine. He is compelled to go on. There is a musty tradition of the law that a trial without cross-examination is not a proper trial. It is a legal fetish and one of the things that is done. The judge expects it, the jury expect it, the client expects ...
— The Man in Court • Frederic DeWitt Wells
... constituted authority, competent and willing to pronounce final decision upon any subject that might trouble the human mind. Science has no such tribunal, and when she forbids others to observe and to reflect she is no better than a blind fetish. ...
— Real Ghost Stories • William T. Stead
... believed to be shed down upon the Earth by those stars and their close association with human destinies have rendered them objects of almost sacred interest among the different races of mankind. In every region of the globe and in every clime, among civilised nations and savage fetish-worshipping tribes, the same benign influences were ascribed to the stars which ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... 'idol, charm,'), devised originally as a name of charms used by the natives of the West African coast, is often employed as a general name for early religious practices. Its proper use is in the sense of a dead object, as a piece of clay or a twig, in which, it is held, a spirit dwells. The fetish is often practically a god, often a household god; the interesting thing about it is that the spirit, generally a tutelary spirit, can enter the object or depart at will, may be brought in by appropriate ceremonies, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... 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 the trunk of ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... not been for a few brave and heroic souls in every age, we would have been naked savages this moment, with pictures of wild beasts tattooed upon our naked breasts, dancing around a dried snake fetish; and I tonight thank every good and noble man who stood up in the face of opposition, and hatred, and death for what he believed to be right. And then they screwed this thumbscrew down as far as they could and threw him into some dungeon, where, in throbbing misery and the darkness ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... once indifferent brother had all at once become a sort of sweet-tasted fetish, stroked David's best coat with his adhesive fingers, and then hugged him with an accompaniment of that mingled chuckling and gurgling by which he was accustomed to express the milder passions. But if he had chosen to bite a small morsel out of his beneficent brother's ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... 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 else—yes! ...
— Where the Souls of Men are Calling • Credo Harris
... of their France and looking out on the ruins of their villages, they had striven to hold what remained to them. They had been the great martial people of Europe and because Napoleon III. tripped them by the fetish of the Bonaparte name in '70, people thought that they were no longer martial. This puts the world in the wrong, as it implies that success in war is the test of greatness. When the world expressed its surprise ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... expressions as the pathetic "Ah, woe, beloved shoot!" of Euripides."[12] Furthermore, as he adds, "Even when the literal notion of the descent from a tree had been lost sight of, the close connection between the prosperity of the tribe and the life of its fetish was often strictly held. The village tree of the German races was originally a tribal tree, with whose existence the life of the village was involved; and when we read of Christian saints and confessors, that they made a point ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... all alone, a seamstress. I had only him, Mouton. One of the tenants had given it to me. He was as intelligent as a child, and gentle as well, and he worshiped me, my dear lady, he worshiped me more than one does a fetish. All day long he would sit on my lap purring, and all night long on my pillow; I could feel his ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... To-day, well-off, owning this shop, "The Mercury," you attribute the success of your undertakings to that clasp. To lose it would to your eyes spell bankruptcy and poverty. Your whole life has been centred upon it. It is your fetish. It is the little household god who watches over you and guides your steps. It is there, somewhere, hidden in this jungle; and no one of course would ever have suspected anything—for I repeat, you are decent people, but ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... trouble until it leaves the movement, in other words, that Socialist friendship for these classes has gone to the point of risking the existence of their organization. Surely their presence is a guarantee that Socialists have not been ruled by the working class or proletarian "fetish," against which Marx warned them more than half a ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... 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 revealed, but as truths implanted in the hearts ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... being 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 Dicky had said: "Let him die—for what he has done, not for something he has not done. ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... 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
... characters Jesus is the most beautiful and the most heroic. I have always been a friend to hero-worship, it is the only rational one, and has always been in use amongst civilised people—the worship of spirits is synonymous with barbarism—it is mere fetish; the savages of West Africa are all spirit- worshippers. But there is something philosophic in the worship of the heroes of the human race, and the true hero is the benefactor. Brahma, Jupiter, Bacchus, were all benefactors, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... how it was with him. To every man his passion and his dream: to Sylvester Hudson, his Aura. More than wife or child, he loved his bar. It was a fetish, an idol. To Sheila's fancy Dickie suddenly ...
— Hidden Creek • Katharine Newlin Burt
... ninth and sixteenth nomes of the Delta in the Pharaonic lists, remained faithful to him, and here he reigned without rival, at Busiris as at Mendes. His most famous idol-form was the Didu, whether naked or clothed, the fetish, formed of four superimposed columns, which had given ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... my hand inside my tunic and stroked Dinky and said to him, "For God's sake, Dink, see me through this time." I meant it too. I was actually praying,—to my mascot. I realize that this was plain, unadulterated, heathenish fetish worship, but it shows what a man reverts to in the ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes
... replied. "He must not know, or the plans of the Naya may be thwarted. Our enemies have arranged to strike their blow three moons from now, but ere that we shall be back in Mo, and they will find that they go only to their graves. Kouaga has made fetish for the son of his royal mistress, and has come to ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... later days was an apostate from his own creed; his "nouveau grand Etre supreme," being as big a fetish as ever nigger ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... astonishment, the disappointment and rage as news of each disaster came in; then that awful business at Sedan, the uprising of the scum here, the flight of the Empress, the proclamation of the Republic, and the idiotic idea that seized the Parisians that the Republic was a sort of fetish, and that the mere fact of its establishment would arrest the march of the Germans. Well, now we are going to have a siege, I suppose, and as I have never seen one, it will be interesting. Of course I have no shadow of faith in the chattering ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... inexpedient to urge it, when the object in view was the solution of a pressing difficulty with regard to Ireland taken apart from the rest of the United Kingdom. But that difficulty will be removed under Tariff Reform—one-sided Free Trade is no longer a sacrosanct fetish—and the case of Ireland must be taken not as apart from, but as part of, the United Kingdom. Irish interests, Agricultural and Industrial, can be far better promoted, furthered, and secured under a scientific tariff ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various
... cup of tea which Marna was offering her guests, and as she looked wistfully out of her tangle of dark hair,—in which lines of silver already were beginning to appear,—she impressed herself upon Kate's mind as one of the innumerable army of martyrs to the fetish of fecundity which had borne down men and ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... With him, sincerity in art was a fetish; in life, a superfluity. But for the moment he was genuinely moved. The poseur's mask which he habitually wore slipped aside and the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... 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 on the ground, and said, that he felt a severe shock in ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... the Moslem, not the Jewish 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 ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... down the cracked concrete walk, passed the big plate-glass windows of Murphy's General Store which were a kind of fetish in Glen Oaks. But Doctor Spechaug wasn't concerned with the cultural significance of the windows. He was concerned with ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... "Duty is your fetish. You sacrifice your whole life to it. And what do you get in return? A sense of virtue perhaps, nothing more. There isn't much warming power in virtue. I've tried it and I know!" He broke off to utter a very bitter laugh. "And so I've given ...
— The Knave of Diamonds • Ethel May Dell
... governance of the universe. No doubt, from the first, there were certain phenomena which, to the rudest mind, presented a constancy of occurrence, and suggested that a fixed order ruled, at any rate, among them. I doubt if the grossest of Fetish worshippers ever imagined that a stone must have a god within it to make it fall, or that a fruit had a god within it to make it taste sweet. With regard to such matters as these, it is hardly questionable that mankind from the first took strictly ...
— On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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
... tremor of feeling, a new sense of introspectiveness to the American short story. As Faulkner put it, Anderson's "was the fumbling for exactitude, the exact word and phrase within the limited scope of a vocabulary controlled and even repressed by what was in him almost a fetish of simplicity ... to seek always to penetrate to thought's uttermost end." And in many younger writers who may not even be aware of the Anderson influence, you can see touches of his approach, echoes of ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... become slave to a small point of inquiry, and you call it the advance to a new time. "The crusade is on," you say. Coronation rites for the commoners and destruction to superstition. I put my hand out to you in joy. The joy is in unholy worship of a fetish, the pain that there is no joy also deference to a fetish. Your creed thunders "Thou shalt not." Love is a thing of yesterday. No room for anything that intimately concerns the self. But what are the apostles of the young thought ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... west across Africa the aboriginal nations are mostly of 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 a large proportion ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... omitting references to his opponents has here caused me infinite inconvenience. He speaks of some eccentric person who has averred that a 'fetish' is a 'totem,' inhabited by 'an ancestral spirit.' To myself it seems that you might as well say 'Abracadabra is gas and gaiters.' As no reference was offered, I invented 'a wild surmise' that Mr. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... loved her!" he thought. "If ever I cease to love her then I shall be as stone-cold a man as her fetish of a French knight, the Sieur Amadis! Ah, my little Innocent, in time to come you may understand what love is—perhaps to your sorrow!—you may need a strong defender—and I shall be ready! Sooner or later—now or years hence—if you call me, I shall answer. I would find strength ...
— Innocent - Her Fancy and His Fact • Marie Corelli
... persistence of being innate, but it is also universal. It has been found in every land, in every time, in every religion. Dr. Matthewson has finely argued that the savage worships a fetish because he is seeking something which does not change[8]. He knows that he dies; he worships that which he thinks does not die. A piece of wood or a stone, at first, seems to him more enduring than a man; therefore he worships the fetish. Gradually ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... we used to receive letters from him not infrequently; he sent me the "Luck of Apemama," which he sacrilegiously purchased from its holder. This fetish, the palladium of the island, was in one point remarkable—a very ordinary shell in a perfectly new box of native make. Why it was thought "great medicine" and ignorantly worshipped, the pale-face student of magic and religion could not understand. However, it was the Luck of the island, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... aberration which is called religion, and a survey of the present state of the world, from the fetish worshipper of central Africa to the super-subtle Theist of educated Europe, furnish us with countless illustrations of the truth of Montaigne's exclamation. God-making has always been a prevalent pastime, although it has ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (First Series) • George W. Foote
... took no notice of its remarks—still it went on, as if knowing that sooner or later he would be drawn towards it; and so he was, and passed the tape through his fingers, pausing here and there; and so throughout the day that little chattering fetish dominated him and every one that entered the room. Men came in, and while waiting, or in a pause in conversation, would be drawn to see what was on its tongue. There is nothing more striking about business in New York than the ease and rapidity with which business is carried out. There had been ...
— Impressions of a War Correspondent • George Lynch
... 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 ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... affair from a hygienic or artistic standpoint. Its face was just inked on, it had no features, no arms; yet not for all the dolls in the world would she have exchanged this filthy and nearly formless thing. It was a fetish. ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult. Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, thought it be only a memorial spoon, is holy and is eagerly and passionately and gratefully bought by the disciple, and becomes a fetish in his house. I say bought, for the Boston Christian-Science Trust gives nothing away; everything it has for sale. And the terms are cash; and not cash only but cash in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real one. From end to end of the Christian-Science ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... along the corredor away from her husband's room. The fate of the San Tome mine was lying heavy upon her heart. It was a long time now since she had begun to fear it. It had been an idea. She had watched it with misgivings turning into a fetish, and now the fetish had grown into a monstrous and crushing weight. It was as if the inspiration of their early years had left her heart to turn into a wall of silver-bricks, erected by the silent work of evil spirits, between her ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad
... machinery, to light itself up again, and help poor human beings! Really, my dear brothers, I am not in jest: you seem but too likely now-a-days to arrive at some such catastrophe—sentimental philosophy for the 'enlightened' few, and fetish-worship (of which nominally Christian forms are as possible as heathen ones) for the masses.—At that you may only too probably arrive—unless you repent, and 'get back ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... no loves, no hates, no virtues, no genial vices after the manner of these frontiersmen. Avarice had warmed the cockles of his heart, and the fetish he prayed to was an old gray woollen stocking, stuffed so full of twenty-dollar gold pieces that it presented the bulbous appearance of the "before treatment" view of a chiropodist's sign. This darling of his old age had been waxing fat since Chugg's earliest manhood. It had been his only love—till ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... this uncanny mixture of bird and reptile that has made the kingfisher an object of superstition among all savage peoples. The legends about him are legion; his crested head is prized by savages above all others as a charm or fetish; and even among civilized peoples his dried body may still sometimes be seen hanging to a pole, in the hope that his bill will point out the quarter from which the next wind ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... it is all unanswerable, and as I ride along through the evening shadows I sneer at that Great Fetish which Comte called the world. And I remember what another pessimist of sentiency has uttered: "Transient are all. They, being born, must die, and, being dead, are ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... told. Among soldiers of the best sort the Regiment is apt to be a fetish, and to Desmond the lightest imputation of disregard for its ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... 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 has invaded Sherbroland, ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... especially sanguinary," Mr Vladimir went on, as if delivering a scientific lecture, "but they must be sufficiently startling—effective. Let them be directed against buildings, for instance. What is the fetish of the hour that all the ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... reason that will never be understood until all souls are judged (if they are ever judged; the idea was at this time classed with fetish worship) he did not join his two companions, but walked steadily behind them. The day was dull, their dress was dull, everything was dull; but in some odd impulse he walked through street after street, through district after district, looking at the ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... his 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 priest, whom they call . ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... 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 ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... for the second almost cost him his life. He rescued a poor slave girl in order to be faithful to a trust imposed in him, and taught her the truths of Allah. The silver leaf was his reward. He found it in the heathen fetish which she gave him in her gratitude. It ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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 ought to feel that the place whereon we stand ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... perchance in some primitive instinct of taboo; of a superstition of fetish-worship fencing off sacred things as unmentionable, and reinforced by the bad Puritan notion that holy things are by ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... everyone that ought to be known, and who would visit a comparatively humble patient with equal interest. Quain was thoroughly good-natured, ever friendly and even affectionate. Forster's belief in him was as that in a fetish. ...
— John Forster • Percy Hethrington Fitzgerald
... her step-mother into the house but remained for a while on the veranda, thinking. It was clearly useless to reopen the subject of the prescription. For some reason Mrs. Coombe regarded it as a fetish. She would not trust it to Taylor's. She would not allow a doctor to see it; there remained only the suggestion of Dr. Callandar that it be inspected without her consent. Esther knew where the prescription ...
— Up the Hill and Over • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... over the Spanish people. The same storm of wild, unreasoning loyalty which had followed Ferdinand's reappearance in Spain followed the overthrow of the Constitution. The mass of the Spaniards were ignorant of the very meaning of political liberty: they adored the King as a savage adores his fetish: their passions were at the call of a priesthood as brutish and unscrupulous as that which in 1798 had excited the Lazzaroni of Naples against the Republicans of Southern Italy. No sooner had Ferdinand set the example, by arresting thirty of the ...
— History of Modern Europe 1792-1878 • C. A. Fyffe
... the experiment will be completed, but not by the autocratic power. In his opinion autocracy is "played out," and must give way to Parliamentary institutions. For him a Constitution is a kind of omnipotent fetish. You may try to explain to him that a Parliamentary regime, whatever its advantages may be, necessarily produces political parties and political conflicts, and is not nearly so suitable for grand sociological experiments as a good ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... cried Lavender, "that is another of your delusions. You are always against superstitions, and yet you make work a fetish. You do with work just as women do with duty: they carry about with them a convenient little god, and they are always worshiping it with small sacrifices, and complimenting themselves on a series of little martyrdoms that are of no ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... enough of that kind of life, he showed the same simplicity in giving it up as in beginning it. There are some who could have done the one, but, vanity forbidding, not the other; and that is perhaps the story of the hermits; but Thoreau made no fetish of his own example, and did what he wanted squarely. And five years is long enough for an experiment and to prove the success of transcendental Yankeeism. It is not his frugality which is worthy of note; for, to begin with, that was inborn, and therefore ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... illustrate the poetic spirit of the great war in a superlative degree. His posthumous volume, brought out in May 1915, a few weeks after his death, has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that of all the other poems of the war put together. He has become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France, an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, in this connection, that neither Peguy nor Brooke had the opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as it seemed for the moment, ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... Pruning this sentence of its magniloquence, might it perhaps mean that there was a large palisaded village, and that the chief had some books in Roman characters, a relic of some castaway, which he kept as a fetish?] ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... one of the Colonies practised slavery, with torture, for the sake of private gain, and that the mere name of Empire wearied and sickened them. On these grounds they stood to save England; on these grounds they were elected, with what seemed like clear orders to destroy the blood-stained fetish of Empire as soon as possible. The present mellow condition of Ireland, Egypt, India, and South Africa is proof of their honesty and obedience. Over and above this, their mere presence in office produced all along our lines the same moral effect ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... Gavino Pacheco Zegarra derives Huanacauri from huanaya, to rest oneself, and cayri, here; "c'est ici qu'il faut se reposer." Ollantai, Introd., p. xxv. It was distinctly the huzca, or sacred fetish of the Incas, and they were figuratively said to have descended from it. Its worship was very prominent in ancient Peru. See the Information de las Idolatras de los Incas y ...
— American Hero-Myths - A Study in the Native Religions of the Western Continent • Daniel G. Brinton
... the ground that it was unlawful to do so during the festival of the great Ju-Ju, whose worshipers could be heard wailing and beating tom-toms nightly in some unknown part of the jungle. What this Ju-Ju fetish was nobody could tell; it had come into the village recently, from the coast, men whispered; it possessed awful and mysterious potency; was guarded zealously by some score of priests, who veiled its awful vision; and it was the greatest Ju-Ju for hundreds of miles along the Niger, ...
— Golden Stories - A Selection of the Best Fiction by the Foremost Writers • Various
... funky ob him, neider! My fader in Jamaiky he one big fetish man; an' I not 'fraid ob Captain Snaggs, or de debbel, or any odder man; an' I wants ter go ter 'Frisco, too, an' dat's de reason ...
— The Island Treasure • John Conroy Hutcheson
... I did not say what I had intended. I was thinking that in the old days McCord had made rather a fetish of touching nothing stronger than beer. Neither had he been of the shoulder-clapping sort. "So you've got something aboard?" ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... not like dem in de other islands. Here dey tink themselves better than white men; bery ignorant fellows, sar. Most of dem lost religion, and go back to fetish. Bery bad dat. All sorts of bad things in dat affair. Kill children and women to make fetish. Bad people, sar, and dey are worse here than at ...
— The Queen's Cup • G. A. Henty
... the commencement of the "Dark 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 peoples of Europe. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... will you not find their features in some circles of the social world right around you? Idolatry! you cannot find any more gross, any more cruel, on the broad earth, than within the area of a mile around this pulpit. Dark minds from which God is obscured; deluded souls, whose fetish is the dice-box or the bottle; apathetic spirits, steeped in sensual abomination, unmoved by a moral ripple, soaking in the slump of animal vitality. False gods, more hideous, more awful, than Moloch or Baal; worshipped with shrieks, worshipped with curses, with the ...
— Humanity in the City • E. H. Chapin
... gas. The curiosity about it, in the eyes of this incisive Gaul, was "not the divinity, but the worshipers." All day long a crowd filed solemnly by it under the supervision of a detachment of police, each pilgrim bestowing upon the fetish, "an egg-shaped lump of glass," half a second's adoration, and then moving reluctantly on. Thousands of far more beautiful things were around it, but none embodying in so small a space so many dollars and cents, and none therefore so brilliant in the light ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... nations who believe themselves wiser than they, worship with reverence a bread, into which they imagine that the enchantments of their priests cause the Divinity to descend? Is not the God-bread the fetish of many Christian nations, as little rational in this point as that of the most ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... 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 basin he readjusted his costume with the gravity of a ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... means only the prosperity of a class. Yet such is the curious glamour that surrounds this, subject and makes a fetish of statistics about "imports and exports," that nothing is more common than for such prosperity to be taken to mean the prosperity of the nation as a whole. The commercial people, having command of the Press, and of the avenues ...
— The Healing of Nations and the Hidden Sources of Their Strife • Edward Carpenter
... my life I found my sentiments arraying themselves against custom, tradition, and even government. The wave of rebellion swept over me in an instant, beginning with an heretical doubt as to the sanctity of the established order of things—that fetish which has ruled Pan-Americans for two centuries, and which is based upon a blind faith in the infallibility of the prescience of the long-dead framers of the articles of Pan-American federation—and ending in an adamantine ...
— The Lost Continent • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... well have that courage. Suppose him in taking his stand to have taken up some social faith that for him has promise of better things. He will find his new creed surrounded by its own swarm of prejudices, and if he refuse to worship every fetish of the free-thinker, declaring that this stands to him for a certain definite, beautiful thing, and fighting for it, he will find himself denied and scouted by his new friends. He may find himself ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... obligation. In her fatigue, to rest passive in the midst of quiet, and soft light, calm in the belief, almost the certainty, that this desert village contained no acquaintance to disturb her, was to know all the joy she needed for the moment. She drank it in dreamily. Liberty had always been her fetish. What woman had more liberty than she had, here on this lonely verandah, with the ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens |
