"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... uncomfortable—for the Old 'Un and his pals. THAT'S EXACTLY WHY WE LIKE IT! What's the use of hitting above the belt only when the foe's only vulnerable below it? We rejoice to see the B.B. knocking the sawdust out of the Grand Old Fistic Fetish, and squelching the cant and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, November 7, 1891 • Various
... 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... besides the pleasure of hearing their shrieks on the voyage; and then the superstitions of the blacks, which my brother used to talk of; their sharks' teeth, their wisps of fowls' feathers, their half-baked pots, full of burnt bones, of which they used to make what they called fetish; and bow down to, and ask favours of, and then, perhaps, abuse and strike, provided the senseless rubbish did not give them what they asked for; and then, above all, Mumbo Jumbo, the grand fetish master, who lived somewhere ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... 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 newspaper men and lawyers, who have undertaken ...
— A Girl of the Commune • George Alfred Henty
... 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
... to contend that our rulers are actuated by any personal malevolence or even, at first, by unlawful personal ambition; they are, as I have said, for the most part lawyers, and law is their fetish—their magical cure-all and philosopher's stone. They almost persuade themselves, perhaps, that we the people make the laws; whereas not more than one man in ten thousand—even of lawyers—knows what the law in any given case is, nor would the majority of us approve any particular law, ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... 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
... 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, and then had ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason
... 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 revealed, but as truths implanted in the hearts of men, which ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge
... 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, ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... shape controlling them. Jupiter does not mean thunder. Thunder means the march and victory of Jupiter. Neptune does not mean the sea; the sea is his, and he made it. In other words, what the savage really said about the sea was, "Only my fetish Mumbo could raise such mountains out of mere water." What the savage really said about the sun was, "Only my great great-grandfather Jumbo could deserve such a ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... war-fetish, Ngalyema. The slightest sound of that would fill this empty camp with hundreds of angry warriors; they would drop from above, they would spring up from the ground, from the forest about, ...
— An African Adventure • Isaac F. Marcosson
... 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 ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... or rather apology. Next to trial by jury, and the reverence paid to rank, and the horror of all things which, as poor Corney Grain used to say, 'are not nice,' I reckon the Sunday sirloin, cooked and served, one and indivisible as the typical fetish of the great English middle class. With this fact before my eyes, I can assure you I did not lightly lay a hand on its integrity. My friends, you have eaten that sirloin without knowing it. You may remember that yesterday after lunch the Colonel ...
— The Cook's Decameron: A Study in Taste: - Containing Over Two Hundred Recipes For Italian Dishes • Mrs. W. G. Waters
... shore, and he of all men knew that while the mob would forgive vulgarity—in fact, really enjoyed it—unsoundness of doctrine was to it a hissing. Orthodoxy is very tolerant—it forgives everything but truth. Every fetish of the superstitious and cringing mind, Talmage repeated over and over in varying phrase. He was the antithesis of an independent, exactly as Spurgeon was. It is the fate of every man who lives above the law to be hailed as brother by some of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... 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
... ago blue china was a kind of fetish in some circles, aesthetic circles, of which the balladist ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang
... between a porcelain dragon covered with constellations of warts, its jaws embellished with teeth and tusks, and a hideous little Mexican fetish, representing realistically the god Vitziliputzili, when I noticed a charming foot, which at first I supposed was a fragment of some ...
— Humorous Ghost Stories • Dorothy Scarborough
... no longer entertained the same feeling of contempt for it. Not again would I make light of it,—this potent engine of destruction which had procured me the character of being a magician. I would hide it from human gaze, and cherish it as a sort of fetish. So I bought a walking- stick and an umbrella, and strapped it up with them, wrapped in my plaid; and when, shortly after, an unexpected remittance from an aunt supplied me with money enough to buy a horse from one of the officers of my friend's ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant
... 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 of the population ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... her body 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 ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... from 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. Customs at Larro. Departure from Larro. Introduction at ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... devoted to acquiring a more thorough understanding of our mother tongue it would be more creditable. To give time to translating good Latin into poor English is paying an extravagant homage to a fetish. Training in the ancient languages must be long-continued and far-reaching, or it seems to be of little value. The needs of culture cannot be satisfied by mere discipline any more than they can be satisfied ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst
... 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 ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various
... 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 measures to combat it. Absinthe has been abolished. For the army—and ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... 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 him ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux
... lives. Their tragedies have come and gone already; and their power remains. Why should good women leave power to such as they? Why should good women's lives be wrecked for a convention? Why in the blind following of some society fetish should life lose its charm, its possibilities? Why should love eat its heart out, in vain? The time will come when women will not be afraid to speak to men, as they should speak, as free and equal. Surely if a woman ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker
... 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 ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins
... 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 ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... what convention would have been more apt if it had not been lost sight of as a convention and come to be regarded as an idea in actual correspondence with a more or less knowable reality? A convention was converted into a fetish, and now that its worthlessness as a fetish is being generally felt, its great value as a hieroglyph or convention is in danger of being lost sight of. No doubt the psalmist was seeking for Sir William Grove's conception, if haply he might feel after it and find it, and assuredly it is ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... 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 "taking ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... 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 ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... 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 ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... 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 ...
— Strange Alliance • Bryce Walton
... lines prove our writer's emancipation from servitude to the Calverley fetish, a fetish that, I am convinced, has done harm to many young men of parts. It is pretty, in youth, to play with style as a puppy plays with a bone, to cut teeth upon it. But words are, after all, a poor thing without matter. J.K.S.'s emancipation has come somewhat late; but he has depths in ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... and olives they saw the hill of Eze rising like a horn; while on its almost pointed apex, the old town hung like some carved fetish, to keep away ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... them, and the Incas might show favor to the poor ruined Omaguas, in the day of their coming glory. And as she grew, she had become, it seemed, somewhat of a prophetess among them, as well as an object of fetish-worship; for she was more prudent in council, valiant in war, and cunning in the chase, than all the elders of the tribe; and those strange and sweet songs of hers, which had so surprised the white men, were full of mysterious wisdom ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... of effort expended by many semi-educated individuals to discredit the knowledge of calories, saying that it is a foolish food science, a fallacy, a fetish, ...
— Diet and Health - With Key to the Calories • Lulu Hunt Peters
... melancholy? The seat of melancholy is the liver. Imagine a city with a liver—of brick and mortar, or stone and cement, a huge mass of masonry buried in its centre, like an enormous fetish, exercising a mysterious influence over the city's health—then you may imagine a city as suffering ...
— The Witch of Prague • F. Marion Crawford
... of 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, but he reckons all the events of the world from the ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... 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 it, but there was no possible guarantee against her occasionally ...
— When William Came • Saki
... of mixed blood, but the people are almost black. They are supposed to accept the religion of the Hindus, but are in reality deplorably ignorant and superstitious. Their priests are a sort of compound of a Brahmin priest and a negro fetish man, and among their principal duties is that of charming away tigers from the villages by means of incantations. There, as in other parts of India, were a few wandering fakirs, who enjoyed an immense reputation for holiness and wisdom. ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty
... immediate household; but there, too, the efficiency which had been her fetish made interference unnecessary. Her well-trained servants chuckled among themselves at the Madam's sudden interest in housecleaning, in linen-closet and ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly
... terrier escaped from his bath. This attic was Maggie's 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 the ...
— Short Stories and Selections for Use in the Secondary Schools • Emilie Kip Baker
... 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
... instruction are not enforced, we should not be surprised. It has been nobody's business to see whether and how hygiene is being taught. The moral crusade spent itself in forcing compulsory laws upon the statute books of every state and territory. Making a fetish of Legislation, the advocates of anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco instruction failed to see the truth that experienced political reformers are but slowly coming to see—Legislation which does not provide machinery for its own enforcement is apt to do little good and frequently will ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... and 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
... small lamps, hung from the roof, and in the centre was a figure intended to represent a human being, with an enormous cock's head. Master Cudjoe, if he was the artist, had contrived to produce as hideous-looking a monster as could well be imagined. 'That's the fetish,' whispered Rob; 'they worship it as if ...
— The Missing Ship - The Log of the "Ouzel" Galley • W. H. G. Kingston
... fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken incessant baby-talk, and the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... associated with good fortune, or they may (like a tree with an unexplained stir in its branches, as reported by Kohl) have seemed to show signs of life by spontaneous movements; in fact, a thing may be what Europeans call a fetish for scores of reasons. For our present purpose, as Mr. Tylor says, 'to class an object as a fetish demands explicit statement that a spirit is considered as embodied in it, or acting through it, or communicating by it, or, at least, that the people it belongs to do habitually ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... grub, twenty pounds of blankets, ten of tent, say eight or ten of hardware including the axe, about twenty of duffel. This was further increased by the idiosyncrasy of Billy. He, like most woodsmen, was wedded to a single utterly foolish article of personal belonging, which he worshipped as a fetish, and without which he was unhappy. In his case it was a huge winter overcoat that must have weighed fifteen pounds. The total amounted to about one hundred and ninety pounds. We gave Dick twenty, I took seventy-six, and Billy shouldered ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... 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 would have ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India—Volume I (of IV) • R.V. Russell
... occasion of great public fetes, of sacrifices to the fetish and to the divinities of the sea. All the temples were thrown open for these solemnities, the prayers of the nation were offered there, and at the last moment, when the ship set sail, fifteen prisoners of war were executed on ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... 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 free trade. ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... we read in the Hebrew religious records how the priests were engaged in establishing the prestige of a fetish called "the ark"; and how the people of one tribe violated this fetish and wakened the wrath of Jehovah, the god. And he smote the men of Beth-shemesh, because they had looked into the ark of the Lord, even ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... 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 that is being ...
— Death Points a Finger • Will Levinrew
... intellectual power, the pure reason directed to spiritual ends. The different shades of blue all indicate religious feeling, and range through all hues from the dark brown-blue of selfish devotion, or the pallid grey-blue of fetish-worship tinged with fear, up to the rich deep clear colour of heartfelt adoration, and the beautiful pale azure of that highest form which implies self-renunciation and union with the divine; the devotional thought of an unselfish heart is very lovely in colour, ...
— Thought-Forms • Annie Besant
... of gentility led him into some actions that can only be characterised as childish. Even in Cornwall he was on the lookout for his fetish. On one occasion when dining with the ex-Mayor of Liskeard, he pulled out of his pocket and used instead of a handkerchief, a dirty old grease-stained rag with which he was wont to clean his gun. {408a} This was done as a protest against ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... 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
... who stands unawed before it, seeing in it but an ugly little idol. And I guess what will be dealt out to him who not only refuses to bow the head, but openly scoffs. And yet I am going to scoff and say ugly words about this fetish of ours. I am going to say that it represents ignorance, hides and causes hypocrisy, stands in the way of progress, drags low the standard of individual excellence, perpetuates many ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 2, April 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... 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, they whirled ...
— The Two Supercargoes - Adventures in Savage Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... 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 inimitable by ...
— Familiar Studies of Men & Books • Robert Louis Stevenson
... rule, she must give a goat to be killed; its flesh is distributed, and its blood, diluted with water and mixed with herbs, is sprinkled on the watering-place and on the paths leading to it. Were any woman to disregard these salutary precautions, the chief fetish-man in the village would fall sick and die, which would be an irreparable ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... "carry out its wishes" unless his own best judgment is that they ought to be carried out. I am a good organization man myself, as I understand the word "organization," but it is in the highest degree foolish to make a fetish of the word "organization" and to treat any man or any small group of men as embodying the organization. The organization should strive to give effective, intelligent, and honest leadership to and representation of the Republican Party, ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... 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 supreme ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... these things as weapons. For a man holding this view, it seems both natural and easy to regard disease as a manifestation of the wrath of some invisible being, and to construct that intricate system which we find among the Africans, and agree to call Witchcraft, Fetish, or Juju."[15] ...
— Religion & Sex - Studies in the Pathology of Religious Development • Chapman Cohen
... will they annoy you in the future, and 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, and can no longer close the mind's eye upon uncomely passages, but must ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 ...
— Letters of Travel (1892-1913) • Rudyard Kipling
... misunderstanding just noticed is; yet our usefulness 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; and until it is dissipated, culture can do no good work in the matter. When ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold
... 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 ...
— Violin Mastery - Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers • Frederick H. Martens
... sand-dunes, the waves that lap peacefully or dash thunderously, tell us nothing of these old and often dismal quarrels. They are but secular things after all; the things that are eternal reach deeper than creed or vestment. We do not ask what fetish or totem the sleepers in the grassy barrows believed in; we may ask if they lived their lives truly and faithfully, doing that which was good according to the ...
— The Cornwall Coast • Arthur L. Salmon
... 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... get that without us—if," I said. "You must remember we've made him a fetish with our rank and file. And he's something of a fetish with the country, now that he's President. No, we can't destroy him—can't even injure him. He'll have to do that himself, if it's ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... 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 is holy ground. There are ...
— Chips From A German Workshop - Volume I - Essays on the Science of Religion • Friedrich Max Mueller
... 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 ...
— Allan and the Holy Flower • H. Rider Haggard
... and incidentally, they learned to distinguish the fetish in each. They read Greek mythology side by side with Judean mythology and noted similarities. The intent of Tutor Campe was to give these boys a scientific education. Science is only classified commonsense. To be truly scientific is to know differences—to distinguish ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... still; as if one were to 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 ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... over what I may, perhaps without offence, call our dusky Empire, that people do not think it worth while to go down to House to hear the affair discoursed on by my Under-Secretary. Amongst the natives in India, I'm told, I'm regarded as a sort of Fetish. Travellers in remote regions bring home stories of finding, set up in humble cottages, little images, more or less resembling me. GORST told me they have a saying there, which he was good enough to translate. His knowledge of Hindustanee is extensive, peculiar, and acquired with remarkable rapidity. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, July 2, 1892 • Various
... of "Animists" and numbering about 8-1/2 millions, have survived to the present day in remote hills and jungles without being absorbed into the Hindu social system, and have preserved their primitive beliefs, in which fetish worship, and magic are the dominant elements. Low as is their social status, it is but little lower than that of the Panchamas who have obtained a footing on the nethermost rung of the social ladder of Hinduism without being admitted to any sort of contact with its higher civilization ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... 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 has brought ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell
... 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.]; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... 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 fall down ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson
... 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 and frenzied ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... it much, and yet doing more killing in war-time and shedding more blood than even the fiercest lion on his cruelest days. Which would perplex a gentlemanly super-cat spectator the more, our habits of wholesale slaughter in the field, or our spiritless making a fetish ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... It was a savage fetish that a warrior must be proof against the alluring ways of pretty maidens; that he must place his honor far above the temptations of self-indulgence and indolence. Cold, hunger, and personal hardship did not count with ...
— Old Indian Days • [AKA Ohiyesa], Charles A. Eastman
... 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 ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... of unrest makes us the prey of impulses, and to the majority of our contemporaries, the robe, half green and half yellow (by recalling to them the worship of common sense), will become a fetish, more precious than all the amulets with which superstition loves to adorn logic, or to incorporate fantastic outline in the classic setting of ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... 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 from any effect ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... 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 from the Persian bihisht, 'paradise,' and ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell
... twenty-eight folios of blasphemy, only three sentences were from my own pen, and two of them were extracted from long articles. One was a jocose reference to the Jewish tribal god, who, as Keunen allows, was carried about, probably as a stone fetish, in that wooden box known as the "ark of the covenant." Another occurred in a long review of Jules Soury's remarkable book on the subject of Jesus Christ's hallucinations and eccentricities, in which he endeavors to show that the Prophet ...
— Prisoner for Blasphemy • G. W. [George William] Foote
... 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 ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... 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 to be ranked ...
— Monism as Connecting Religion and Science • Ernst Haeckel
... has moreover to pay an indemnity to the family of the supposed victim.[44] "Death, in the opinion of the natives, is never due to a natural cause. It is always the result either of a crime or of sorcery, and is followed by the poison ordeal, which has to be undergone by an innocent person whom the fetish-man accuses ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... 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 seems good ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... susceptible in part of sometime being used 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 ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... conquered the country. To the Hausa and Bornuese it was previously known as Fumbina (or South-land). The inhabitants are mainly pure negroes such as the Durra, Batta and Dekka, speaking different languages, and all fetish-worshippers. They are often of a very low type, and some of the tribes are cannibals. Slave-trading was still active among them in the early years of the 20th century. The Fula (q.v.), who first came into the country about the 15th century as nomad ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... went on the old man in a voice which, though charged with strong emotion, seemed to be speaking to itself, "was the chief mark of the insensate barbarism still prevailing in those days. It sprang from that most irreligious fetish, the belief in the permanence of the individual ego after death. From the worship of that fetish had come all the sorrows ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Fetish! fetish! fetish!" screamed out the negro, sliding down the tree a great deal faster than he had come up, coming down the latter part by the run, and reaching the ground more dead than alive; while the monkey clambered ...
— The Three Midshipmen • W.H.G. Kingston
... States' participation in the World War, tin became practically unobtainable, and coffee packers turned to paper and fiber containers as substitutes in packaging nearly all grades. In this war period, commercial economy became a fetish in the business world; and coffee packers worked to save not only material, but shipping space, labor, and time. Paper and fiber containers proved to be not only practical but economical packages. Because of their war-time experience, ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... theological. The human mind, in framing a class of objects, did not set out from the notion of a name, but from that of a divinity. The realization of abstractions was not the embodiment of a word, but the gradual disembodiment of a Fetish. ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill
... Eddy-worship will be 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... "The fetish-men know how to exorcise him, and afterwards go to the huts and say that Mzimu is angry; so the negroes bring them bananas, honey, pombe (beer made of sorghum plant), eggs, and meat in order to ...
— In Desert and Wilderness • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... negroes broke out, in the parish of St. Mary, and spread through almost every other district of the island, an old Koromantyn negro, the chief instigator and oracle of the insurgents in that parish, who had administered the fetish, or solemn oath, to the conspirators, and furnished them with a magical preparation, which was to render them invulnerable, was fortunately apprehended, convicted, and hung up with all his feathers and trumperies about him; and his execution struck the insurgents with a general ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... But her heart leaped to think how well she knew the answer. No need to speak of it, though. It would be almost profanity to talk to this women, who knew about as much of it as an African fetish-worshipper knows of the Eternal—of that love which counts fidelity not by months and years; which, though it has its root in mortal life, stretches out safely and fearlessly into the ...
— Christian's Mistake • Dinah Maria Mulock Craik
... 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 ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... 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
... were a race, as 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 is ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... promises, and stubbornly hugging the fetish of family pride, the boy gave but little indication during the first four years of his course of the heretical doubts and disbeliefs fermenting within his troubled mind. And when, after the death of his father and its ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... idea that bag-limit laws can save the game is to-day the curse of all our game birds, mammals and fishes! It is a fraud, a delusion and a snare. That miserable fetish has been worshipped much too long. Our game is being exterminated, everywhere, by blind insistence upon "open seasons," and solemn reliance upon "legal bag-limits." If a majority of the people of America feel that so long as there is any game alive there must be an annual two ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... for one, must decline to be misled or deceived by specious generalities. If you are asking me my opinion I shall simply say that the bathing habit of Merrie England is a venerable myth, and likewise so is the fresh-air fetish. The error an Englishman makes is that he mistakes cold air ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... the make-up of very 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 ...
— Potterism - A Tragi-Farcical Tract • Rose Macaulay
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various
... 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 of ...
— The Reminiscences Of Sir Henry Hawkins (Baron Brampton) • Henry Hawkins Brampton
... Rochester answered. "The fetish of birth has never appealed to me. I find as many gentlefolk amongst my tenants and servants, as at the parties to which I have the honor of escorting you. It isn't that at all. It's a matter of insight. Some day you will all ...
— The Moving Finger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... 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
... not a living being, worshiped because supposed to be inhabited by some god. In some parts of Africa the Fetishes are a sort of guardian divinity, and there is one for each district like a town constable; and sometimes one for each family. The Fetish is any stone picked up in the street—a tree, a chip, a rag. It may be some stone or wooden image—an old pot, a knife, a feather. Before this precious divinity the poor darkeys bow down and worship, and sometimes, sacrifice a sheep ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... selling wind. Ulysses received the winds in a leathern bag from Aeolus, King of the Winds. The Motumotu in New Guinea think that storms are sent by an Oiabu sorcerer; for each wind he has a bamboo which he opens at pleasure. On the top of Mount Agu in Togo, a district of West Africa, resides a fetish called Bagba, who is supposed to control the wind and the rain. His priest is said to keep the winds shut up ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... lousy-looking, dressed-up dolls, life size and tinselly, that stood in the glass cases; the blood-streaked Jesus on the crucifix; the mouldering, mumbling, filthy peasant women on their knees; all the sense of trashy, repulsive, degraded fetish-worship was too much for her. She hurried out, shrinking from the contamination of the dirty ...
— The Lost Girl • D. H. Lawrence
... 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 ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... 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 he was the villain ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... pool. In a corner of this he installed the ring of cork and canvas, and remained by it, patting and caressing it. When it rained again, he appreciated, for the first time, the comfort of shelter, and became a cave-dweller, with a new god—a fetish, to which he transferred his allegiance and obeisance because more powerful than ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... 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
... him. 'The greatest crime is loss of time.' 'Time flies.' 'Time waits for no man.' These are only small instances, but their total effect is not small, for it is life itself that you sacrifice to this fetish. Your G'il actually won't let you take good full draughts of existence—he keeps you so busy dividing it into months, days, and minutes. You imagine that it is because you lead crowded lives that you do ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... 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 only another sign ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... same height from the floor with its ragged strip of old matting was a box, in use as a table, covered with black oilcloth. On this were grouped some toy chairs and chests, made of tiny seashells pasted on cardboard; a vase with one flower in it; a miniature mirror, and some fetish charms and photographs, evidently for sale. But on the bunk itself lay a thing which made Angela forget all the surroundings. A thin, stabbing pain shot through her heart, as if it had been pricked with a needle. She was face ...
— The Port of Adventure • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... but not altogether. He sat in the corner of the fireplace, his knees drawn up to his chin, and his hands buried in his beard. He looked fixedly at the Master, not unlike a fanatic savage worshipping his fetish, or as a scientist watches the universe. The eyes of Reb Moshe expressed deep veneration, wonder, and ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko
... 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 ...
— "Unto Caesar" • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... the 31st March they set sail from Badagry in the chief's war canoe, which was about forty feet long, and propelled by poles. The banks of the river were low, covered with stunted trees; and a slave-factory and fetish hut were the only buildings visible. At intervals, at a winding of the river, they saw "a noble and solitary palm-tree, with its lofty branches bending over the water's edge." At this point, the atmosphere is loaded ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... and of 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 ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... Verdun; and between the Marne and Verdun had been sixteen months when, on the soil 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 and admiration at French courage France smiled ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... 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 to the crops of godly persons, ...
— The Upton Letters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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, the ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... than lethargy. She was one of nature's opiates, and she administered herself unconsciously to everyone who saw much of her. Edward's father, having had an overdose, had not survived. Mrs. Marston always spoke of him as 'my poor husband who fell asleep,' as if he had dozed in a sermon. Sleep was her fetish, panacea and art. Her strongest condemnation was to call a person 'a stirring body.' She sat to-day, while preparations raged in the kitchen, placidly knitting. She always knitted—socks for Edward and shawls for herself. She had made so many shawls, and she so felt the cold, that she wore them ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... the oracle was speaking all the time, but he 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
... Italy visited by Chaucer in the fourteenth century, the passion for antiquity goes on increasing; the Latins no longer suffice, the Greeks must be known. Petrarch worshipped a manuscript of Homer, but it was for him a dumb fetish: the fetish has now become a god, and utters oracles that all the world understands. The city of the Greek emperors is still standing, and there letters shine with a last lustre. While the foe is at its gates, it rectifies its grammars, goes back to origins, rejects new ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... impression was that the mason must be a superior sort of workman because he kept his home and his few possessions neatly and orderly. She did not know that there are many naturally clean persons in the laboring-classes. However, she made no fetish of tubbing herself once a day, and thought on to more important considerations. Evidently the young man was attached to his beautiful solitary abode—he had planted and watered a vine for the door. She resolved to tell him that he could help himself to ...
— Clark's Field • Robert Herrick
... life a score of times to serve you. This morning I saved you from something worse than death, and surely I deserve a little consideration at your hands. Will you not think again? Since heroism is your fetish, can you find nothing heroic in my ...
— A Mating in the Wilds • Ottwell Binns
... of fetish "herbs" is denied by Mr. Max Muller, he does not, of course, forget Soma, that divine juice. It is also to be noted that in modern India, as Mr. Max Muller himself observes, Sir Alfred Lyall finds that "the husbandman ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... simple is the offering of coco-nuts to Kali. The worshipper gives a nut to the pujari who splits it in two with an axe, spills the milk and hands back half the nut to the worshipper. This is the sort of primitive offering that might be made to an African fetish.] ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... unknown, 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 ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long
... visitor's part that excited Waterlow's secret scorn: family feeling was all very well, but to see it triumph as a superstition calling for the blood-sacrifice made him feel he would as soon be a blackamoor on his knees before a fetish. He now measured for the first time the root it had taken in Gaston's nature. To act like a man the hope of the Proberts must pull up the root, even if the operation should be terribly painful, should be attended with cries and tears and contortions, with ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... said Nina. 'When you do mischief you mean mischief. Now I became so—so—what shall I call it, intriguee about this little "fetish" of yours, that I remember well the night you first left ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... 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 a clue ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham
... their wives and children, and expend them accordingly. They are not guilty of "sins and waste and carelessness"; and some of them are even inclined to question whether they should pay for the results of such sins on the part of other men: and since those who believe in the "fetish of parental responsibility," to quote the favourite Socialist cliche, can show that this is not a fetish but a tutelary deity of Society, whose power has been increasing since backbones were invented, they may be well assured that the last word will ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... be happy?" he said. "Do you think you will ever manage to forget what you have sacrificed to this fetish you call Love,—how you broke the heart of one of the best fellows in the world, and trampled upon the memory of your dead child—the little chap you used to call the light of your eyes, who used to hold out his arms directly he saw you ...
— The Way of an Eagle • Ethel M. Dell
... committee had followed the campaign which Christophe was conducting in the Review. His slaughter in the opposing camp had seemed to them to give signs of a strong grip which it would be as well to have in their service. Christophe had also let fly certain disrespectful remarks about the sacred fetish: but they had preferred to close their eyes to that: and perhaps his attacks, not yet very offensive, had not been without their influence, unconsciously, in making them so eager to enroll Christophe before he had time to deliver ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... second if the first be but granted. Life—meaning the exact reproduction of reality—is their fetish. Now, it must be granted that Dickens does make his creatures talk as their prototypes do not in life. Nobody would for a moment assert that Mrs. Gamp, Pecksniff and Micawber could be literally duplicated from the actual world. But is not Dickens within his ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton
... 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 ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the cart before the horse. 'Fetish' is really the Portuguese word feitico, artificial, made-up, factitious (Latin factitius), applied to ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench
... When she came, he was struck, not having seen her since the birth of the third baby, by the further alteration in her. How thin she was! And quiet! With that dullness which, in his judgment, too much domesticity always brought to women. Like most ultra-modern men, while secretly making a fetish of the softer virtues in woman, he wanted them expressed somehow in an up-to-the-minute setting. Yet he understood dimly the struggle of twentieth-century woman in trying to make herself at once as new as to-day and as old ...
— Married Life - The True Romance • May Edginton
... lucky 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
... 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 cheek, David would ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... days at the Grange, and in that brief space of time she was already beginning to establish a precedent. She was a tall, slim girl, with earnest eyes, a decided chin, and an intellectual forehead. Work, with a capital W, was her fetish. She sat during classes with her gaze focused on her teacher, and a look of intelligent interest that surpassed everyone else in the Form. Miss Gibbs turned instinctively to Maudie at the most important points of the lesson. There was a feeling abroad that she sucked in knowledge ...
— The Madcap of the School • Angela Brazil |
