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Fetish   /fˈɛtɪʃ/   Listen
Fetish

noun
1.
A form of sexual desire in which gratification depends to an abnormal degree on some object or item of clothing or part of the body.
2.
A charm superstitiously believed to embody magical powers.  Synonyms: fetich, hoodoo, juju, voodoo.
3.
Excessive or irrational devotion to some activity.  Synonym: fetich.



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"Fetish" Quotes from Famous Books



... ailing limb or member made of candle wax that breaks to bits between the fingers. Then there are huge candles without number, martyrs and crucifixions, with all the disgusting and bloody features of elsewhere; every kind and degree and shape and size of fetish. Cholula needs badly another Cortez to tumble her gods down to the plain below and drive out the hordes of priests that sacrifice their flocks none the less surely, if less bloodily, than ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... 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 with ...
— A Millionaire of Yesterday • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... war, unless you can appeal to his brain by making him believe that they are what the Scotchman calls uncanny. If you once find him thinking that steam, or the gun which kills a man a couple of hundred yards away, is the result of fetish or the bunyip, or a diabolical spirit, he's the greatest coward under the sun. Give them another brush over with the light, ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn

... 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

... something else, and that this change should be taking place under our very eyes. But, happily for me, the world-conflict which is now devastating Europe has begun to undermine in the soul of many the fetish-worship of civilization. And to assist further in breaking the spell which civilization may have cast over the imagination of most of my audience, I would remind you that civilization is, after all, a mere mushroom growth, and that what ...
— Is civilization a disease? • Stanton Coit

... 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 they were unreal ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... not ready for the full public avowal of this principle, but he was driven to the wall and was forced to own it or lie. He boldly gave his position, and declared that marriage was a fetish, and that its basis on a union for life without regard to the feelings of the parties was a fountain of corruption, and was the source of the monopolistic instincts that now ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon

... 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 prays to his plough and the fisher ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... wherever he goes. For his references to Deity, Plato undoubtedly would have expelled him from his Republic; and justly so, for James Stephens treats his god very much as the African savage treats his fetish. Now it is supplicated, and the next minute the idol is buffeted for an unanswered prayer or a neglected duty, and then a little later our Irish African is crooning sweetly with his idol, arranging its domestic affairs and the marriage of Heaven and ...
— Imaginations and Reveries • (A.E.) George William Russell

... Eddy-Worship will be taught in the Sunday-schools and pulpits of the cult. Already whatever she puts her trade-mark on, though it be only a memorial-spoon, is holy and is eagerly 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 is for sale. And the terms are cash; and not only cash, but cash in advance. Its god is Mrs. Eddy first, then the Dollar. Not a spiritual Dollar, but a real one. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... man with a thick thatch over his brains and the responsive magnetism of her own years. Poor old fighting-cocks! What a jade nature was . . . or was it merely the tyranny of an Idea, carefully inculcated at the nativity of the social group, with other arbitrary laws, in behalf of the race? The fetish of the body. Stark materialism. . . . However, it was not as hard on them as on women outgrown their primary function. Theirs at least the privilege of approach; and their deathless masculine conceit—when all was said, Nature's supreme ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... gathered, was somewhat as follows. The "witch doctors" or magicians of the nation—numbering in all something over a hundred— all of whom were then in Gwanda for the purposes of the ceremony, would assemble at sunset that same evening in a sort of fetish house; and there, under the leadership and direction of one Machenga, the head or chief witch doctor, would perform certain mysterious rites, and submit themselves to a certain mysterious form of treatment, lasting the entire night, which, it was generally ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood

... of Judaism 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 of the ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley

... 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 is to be the equal and lifelong companion ...
— The Man • Bram Stoker

... The difference is that while one may talk only with his contemporaries and neighbours one may read the words of a writer far distant both in time and space. It is no wonder, perhaps, that the printed word has become a fetish, but fetishes of any kind are not in accordance with the spirit of the age, and their veneration should be discouraged. Reading in which the contact of minds is of secondary importance, or even cuts no figure at all, is meaningless ...
— A Librarian's Open Shelf • Arthur E. Bostwick

... continued 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 and her husband. ...
— Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard • Joseph Conrad

... transfer sickness from the body to the tree and whoever shall touch it. The Sawahili people term such articles a Keti (seat or vehicle) for the mysterious haunter of the tree who prefers occupying it to the patient's person. Briefly the custom still popular throughout Arabia, is African and Fetish. ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... am held to have stretched the prerogative of the Ka, or of the waxen image which, by the way, has survived almost to our own time, and in West Africa, as a fetish, is still pierced with pins or nails, I can urge in excuse that I have tried, so far as a modern may, to reproduce something of the atmosphere and colour of Old Egypt, as it has appeared to a traveller in that country and a student of its ...
— Morning Star • H. Rider Haggard

... 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 months ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... 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 ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... continence. Properly understood, asceticism is a discipline, a training, which has reference to an end not itself. If it is compulsorily perpetual, whether at the dictates of a religious dogma, or as a mere fetish, it is no longer on a natural basis, and it is no longer moral, for the restraint of a man who has spent his whole life in a prison is of no value for life. If it is to be natural and to be moral asceticism must have an end outside itself, it must subserve the ends of vital activity, which cannot ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... lightest-hearted felt a thrill of apprehension at the thought of the horrors that were to come. In a day or two all this was to be changed. People went about then counting the Russian millions; the steamroller fetish was to be evolved. The most peaceful stockbroker or shopkeeper, who had never even been to a review in his life, could make calculations of man power with a stump of pencil on the back of an old envelope, which would convince the greatest pessimist that Germany and Austria were outnumbered ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... 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 ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt

... undeveloped state of the proletariat in 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 ...
— Violence and the Labor Movement • Robert Hunter

... 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, and then had candles ...
— Ensign Knightley and Other Stories • A. E. W. Mason

... you make a fetish of the house, if the house stands in the way of your helping your own ...
— Jan and Her Job • L. Allen Harker

... numerous than those of other employments. That the greatest number of these are at Kommendo, Mina, and Kormantin. From each of which places, there go out every morning, (Tuesday excepted, which is the Fetish day, or day of rest) five, six, and sometimes eight hundred canoes, from thirteen to fourteen feet long, which spread themselves two leagues at sea, each fisherman carrying in his canoe a sword, with bread, water, and a little fire on a large ...
— Some Historical Account of Guinea, Its Situation, Produce, and the General Disposition of Its Inhabitants • Anthony Benezet

... of labour made to suit 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' ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... Serbian language," laughed Alec. "It opposes me at every turn; it mocks at my best efforts; it swathes me like the bandages of a mummy,—and I am growing weary of its restraint. This is a question of self interest, too. Perhaps, if I can persuade our good Kosnovians to adopt some more up-to-date fetish, they may drop the hereditary habit of carving their chosen rulers into mincemeat whenever a change of Government ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy

... thus understood, confine itself to mere description; it also assumes the office of judge. While it pulls down much that passion and inaccuracy have reared, and thus restores respect for the past, it does not turn that past into a fetish. It looks it boldly in the face and questions it, instead of prostrating itself before it and worshipping it with downcast eyes. Thus, by plainly showing us the many bonds which tie us to it, it escapes at once both the rashness of impatience ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... two railways, but Parliament thought otherwise and passed the Bill. Indeed Parliament is not free from blame for many unnecessary duplicated lines throughout the kingdom. Competition was for long its fetish; now it is unification, and (blessed word!) co-ordination. Strange how men are taken with fine words and phrases, and what slaves they are to shibboleths! Before the House of Commons Committee which sat on this Bill I had the pleasure, for the first ...
— Fifty Years of Railway Life in England, Scotland and Ireland • Joseph Tatlow

... that still prevails in certain quarters. I refer to the really old families among the landed aristocracy. Some of them have not changed essentially, in their attitude towards the world in general, since the reign of Queen Elizabeth. They make of family a fetish. They are ready to sacrifice everything upon the altar of family. They may exhibit this pride of race less obviously than some of the French or Germans or Italians; but they have a deeper sense of their ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis

... 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

... had 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 ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning

... 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 ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler

... her; she would not inquire further; what were the general principles underlying that fact—or even whether there were any—she refused to consider. Years after the discoveries of Pasteur and Lister, she laughed at what she called the 'germ- fetish'. There was no such thing as 'infection'; she had never seen it, therefore it did not exist. But she had seen the good effects of fresh air; therefore, there could be no doubt about them; and therefore, it was essential that the bedrooms of patients should be well ventilated. Such ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey

... assume the 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 rights as artist in so ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... admitted that will make 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 ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling

... sound to you in your orthodox home, but yet a legacy of Christ. Thou shalt love God with all thy heart and thy neighbour as thyself, was the law of Christianity. We have forgotten God and the responsibility of the individual soul to its own divinity; we have made a fetish of our neighbour's earthly welfare. We are not Christians but humanitarians, followers of a maimed and materialistic faith. This is the ideal of the world to-day, and from it I see but one door of escape—and none but a strong man shall open ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... 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, ...
— An Obscure Apostle - A Dramatic Story • Eliza Orzeszko

... grotesquely carved finials affixed to the roofs. This part of the town, situated in its centre, and covering, perhaps, a space of forty acres, was, I afterwards learned, the habitation of King Banda, his Court, the principal officers of his army and household, and the priests, whose temple, or fetish-house, stood on the opposite side of the square to that occupied by the "palace" of ...
— A Middy of the Slave Squadron - A West African Story • Harry Collingwood

... destiny of Ireland," she said, "has been to escape age after age the malarial fever of culture. The Romans never touched her shores. The renaissance passed her by. She has not bowed the knee to our modern fetish of education. You and I ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham

... I was young then and 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 heart beating, ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... adroit flank movement, rapidly executed, Serena managed to possess herself once again of the seat of honour upon the sofa, thereby interposing a thin but impenetrable barrier between her hostess and the latter's own particular fetish, ...
— The Far Horizon • Lucas Malet

... embrace of the woods and opened the long line of its dull windows, he realized all that it had done for Frida. He understood the abnegation and the tragedy of her life. She had been sacrificed, not only to her father, but to her father's fetish, the property; Coton Manor had to be kept up at all costs, and the cost had been Frida's, it had been her mother's. The place had crushed and consumed her spirit, as it swallowed up two-thirds of her material inheritance; it had made the living woman as the dead. He remembered how ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair

... their parents, just as Galileo rises above the doctrine that nature abhors a vacuum. The parallel is all the more complete in that in many cases false religions have been also false sciences. The prayer to the fetish for rain is as contrary to true religion as it is contrary to true science. Many false religions are most easily overthrown by scientific instruction. Many false sciences begin to totter when the believers in them are taught true religion. The ordinary superstitions which have so strong a hold on ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter

... teaching the Koran;" but the venerable Bishop Crowther, who has spent his whole life in that part of Africa where these conquests are supposed to be made, declares that the real vocation of the quiet apostles of the Koran is that of fetish peddlers.[118] If it be objected that this is the biased testimony of a Christian missionary, it may be backed by the explorer Lander, who, in speaking of this same class of men, says: "These Mollahs procure an easy subsistence by making fetishes or writing charms on bits of wood which are ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... a local seer willing to tell for a small piece of money where stray asses have gone, its enthusiastic attitude to the monarchy, its obvious delight in the splendid presence and powers of Saul, its intimate knowledge of the ecstatic prophets, its conception of the ark as a sort of fetish whose presence insures victory—all these things bespeak for the document that relates them a high antiquity. The other document represents Samuel as a great judge and virtual regent over all Israel, it has a wide experience of the evils of monarchy, it idealizes ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... life, but,—in her palmy days,—she had loved. And the necessity of loving had apparently remained a part of her nature, otherwise it would have been a sheer impossibility for her to have selected so strange a fetish as Lady Wicketts for her adoration. Lady Wicketts did not, in any marked way, respond to Miss Fosby's tenderness,—she merely allowed herself to be worshipped, just as in her youth she had allowed scores of young bloods to kiss her hand and murmur soft nothings in her then 'shell-like' ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... arguing against classification, which is essential to the practical utility of any library. An imperfect classification is much better than none: but the tendency to erect classification into a fetish, and to lay down cast-iron rules for it, should be guarded against. In any library, reasons of convenience must often prevail over logical arrangement; and he who spends time due to prompt library service in worrying over errors in a catalogue, or vexing his soul at a faulty classification, is ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford

... benefit of society at large," Miss Ogle explained; "and our obstacles so far have been, in chief, the fetish of proprietary rights and the ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell

... continent of Africa to settle only at its northern coast line and its most southern cape; and, to-day, it has given Cuba all of its benefits, and has left the equally beautiful island of Hayti, only fourteen hours away, sunk in fetish ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis

... vehicles imposed. On the other hand, given every facility, it is presumable that the result would have been the same. Mythology is the mother of poetry. Idolatry is the father of art. Neither could appeal to a people to whom delicacy was an unknown god. Had it been known and a fetish, they could not have become the practical people that they are. Even then they were shrewd. Their Elohim might alarm but never delude. Israel was ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus

... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell

... 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

... purau-trees which bordered the banks and climbed the hills into the distance. The puraus often seemed like banians, stretching far over the water in strange and ghostlike shapes, with twisting branches and gnarled trunks that in the obscurity gave a startling suggestion of the fetish growths of the ancients. I felt a faint touch of fear as I groped through the stream, now and again falling into a deep hole or stumbling over a stone or buried branch, and I looked often to reassure myself that Raiere's ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien

... the 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 the shore, ...
— Jack - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet

... nation we find a vital Power, an ordering Force, recognised as present in the natural world, and the human mind seems ever prone to believe such Power to have affinity to human nature and to be, so to speak, open to a bargain. The fetish priest, the rain doctor, the medicine-man, the Hindu yogi, the Persian Mage, the medieval saint, and countless miracle-workers in every age, have ever believed themselves to be, whether by force of will, or by ecstatic contemplation, ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... nature of history. Your modern non-Catholic or anti-Catholic historian is always misunderstanding, underestimating, or muddling the role played in the affairs of men by great and individual Personalities. That is why he is so lamentably weak upon the function of legend; that is why he makes a fetish of documentary evidence and has no grip upon the value of tradition. For traditions spring from some personality invariably, and the function of legend, whether it be a rigidly true legend or one tinged with make-believe, is to interpret Personality. Legends have vitality and continue, ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc

... one of Fenton's peculiarities that he never knowingly shrank from telling himself the truth about his thoughts and actions with the most brutal frankness. Indeed, it might not be too much to say that this self-honesty was a sort of fetish to which he made expiatory sacrifices in the shape of the most cruelly disagreeable admissions before his inner consciousness. He constantly settled his moral accounts by setting down on the credit side "Self-contempt to balance," a method of mental bookkeeping by no means rare, albeit seldom ...
— The Philistines • Arlo Bates

... black-faced man 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 bearing ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... collection of antebellum fetishes is a happy one. Examples of the Little Navy and Voluntary System fetishes are now rather rare, but you should have no difficulty in securing a well-preserved specimen of the Free Trade fetish at the old emporium of antiquities kept by the firm ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... 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 ...
— Kepler • Walter W. Bryant

... away in the recesses of his whare. 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 has found ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay

... millionaire's holiday. So he took all these valuables in a black japanned dispatch-box, which he guarded like a child with absurd precautions. He never allowed that box out of his sight one moment; and he gave me no peace as to its safety and integrity. It was a perfect fetish. "We must be cautious," he said, "Sey, cautious! Especially in travelling. Recollect how that little curate spirited the diamonds out of Amelia's jewel-case! I shall not let this box out of my sight. I shall stick to it myself, if we ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... 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 ...
— Culture and Anarchy • Matthew Arnold

... an old angel, with as good a heart as ever beat under a cassock. But what a slave a man may be to the fetish of his faith! Only think what he says, my darling! The guilty party! I'll never believe you are the guilty party, but consider! The guilty party may never marry! No good clergyman of any Christian Church in the world dare marry her! What ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... advance. Upon the door, done in the blind, morbid egotism of crime, which so often leaves open sign and signal for its own undoing, there showed, cut deep in the jamb, a rude sign, cabalistic, mysterious, fetish-like. To Eddring it seemed for the instant to be the same mark as that upon the handkerchief. He could not explain these things in his own mind. Others of the party were more interested in pointing out once more, in the confusion of footprints before the building, the imprint of ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... after century, the ages roll on, polytheism comes back under the disguise of Mariolatry and the adoration of saints; image-worship becomes as rampant as in old Egypt; adoration of relics takes the place of the old fetish-worship; the virtues of the ephod pale before those of holy coats and handkerchiefs; shrines and calvaries make up for the loss of the ark and of the high places; and even the lustral fluid of ...
— The Evolution of Theology: An Anthropological Study - Essay #8 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley

... 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

... 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

... haven't told you about that yet! Better light your pipe again. You see, he stumbled in on me in the dark when I was pumping away at that old parlor organ to please Mrs. Lockhart. It's her household fetish and I've forgotten how many pounds of butter she made and sold to buy it. Well, Eric stumbled in, and in some inarticulate manner made me understand that he wanted me to sing for him. I sang just the old things, ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... 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 may ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard

... perversion of the positive, but a transformation of the 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

... saw it. The skull of a child, looking like a white stone amidst the grass. He wrapped it in leaves torn from the trees near by, and the grim corporal stood watching him, and wondering, no doubt, for what fetish business the white man had come ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole

... 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 ...
— The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies • Robert Gordon Latham

... and sent a bullet through a man's heart, I 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 ...
— Fashionable Philosophy - and Other Sketches • Laurence Oliphant

... day was spent in destroying the two great stockades, cutting down the bush round them, and blowing up the fetish tree; as well as burying the enemy's dead, thirty in number. On the evening of the next ...
— Through Three Campaigns - A Story of Chitral, Tirah and Ashanti • G. A. Henty

... adoration, homage; idolatry, deification, apotheosis. Associated Words: liturgies, liturgy, ritual, cult, fetish, fetishism, totem, totemism. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... antiquarians. 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 for this one lapse—if an accident had not ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc

... which are not immediately derived from, and absolutely coincident with, the reverence due to the supreme reason of the universe, are all alike dangerous superstitions. The worship founded on them, whether offered by the Catholic to St. Francis, or by the poor African to his Fetish differ in form only, not in substance. Herein Bruno speaks not only as a philosopher, but as an enlightened Christian;—the Evangelists and Apostles every where representing their moral precepts not as doctrines then first revealed, but as truths implanted ...
— Literary Remains (1) • Coleridge

... exposition of a battle that he was planning. For the first time in his presence and over his maps, I saw that after all there was such a thing as the science of war, and that it was not always a fetish of elementary ideas raised to the nth degree of pomposity, as I had been led to believe by contact with other generals and staff-officers. Here at least was a man who dealt with it as a scientific business, according ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs

... tonight. Had it 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll

... 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 ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... 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 again, and to ...
— Wanderer of Infinity • Harl Vincent

... simple tribal communism; Christianity has been introduced amongst the Eskimo of South Alaska and in the greater part of Labrador; in other parts the old religion still obtains, called Shamanism, a kind of fetish worship; much of their folk-lore has been gathered and printed; fishing and seal-hunting are their chief employments; they are of good physique, but deplorably unclean in their habits; their name is supposed to be ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... religions in groups 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 between ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... 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 ...
— Rosemary - A Christmas story • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... did not even know the elements, and much less the axioms. Herein his instruments, or indeed, any that man could make, were as futile and as useless as would be the prayers of an archbishop addressed to a Mumbo-jumbo in a fetish house. The link was wanting; there was, and could be, no communication between the two. The invisible ether which he had subdued to his purposes was still a constituent part of the world of matter; he must discover the spiritual ether, and discover also the animating ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard

... shades of RA and TUM, Ye ghosts of gods Egyptian, If murmurs of our planet come To exiles in the precincts wan Where, fetish or Olympian, To help or harm no more ye list, Look down, if look ye may, and scan This ...
— Ballads in Blue China and Verses and Translations • Andrew Lang

... West make a fetish of "progress," which is the ethical camouflage of the desire to be the cause of changes. If we are asked, for instance, whether machinery has really improved the world, the question strikes us as foolish: it has brought great changes and therefore great "progress." What ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... 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

... 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 ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams

... of the sort: for that, in my plain opinion, would be to make a fetish of the book. One of these days I hope to discuss with you what inspiration is: with what accuracy—with what meaning, if any—we can say of a poet that he is inspired; questions which have puzzled many wise men from ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... 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 ...
— Secret of the Woods • William J. Long

... fetishism, to refuse to consider the ideal attained, the progress effected as a simple instrument, a starting-point for further progress and for the attainment of new ideals, instead of contentedly halting to adore as a fetish the progress already effected, which men are prone to look upon as being so complete that it leaves no room for new ideals and ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri

... classes—that it would be 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 system than under the so-called free trade system, which insists ...
— Against Home Rule (1912) - The Case for the Union • Various

... The word "fetish" (from Portuguese feitico, 'artificial', then '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, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy

... still I loved him because he was not like myself. There was a girl in the town who was beautiful; many asked for her as their wife, but her father had long promised her to my friend; he refused even the greatest warrior of the place, who went away in wrath to the fetish-man, and throwing him his gold armlets asked for a fetish against his rival. It was given, and two days before he was to be married my friend died. His mother came to me, and it was enough. I put on my war ...
— Mr. Midshipman Easy • Captain Frederick Marryat

... exsufflation|, cantrap[obs3], runes, abracadabra, open sesame, countercharm[obs3], Ephesian letters, bell book and candle, Mumbo Jumbo, evil eye, fee-faw-fum. talisman, amulet, periapt[obs3], telesm[obs3], phylactery, philter; fetich, fetish; agnus Dei[Latin: lamb of God]; furcula[obs3], madstone[obs3]; mascot, mascotte[obs3]; merrythought[obs3]; Om, Aum[obs3]; scarab, scarabaeus[obs3]; sudarium[obs3], triskelion, veronica, wishbone; swastika, fylfot[obs3], gammadion[obs3]. wand, caduceus, rod, divining rod, lamp ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... very simple nature and easily deduced. How strange that among all this large number of politicians and scholars, who are as numerous as the trees in the forest and the perch in the stream, should have failed for all these years to notice these simple points; and now suddenly make a fetish of them because they have come out of the mouth of a foreigner. Is it because no one except a foreign doctor can discover such facts? Why even a humble learner like myself, though not so learned even to the extent of one ten-thousandth part of his knowledge, more than ten years ago anticipated ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... Red Cross flag. On a gooseberry bush in the midst of the farm they also left a white flag, where it still flew to protect a few fat pigs, turkeys, and other fowl. The white flag is becoming a kind of fetish. To-day all our white tents were smeared with reddish mud to make them less visible. Beyond Range Post the enemy set up a new gun commanding the Maritzburg road as it crossed that point of hill. The Irish Fusiliers who held that position were shelled ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... Another was inscribed: "Unconditional Republicanism." In the white light of to-day the truth that an invariable partisan is an occasional lunatic becomes impressively apparent. Party under increasing civilization is a factor, not a fetish. It is a means, not an end. It is an instrument, not an idol. Man is its master, not its slave. Not that men will cease to act on party lines. Party lines are the true divisional boundary between schools of thought. No commission is needed ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various

... 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

... 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 ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi

... gyrations. Talmage never ventured far from 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

... child!" There was keenness about the exclamation which almost amounted to actual dislike. "I'm tired to death of having Tessa's welfare and Tessa's morals rammed down my throat. Why should I make a fetish of the child? What is good enough for me is surely ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... which has led you almost to lay aside the principles which now seem prejudices to you. I myself willingly immolate on the altar of new ideas that pride of nobility which delights in the study of old parchments, and makes a kind of fetish of scutcheons carved on the walls of an ancient castle. I condemn as a foolish error, the airs of superiority affected by old nobles in respect to merit sprung from the people; and if, in the opinion of my father, your marriage with the daughter of your friend, seemed a degradation, forgive ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various

... doctrine that terror and pain have been the best means of educating mankind, so the child must pursue the same road as humanity. This is an utter absurdity. We should also, on this theory, teach our children, as a natural introduction to religion, to practice fetish worship. If the child is to reproduce all the lower development stages of the race, he would be practically depressed beneath the level which he has reached physiologically and psychologically through the common inheritance of the race. If we have ...
— The Education of the Child • Ellen Key

... in hideous form out of the forest, or the mud, or the river, or where not, and flogs some woman who has been backbiting, or scolding, or with some other domestic mischief disturbing the general peace. Carlyle seems to confound him with the common Fetish; but he is quite another thing. He is a disguised man; and all about him is a freemasons' secret among the men."—"I finished the Scarlet Letter yesterday. It falls off sadly after that fine opening scene. The psychological part of ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster

... 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, ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips

... 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 Providence, a subtle ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey

... 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... with 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 belonged to her. She longed ...
— Mogens and Other Stories - Mogens; The Plague At Bergamo; There Should Have Been Roses; Mrs. Fonss • Jens Peter Jacobsen

... who never smelt powder, abused the soldiers. Those fellows would have been the first to run. Others, still worse, to show their abject flunkeyism to Scott, and to humbug the public at large about their intimacy with this fetish, make speeches in his defence. Scott broadly prepared the defeat, and now, through the mouths of flunkeys and spit-lickers,[2] he attempts to throw the fault on the ...
— Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862 • Adam Gurowski

... to fight for the power of the Soviets six or eight weeks before the Constituent Assembly," our neighbors on the Right told us. We, however, were in no degree infected with this fetish worship of the Constituent Assembly. In the first place, there were no guarantees that it really would be called. The breaking up of the army, mass desertions, disorganization of the supplies department, agrarian revolution—all this created an environment ...
— From October to Brest-Litovsk • Leon Trotzky

... out and formally communicate it to the Kazi. The dowry is then settled, and the bond of marriage is sealed. But when the parents of the bride are poor they receive a bride-price of Rs. 30, from which they pay the dowry. The Bhishtis worship their leather bag (mashk) as a sort of fetish, and burn incense before it on Fridays. [354] The traditional occupation of the Bhishti is to supply water, and he is still engaged in this and other kinds of domestic service. The name is said to be derived from the Persian bihisht, 'paradise,' and to have been given to them on account of the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume II • R. V. Russell

... denominational rubric 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 ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... rector of a fashionable London church, but there was a time when I felt almost intoxicated by my wife's worship of me, and by my domination over the crowds who came to hear me preach. Domination! That was my fetish! That was what led me to—oh, sometimes I think it must ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens

... from simple principles seems to be the attitude of Prince Buelow, in his speech in the Reichstag on universal suffrage. He is reported to have said:—'Only the most doctrinaire Socialists still regarded universal and direct suffrage as a fetish and as an infallible dogma. For his own part he was no worshipper of idols, and he did not believe in political dogmas. The welfare and the liberty of a country did not depend either in whole or in part upon the form of its Constitution ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas

... 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, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... later days was an apostate from his own creed; his "nouveau grand Etre supreme," being as big a fetish as ever nigger first made and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley

... the degree of attainment that presupposes a positive benefit. If the time were 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 by merely utilitarian ...
— A Broader Mission for Liberal Education • John Henry Worst

... almost any general view respecting the mode of 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

... fetish. It was the people, misled, who precipitated the South into the madness of secession and the ruin of a hopelessly unequal war of sections. It was the people backing if not compelling the Kaiser, who committed hari-kari for themselves and their ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson

... grave-stones; perhaps the religious employment of them in this wise led to the idea of the god-stone in many cases; but it is difficult to say in monolith-worship whether the stone itself be not a god; not a fetish, for (as has been said by others) a fetish is a god only so long as he is regarded as being useful, and when shown to be useless he is flung away; but a god-stone is always divine, whether it grants ...
— The Religions of India - Handbooks On The History Of Religions, Volume 1, Edited By Morris Jastrow • Edward Washburn Hopkins

... of these small phalli were worn for personal decoration; and here we come to a still lower decadence in sex worship,—the period of superstition. A phallus was worn as a charm, somewhat as a fetish to ward off disease. Such charms were supposed to bring good luck and prosperity to the owner and they were used particularly as a charm against barrenness in women. A sign which could be made by the hand, the phallic hand, was used as a protection against ...
— The Sex Worship and Symbolism of Primitive Races - An Interpretation • Sanger Brown, II

... 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

... I put 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 barbaric ...
— A Yankee in the Trenches • R. Derby Holmes



Words linked to "Fetish" :   physical attraction, concupiscence, good luck charm, eros, devotion, charm, sexual desire



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