ABSTRACT
The etymological root of ‘fanatic’ is clear enough. The word derives from the Latin noun fa¯num meaning sanctuary or temple from which comes the adjective fa¯na¯ticus – a temple devotee who is orgiastic, inspired, frantic or frenzied. By this definition, the fanatic is ‘always profaning: attacking the temples, polluting the relics, defying the taboos, and cursing the gods of the “other” – shitting in the pope’s tiara, a commonplace in anti-Catholic engravings of the Reformation period’.1 In the English language, by 1525, the fanatic was ‘a religious maniac’, and by 1644, ‘a visionary, an unreasoning enthusiast’.2 The term was increasingly used as a hostile epithet applied to Protestant Nonconformists (or Dissenters).3 In continental Europe in the same period, the term emphasised religious and spiritual divergence and the sense of an aggressive, religious zealot – itself, of course, a term referring back to a Jewish ‘fanatical enthusiast’4 – who was filled with a personal passion that was so extreme as to be an illness.5 Thus, in France in the seventeenth century, fanaticism was ‘comme une maladie, contagieuse, difficile à guerir et dangereuse’.6 The overriding theme is of an irregular religious practice that is so extreme as to be an ‘illness’ afflicting its adherents. Depending on the dominant religion in any given society, the cause of the illness, the symptoms of which were fanatical behaviour, lay in a variety of dissenting religions, separate and distinct from the established church. In this respect, the exclusive qualities of so much of European religious life in this period can be neatly contrasted to New Age religions in Nigeria that are an amalgamation of traditional local and national worship mixing together Christianity, Islam and local metaphysical spiritualism – a combination that militates against fanaticism.7
