ABSTRACT
In 1760 Charles de Brosses, a liberal French aristocrat and proto-anthropologist, published On the Cult of Fetish Gods, in which he coined the word “fetishism.” The word “fetish” itself had already been subject to much investigation on the part of the Europeans who encountered a form of religion in Africa they could not understand: the worship of things. After reviewing some of de Brosses’ predecessors, the chapter analyzes de Brosses’ intervention into the eighteenth-century debates on the origin of religion. De Brosses claimed that fetishism was the original, universal form of religion, because it was the product of the universal primitive mind. But his reasoning led him into a dilemma. As a Christian, he believed that God had created everything, including the capacity for abstract monotheism. Why then would God also have created man as originally fetishistic? And how to explain the transition from worship of many material things to worship of a single, non-material God? The discussion of de Brosses’ dilemma leads to a philosophical analysis of the paradoxically necessary co-existence of both the concretely material and the abstract in the origin of religion. This paradox itself has important consequences for the entire history of fetishism.
