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In the religious studies and ethnology of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the term “fetishism” was used to describe the veneration of certain objects (rocks, trees, etc.—fetishes) that were thought to possess spirits or to have special powers. Such veneration was found especially in the so-called tribal societies. On the basis of the reports of Portuguese mariners, who said that dwellers on the coast of West Africa worshiped cultic objects that the Portuguese called feitic̦o (from Lat. factitius, “artificially made”), C. de Brosses used the term in his study Du culte des Dieux f…