Fetishism and Figurism in Charles de Brosses’s Du culte des dieux fétiches: Natural Historical Facts and Historical Fictions

In Du culte des dieux fétiches, ou Parallèle de l’ancienne religion de l’Égypte avec la religion actuelle de Nigritie (1760), Charles de Brosses (1709–77) coined the term “fétichisme” in an attempt to synthesize contemporary evidence regarding the practices and beliefs of pre-modern societies. By compiling the reports of traders and travelers from the sixteenth century to the present, he concluded that the direct worship of things (such as rocks, trees, bodies of water and animals) was widespread and could be identified as a distinct species of religion, reflecting a savage and irrational “façon de penser.”¹ Furthermore, by comparing these practices to ancient Egyptian plant and animal worship and the rites of other pagans, de Brosses argued that fetishism was a universal phase of religious development: the oldest and most primitive form of religion, distinct from the later systems of polytheism and monotheism.

De Brosses’s assertion that all religions began with fetish worship—a direct, affective and immediate attachment to things—established an origin so radically other and irrational that it challenged existing approaches, from orthodox biblical history to deism and natural religion, and even secular philosophical history. Indeed, much existing scholarship on de Brosses focuses on his contribution to emergent disciplines such as comparative religion, anthropology and the philosophy of history, and the disruptive impact of what has become one of modern critical theory’s most promiscuous and productive concepts—fetishism.² Although some studies of Du culte des dieux fétiches within the context of eighteenth-century discussions of myth and religion recognize de Brosses’s unique and innovative interventions, he rarely escapes condemnation as a slipshod stylist or blatant racist, if not both.³ More recently, Aaron Freeman has convincingly portrayed de Brosses’s affinities with what Jonathan Israel calls Radical Enlightenment and foregrounded de Brosses’s contribution to the satirical anti-clericalism so characteristic of skeptics and the philosophes.⁴ However, these approaches have not fully explored de Brosses’s materialist critique of the mediation of religious ideas and experience, nor the challenge it poses to the very possibility of a philosophically guided universal history.

In focusing on what William Pietz calls the “irreducible materiality” of the fetish and de Brosses’s vigorous denunciation of both ancient and modern attempts to transform it into a representation, symbol or allegory of some higher spiritual truth, I have been inspired by recent scholarship that discusses how complex, varied mediations shaped the articulation of Enlightenment projects and values, such as the work collected in Clifford Siskin and William Warner’s This is Enlightenment. Siskin and Warner define “mediation” as “shorthand for the work done by tools, by what we would now call ‘media’ of every kind—everything that intervenes, enables, supplements, or is simply in between” and provocatively call the Enlightenment “an event in the history of mediation.”⁵ Regarding de Brosses’s text as a extended investigation of how religious beliefs are inevitably and inescapably formed through historic mediations, I propose to explore the tensions inherent in his materialist theory of religion. De Brosses’s polemic distinguishes sharply between the immediate, primitive origins of religion in fetishism and the highly mediated, even devious, development of more advanced forms of worship. What is ultimately at stake in granting such an exceptional status to fetish worship?

In presenting his case for fetishism, de Brosses confronts a tendentious mode of historical narrative dominated by what he calls figurism. Like fetishism, figurism is a universal tendency, but these two -isms exist in an uneasy dialectical relationship. Whereas fetishism directly invests material objects with an inscrutable power, figurism seeks to repress the material origins of religion in fetish worship by retrospectively transforming fetishes into symbols and allegories of a purely spiritual and transcendent truth. According to de Brosses, as peoples become more civilized and adopt polytheism and monotheism, they attempt to erase or sublimate all evidence of fetish worship, employing figurism to create a new mythical origin that anticipates and prefigures their historical destiny.⁶ [End Page 108...