or associate a demon with it, before it strikes his fancy as possessed of powers that may bring him luck? No words, however, so far as I am aware, as yet exist that can be desirably used to express the general concrete conception of objects as themselves Powers. Fetishism and Fetishist will, no doubt, at once occur to you. But the associations connected with the origin of these terms in the Portuguese feticho, and which still cling to it inseparably, make it impossible, or, at least, highly undesirable, to use these terms to connote so general a conception of innate powers in things as must, I think, be recognised. For the needed term should include in its connotation not only such manifestations of this conception as had been observed by Habakkuk when he wrote—"He sacrificeth to his net and burneth incense unto his drag, because by these his portion is fat and his meat plenteous"[1]—but such a verse of the hymn of the Peleiades, Priestesses of Dodona, as
(
Greek characters)[2]
("Earth bringeth forth fruits, therefore call Earth Mother"), and also such a sublime invocation as that of Prometheus:
"O divine Ether, and swift-winged Breezes,
Fountains of Rivers, and Sea-waves'
Laughter innumerable. All-mother Earth,
All-seeing circle of the Sun, on you I call!"[3]
Hence, as terms connoting this general concrete conception of Things as themselves Powers, however low the expression of it, or however high, I would propose the terms Zoönism and Zoönist, derived from the Greek (Greek characters), an animal. For what is distinctive of our conception of
- ↑ Hab. i, 16.
- ↑ Pausanias, x, xii, 10.
- ↑ Thus I have literally translated the famous lines of Æschylus (Prometh. Vine, 82-91). But Christian notions so overpower the perceptions even of such a scholar as Dean Plumptre, that he actually translates (
Greek characters)—"O divine firmament of God," thus wholly destroying the meaning of the passage as an appeal from the Younger Anthropomorphic to the Elder Elemental Gods.
