Just as fetishism was for a long time accepted as a generic term covering all that was nefarious in the customs of the West African tribes, so in the popular mind today, Voodoo and Obeah are interchangeable and signify alike whatever is weird and eerie in the practices of the descendants of these same tribes as they are found throughout the West Indies and the southern portion of the United States. And yet technically, not only are Voodoo and Obeah specifically distinct, one from the other, both in origin and in practice, but if we are to understand the true force and influence which they originally exercised over their devotees, we must dissociate them from the countless other forms of magic, black or white, that have gradually impinged themselves upon them as so many excrescences.
Just as fetishism was for a long time accepted as a generic term covering all that was nefarious in the customs of the West African tribes, so in the popular mind today, Voodoo and Obeah are interchangeable and signify alike whatever is weird and eerie in the practices of the descendants of these same tribes as they are found throughout the West Indies and the southern portion of the United States. And yet technically, not only are Voodoo and Obeah specifically distinct, one from the other, both in origin and in practice, but if we are to understand the true force and influence which they originally exercised over their devotees, we must dissociate them from the countless other forms of magic, black or white, that have gradually impinged themselves upon them as so many excrescences.
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