Such is Obeah now; and such it was, as may be seen by De Bry's plates, when the Portuguese first met with it on the African coast four hundred years ago.
But surely it is an idolatry, and not a nature-worship.

Just so does the priest of Southern India, after having made his idol, enchant his god into it by due ceremonial.

It may be a very ancient system: but as for its being a primeval one, as neither I, nor any one else, ever had the pleasure of meeting a primeval man, it seems to me somewhat rash to imagine what primeval man's creeds and worships must have been like; more rash still to conclude that they must have been like those of the modern Negro.

For if, as is probable, the Negro is one of the most ancient varieties of the human race; if, as is probable, he has remained--to his great misfortune--till the last three hundred years isolated on that vast island of Central Africa, which has probably continued as dry land during ages which have seen the whole of Europe, and Eastern and Southern Asia, sink more than once beneath the sea: then it is possible, and even probable, that during these long ages of the Negro's history, creed after creed, ceremonial after ceremonial, may have grown up and died out among the different tribes; and that any worship, or quasi-worship, which may linger among the Negroes now, are likely to be the mere dregs and fragments of those older superstitions.
As a fact, Obeah is rather to be ranked, it seems to me, with those ancient Eastern mysteries, at once magical and profligate, which troubled society and morals in later Rome, when 'In Tiberim defluxit Orontes.' If so, we shall not be surprised to find that a very important, indeed the most practically important element of Obeah, is poisoning.

This habit of poisoning has not (as one might well suppose) sprung up among the slaves desirous of revenge against their white masters.