This introduction explains some fundamental concepts and the history of the Afro-Atlantic religions, a pivotal moment of which—the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century encounter of European and African troops on the West African coast—should influence not only these religions but also the European Enlightenment. Although the concept of the "fetish" constructs the African as a primordial antitype to the ideals that an emergent European bourgeoisie wished to enforce in Europe, African religion is no less historical than European social theory, and European social theory is no less affected by the material conditions of its genesis than are the religions of Africa and its diaspora. Moreover, the Afro-European encounter on the Guinea Coast was a precondition and conceptual foundation for both systems of thought. As racially ambiguous Europeans, Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud had a special stake in the Enlightenment's derogatory rhetorical uses of the African religious Other. Here the author introduces a Candomblé temple in a fashionable district of Berlin and a range of Afro-Atlantic priests who, in real historical time, talk back to these two-preeminent theorists of the so-called fetish.