ABSTRACT
It is as if you wanted to recall very clearly the image of someone who was absent, either to yourself or to an audience: you imitate that person, how he speaks, how he laughs, what he says, or you call his name, and by that means you evoke his image. By the same method this unconscious factor can be invoked, provided you give it the right name. We ought therefore to have symbols in order to control the unconscious factors. Otherwise they are absolutely beyond our control and we are their victims, and whether their influence is beneficial or disastrous remains in their hands. So it always has been of the utmost importance for man to have a certain magic control of the gods. You are probably rather shocked at the idea, because the Christian always assumes that we cannot force God, that we depend entirely upon his grace, but the sacraments in the Catholic Church are magic devices, magic methods, of forcing the grace of God-like the marriage or baptism ceremony, for instance. You remember the famous story from L'ile des pingouins,9 how they baptized the penguins, and St. Mae! said that if the sacraments were exact, if the rite had been performed in the proper way, it must give souls to the birds; if it did not produce the desired effect, it meant that some mistake in the form had been made. It was really believed that people could not sin any longer after having been baptized. Yet there were cases where people were still sinning, which would mean that the grace of Heaven had not worked, that there must be a flaw-the rite had perhaps not been correctly performed and must be performed once more. There were even cases where people received baptism twice and still sinned, and then probably the priest thought up something else-that they were children of Satan, meant for eternal baking in hell, and that closed the thing.
