’Psychology and Religion’

The elephant is neither an inference nor a statement nor the subjective judgment of a creator. It is a phenomenon. But people are so used to the idea that psychic events are wilful and arbitrary products, or even the inventions of a human creator, that they can hardly rid ourselves of the prejudiced view that the psyche and its contents are nothing but people&s;s own arbitrary invention or the more or less illusory product of supposition and judgment. Religion, as the Latin word denotes, is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum , that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will. A great many ritualistic performances are carried out for the sole purpose of producing at will the effect of the numinosum by means of certain devices of a magical nature, such as invocation, incantation, sacrifice, meditation and yoga practices, self-inflicted tortures of various descriptions, and so forth.