St. Boniface Chopping Down Pagan Tree
Freud uses the legend of St. Boniface cutting down an oak deemed sacred by Saxons as a symbol to further his argument that enacting a fundamental revision in the “relationship between civilization and religion” should not be considered an impossible task. The pagans expected a catastrophe to result from this act and when nothing occurred, wholesale conversion to Christianity took place.
French and Russian Revolutions
These two revolutionary orders are offered up by Freud’s critic in the dialogue structure as examples of the historical failure to replace religion with reason. He forwards them as evidence to argument that religious belief is a necessary component for human civilization because attempts to replace faith with rational explanation have proven fruitless.
The Stork Brings Babies
Freud uses the time-honored tradition of avoiding the difficulty of telling children the truth about where babies come from as a symbol for the effects of religious faith. The truth is intentionally obscured, but inevitably revealed and the revelation serves the broader process of engendering distrust of parental (church) authority.
The Acropolis
The Acropolis is situated as symbol of beliefs that people acquire for themselves as facts rather than beliefs that are acquired through the teaching of facts merely assumed to be certainties. Freud describes the personal experience of having acquired a belief in the factual certainty of the existence of Acropolis and how that acquired belief was nevertheless overwhelmed by acquisition of the factual certainty attained himself with his first view of it. The symbolic implies that even learned certainties of actual facts are subsumed by the greater glory of personal acquisition. The underlying message being that it is better to work hard at determining whether acquired beliefs are based on false information than merely to rely upon that false certainty.
The Primal Father
The symbol of the primal father is first outlined in Freud’s previous volume Totem and Taboo, published in 1912. The primal father is a mythic patriarch of a primeval tribe who is eventually killed by his sons only later to be venerated as a god. Freud returns to his mythic concept here to suggest that symbolically, “the primal father was the original image of God.”
