A sacred object is invisible and works in an unusual way to motivate thoughts and behavior. Yahweh is a sacred object. Allah is a sacred object. Nations are sacred objects.

Human beings imagine what their god wants them to think and how he wants them to behave. These gods are invisible and unseen.

Sacred objects motivated massive killing in the First World War, with 9 million human beings dying in the name of France, Great Britain, Germany, and many other nations, each conceived as a sacred object.

The entire civilization was under the spell of these unseen objects. A very ordinary phenomenon if one is plugged into the phantasy, but how very strange if one thinks about it (but we are not supposed to think about it).