EXCERPT For, contrary to what children are told, it is not by carrying children on his shoulders that Saint Christopher saves. It is not by giving free rein to his phoric impulse, durch Nacht und Wind, that he protects himself from the Ogre, king of the riverine alder groves where there grows a red wood covered with white or grey bark—the pau-brasil of the temperate zones. Contrary to what Michel Tournier thinks, it is not the superphoria of an astrophore child perched on the shoulders of a Nazi Gilles de Rais that rescues him from the Holocaust. The real Christopher, Tarado da Sé, the perverse giant nigromancer from Olinda, practises a different kind of medicine which has nothing to do with this deception, the so-called migration of souls, the crossing of the river to the other bank. It is an exclusively corporeal medicine. He does not shed his blood for the evening meal so that Roman blancomancers dressed in a chasuble sewn with gold and silver, after having thoroughly fumigated the room where their public is dozing obediently, can pretend every Sunday, at the appointed hour, to convert the cash, to transubtantiate the wine. The true Christopher does not bear the Christ who sanctifies through blood.…