[prearpaccew]

I'm not sure I would extend the definition of superstition to cover everything from art to storytelling to the making of statues. People in the pre-modern era were more at home with imaginative and mythopoeic forms of expression; they did not feel themselves confined, as many of us moderns do, to a dreary literalism.

And it's not as if the psychological needs which you mention have disappeared; rather, they've become fodder for the advertising industry.