THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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Freud noted similar totemic aspects in young children's animal phobias, where an animal
is irrationally feared for no apparent reason. The animal, argued Freud, is feared because
it has become the displaced object of the child's patricidal fantasies, and the child
unconsciously fears the animal-father's retaliation (1909, 1918). Thus oedipal fantasies
regarding incestuous and parricidal wishes find their anthropological equivalent in
totemic taboos and ritual practices. Freud, however, was not content with the analogy
between childhood phobias and primitive religion, he sought to extend this argument to
include the monotheistic religions as well. This he did by claiming that the totemic
ancestor undergoes further displacement and evolution, with the hero as an intermediate
figure, until it eventually becomes God (1913, 1921). The Eucharist thus functions as the
Christian equivalent of the totem meal, and the crucifixion myth depicts the Christian
equivalent of the sacramental slaying of the totemic father. The guilt associated with
patricidal wishes and totem sacrifice is neurotic insofar as the human father does not
literally die as a consequence of the son's fantasies. However, using an argument
discredited by anthropologists, Freud (1913, 1925) suggested that an actual patricidal act
did occur in humankind's primitive history, and that this is the source of collective guilt.
In other words, not only personal history (ontogeny), but also the history of the human
species (phylogeny), is implicated in religious belief: "There probably exists in the life of
the individual, not only what he has experienced himself, but also what he brought with
him at birth, fragments ofphylogenetic origin, an archaic heritage" (Freud, 1939, p.125).
Freud's ideas on religious phylogeny derive from adopting Darwin's thesis that the
original social organisation of humankind was the primal horde, in which one patriarch
ruled strictly over the other males, and reserved access to the females for himself (Freud,
1912-13). Exogamy was so instituted, and sexual relations prohibited within the clan.
The patriarchal primal horde ended with an uprising by the younger males who killed and
devoured the leader, an act wherein they "accomplished their identification with him '"
and acquired a portion of his strength" (Freud, 1912-13, p. 141-2). Collective memories
or some form of ideational content thus constitute in the human race a universal
predisposition to guilt, and relief from this through the worship ofa sovereign deity: "The