THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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heterosexual oedipal longings may be alleviated ifall manner ofperverse sexual practices
are attributed to an evil cult that enacts our own displaced fantasies.
The third alleged activity of diabolic witches and Satanists is the sacrilegious parody of
Christian worship, whereby God is debased and His adversary, Satan, is exalted.
Apostasy, notes Cohn, goes hand in hand with eroticism. Because Christianity has
emphasised the repression of instinctual life, it is meaningful that "the notion of
unbridled sexuality could so easily be combined with that of a cult in which Christianity
was systematically repudiated and burlesqued" (Cohn, 1975, p. 262). In these terms, the
attraction of Satan, the personification of unbridled instinctual expression, is obvious.
This attraction is defensively transformed into abhorrence, and those individuals alleged
to follow Satan are regarded as social pariahs.
Cohn, however, fails to note the obvious oedipal significance of Satan in Christian
mythology. Satan was originally the angel Lucifer, a son of God who rebelled against the
divine father's authority, and was subsequently banished from heaven. Lucifer may thus
be seen as a prototypal oedipal son, punished for challenging his father's authority. Satan
provides a heroic figure of identification for every son who has chafed under his father's
'castrating' authority, and who has entertained, albeit unconsciously, fantasies of
overthrowing the family 'god'.
Zacharias (1980), too, approaches the history of the Satanic cult from a Freudian
perspective. Like Cohn, he notes the inversion of social values and the forbidden
attraction this represents. Unlike Cohn, however, he acknowledges Satanism as a reality,
and employs a closer reading of Freud to interpret the unconscious motives of cult
members. He begins with Freud's observation that Satan is the negative image of the
father, and proceeds to argue that the Satanist uses the defence mechanism of reaction
formation to transform oedipal hatred into love, employing the "reinforcing effect of
ritual" (p. 19) to this end. Not only are the Satanist's own hostile impulses transformed
into their opposite, but the hated father-image is also "transformed into its opposite, and