THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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Religion appears to me to be a peculiar attitude ofmind which could
be formulated in accordance with the original use of the word
religio, which means a careful consideration and observation of
certain dynamic factors that are conceived as 'powers' : spirits,
daemons, gods, laws, ideals, or whatever name man has given to
such factors in his world as he has found powerful, dangerous, or
helpful enough to be taken into careful consideration, or grand,
beautiful, and meaningful enough to be devoutly worshipped and
loved (1940a, p. 8).
Despite the deliberate vagueness and ambiguity of lung's definition of religious
experience, it is clear that for him the religious dimension is a product of psychic
reality, and not the reverse. At one point he defines religion as a "conscientious regard
for the irrational factors of the psyche" (1957a, p. 261). In other words, lung is
contending that religious experience stems from an unwilled encounter with the
unconscious contents ofthe psyche. The unconscious, he argues, is:
the only available source of religious experience. This is certainly
not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or
is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious
experience seems to flow .... I put the word 'God' in quotes in order
to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea whose
dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the
unconscious psyche (1957, p. 293).
lung did not share Freud's anti-religious sentiment, but believed, contra Freud, that the
idea of God was an "absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational
nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God's existence"
(1953 a, p. 71). The shift in perspective from considering God to be a regressive
manifestation of unresolved childhood conflicts, to an indispensable psychological
phenomenon, will be traced in the following section.
11.2 The development of Jung's theory of religious mythology
lung's ideas on the subject of religion were constantly revised and transformed in the
course of his life-time. There are no fewer than three identifiable stages in the
evolution of his thought on the matter (Heisig, 1979). Continuous throughout this
evolution, however, was a conviction that lung shared with Freud - religious
experience and symbolism is the product of unconscious psychic processes: "The