THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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Not only were the gods dragged down from their planetary spheres
and transformed into cthonic demons, but, under the influence of
scientific enlightenment, even this band of demons, which at the time
ofParacelsus still frolicked happily in mountains and woods, in rivers
and human dwelling-places, was reduced to a miserable remnant and
finally vanished altogether. From time immemorial, nature was
always filled with spirit. Now, for the first time, we are living in a
lifeless nature bereft ofgods (lung, 1945, p. 211).
The despiritualisation of nature, however, is only one of the consequences of
Enlightenment thinking. The ancient gods were not simply products of historically
outmoded belief systems, but personified expressions of transhistorical psychic forces.
Calling them projections certainly alters our perceptions ofthem, but does not diminish
their psychological power:
Only in the age of enlightenment did people discover that the gods
did not really exist, but were simply projections. Thus the gods were
disposed of. But the corresponding psychological function was by
no means disposed of ; it lapsed into the unconscious, and men were
thereupon poisoned by the surplus of libido that had once been laid
up in the cult ofdivine images (lung cited in Byrnes, 1984, p. 80).
But if the self-reflective withdrawal of projections is the creative path to human
individuation, why does lung employ the destructive metaphor ofpoisoning to describe
the psychic effect of their return? One answer lies in lung's concept of inflation,
defined as "identification with the collective psyche caused by the invasion of
unconscious archetypal contents" (Samuels et ai, 1986, p. 81). This is a dangerously
regressed state since individuals, rather than simply being aware of spiritual forces,
identify with them and lose any realistic appreciation ofthemselves. Identification with
an archetype means that the archetype in question exerts a "possessive influence"
(lung, 1953a, p. 70), and invariably produces personality changes in the person so
affected. Both religious conversions and schizophrenic reactions testify to the
consequences of archetypal identification. Inflation is thus based on introjective rather
than projective dynamics, and presents the opposite psychic danger of projection.
What is common to both processes is attributing - to oneself (inflation) or another
(projection) - the contents ofthe collective unconscious. In so doing the individual: