THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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The child is guided by the power of the parents as by a higher
destiny. But as he grows up, the struggle between his infantile
attitude and his increasing consciousness begins. The parental
influence ... is repressed and sinks into the unconscious, but it is not
eliminated; by invisible threads it directs the apparently individual
workings of the maturing mind. Like everything that has fallen into
the unconscious, the infantile situation still sends up dim,
premonitory feelings, feelings of being secretly guided by other
worldly influences. These are the roots of the first religious
sublimations. In the place ofthe father with his constellating virtues
and faults there appears on the one hand an altogether sublime deity,
and on the other hand the devil (Jung, 1949, p. 320-321).
In his later work, however, God and the Devil are not simply manifestations of the
repressed personal unconscious, deriving from actual childhood experiences of
omnipotent parental figures. Rather, they are transpersonal phenomena common to the
entire human species:
In so far as through our unconscious we have a share in the historical
collective psyche, we live naturally and unconsciously in a world of
werewolves, demons, magicians, etc., for these are things which all
previous ages have invested with tremendous affectivity. Equally we
have a share of gods and devils, saviours and criminals; but it would
be absurd to attribute these potentialities of the unconscious to
ourselves personally (lung cited in Byrnes, 1984, p. 81).
Deities, whether benevolent or malevolent, are symbolic archetypal expressions of the
collective unconscious, personified in the form of mythological figures to which we
attribute supernatural agency and power. Gods, states lung, "are personifications of
the collective unconscious, for they reveal themselves to us through the unconscious
activity ofthe psyche" (l948c, p. 163).
This chapter began with the assertion that lung's basic approach to religion is a
phenomenological one that privileges the psychic reality of personal experience. He
departs from this descriptive stance, however, by identifying underlying causal
processes at work in religious experience: "God is inside, because ... the God-image is
a complex of ideas of an archetypal nature representing a certain sum of energy which
appears in projection" (Moreno, 1970, p. 83). Demons, likewise, are archetypal
formations that attain representation only by projection (von Franz, 1980).