THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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gives psychological life its dynamic character. The Trinity is therefore an imperfect
symbol of the self because the fourth element is missing. Jung suggests that the
missing fourth is Satan, and that he has been excluded in order to preserve God's
moral perfection as the summum bonum:
The self is a union of opposites par excellence, and this is where it
differs essentially from the Christ-symbol .... The opposition between
light and good on the one hand and darkness and evil on the other is
left in a state of open conflict, since Christ simply represents good,
and his counterpart the devil, evil" (l953a, p.19).
The shadow side of God, however, is clearly evident in Yahweh's Old Testament
attributes, which Christianity found distasteful. Christian dogma sought to exclude the
dark side of God in order to make him an exemplar of love and virtue. This dark side
was split off and excluded from the symbol ofthe Holy Trinity and, like all dissociated
archetypal experience, assumed a personified life of its own in the figure of God's
adversary, Satan (lung, 1940). Satan thus emerges as a historical manifestation of an
archetypal possibility only because Christian dogma sought a neurotic solution to its
ambivalent experience of God, by splitting off His destructive qualities, which then
assumed the form ofan evil adversary:
If we disregard the specifically Persian system of dualism, it appears
that no real devil is to be found anywhere in the early period ofman's
spiritual development. In the Old Testament, he is vaguely
foreshadowed in the figure of Satan. But the real devil first appears
in the adversary of Christ, and with him we gaze for the first time
into the luminous realm of divinity on the one hand and into the
abyss of hell on the other" (Jung, 1948c, p. 173).
Jung further notes that Satan, like Christ, is a son of God, and that these two
opposites, prefigured in the Old Testament by Cain and Abel, represent the archetype
of the hostile brothers (1 948c). Evil is an ineradicable part of the self and, although
Jung does not go so far, implicit in his argument is the suggestion that the Christian
Trinity is .a symptom of neurotic religious dogma, arising from the pathological
dissociation of good and evil, and the latter's projection into the figure of Satan. If
psychological health is characterised by the integration of dissociated polarities, and
the withdrawal of projections, then Christianity may be seen as a form of cultural