THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SATANIC CULT INVOLVEMENT: AN ...

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A fourth point to be made concerns the relationship between Satanism and Christianity.
As indicated in Part One of this dissertation, Satanism does not, and cannot, exist outside
of a Christian society because its identity as the inverted mirror image of Christianity is
obviously contingent upon the persistent hegemony of Christian spirituality. It is the
Christian Devil who Satanists worship. Moreover, as was noted in Chapter Five, the
current cultural paranoia concerning the "satanic epidemic" is directly attributable to the
extreme dualistic theology of the burgeoning evangelical Christian movements, which
simultaneously promotes persecutory anxiety in the Christian faithful, and spurs would-be
Luciferian rebels to genuine satanic practices.
lung, despite his sympathetic approach to Christian ritual, was critical of Christian
dogma. He knew full well that Satan emerged as the historical realisation of an
archetypal possibility only because Christian theodicy sought a neurotic solution to its
ambivalent experience of God, by splitting of His destructive qualities and assigning them
to a wholly evil adversary. Consequently, claims lung, "every single Christian has a split
in his psyche" (Cited in Stein, 1985, p. 172). lung thus advocated a cultural therapeutics,
a collective parallel to individual psychotherapy, whereby higher levels of psychological
wholeness are attained by taking back one's shadow projections and integrating
disavowed parts of the self. The enemy, in other words, is us, and "what one reacts to
emotionally in an opponent represents an unclaimed piece of one's own psyche" (Stein,
1985, p. 172). Stein is moved to observe that Christianity'S "record on reconciliation of
opposites and on working through differences of attitude is not brilliant" (p. 172). A
cultural shift is necessary in order to address the sociological conditions that make
Satanism a compelling spiritual choice for some.
From a fundamentalist Christian perspective. everything occult is considered evil.
However, much occult philosophy echoes lung's call for the integration of our projected
shadow aspects, a prerequisite for any form of psychic wholeness. Cavendish (1967)
expresses this occult vision: