For over two thousand years the figure of Satan, both as a theme of poetico-religious thinking and artistic creation, and as a mythologem, has been a constant psychological expression, having its source in the unconscious evolution of ‘metaphysical’ images.
We should go very wrong in our judgement if we assumed that ideas such as this derive from rationalistic thinking, All the old ideas of God, indeed thought itself, and particularly numinous thought, have their origin in experience. Primitive man does not think his thoughts, they simply appear in his mind. Purposive and directed thinking is a relatively late human achievement. The numinous image is far more an expression of essentially unconscious processes than a product of rational inference. Consequently it falls into the category of psychological objects, and this raises the question of the underlying psychological presuppositions. We have to imagine a millennial process of symbol-formation which presses towards consciousness, beginning in the darkness of prehistory with primordial or archetypal images, and gradually developing and differentiating these images into conscious creations.
The history of religion in the West can be taken as an illustration of this: I mean the historical development of dogma, which also includes the figure of Satan. One of the best-known archetypes, lost in the grey mists of antiquity, is the triad of gods. In the early centuries of Christianity it reappears in the Christian formula of the Trinity, whose pagan version is Hermes ter unus. Nor is it difficult to see that the great goddess of the Ephesians has been resurrected in the Theotokos. This latter problem, after lying dormant for centuries, came into circulation again with the dogma of the Immaculate Conception and, more recently, of the Assumption of the Virgin. The image of the mediatrix rounds itself out to almost classical perfection, and it is especially noteworthy that behind the solemn promulgation of the dogma there stands no arbitrary tenet of papal authority but an anonymous movement of the Catholic world. The numerous miracles of the Virgin which preceded it are equally autochthonous; they are genuine and legitimate experiences springing directly from the unconscious psychic life of the people.
I do not wish to multiply examples needlessly, but only to make it clear that the figure of Satan, too, has undergone a curious development, from the time of his first undistinguished appearance in the Old Testament texts to his heyday in Christianity. He achieved notoriety as the personification of the adverse principle of evil, though by no means for the first time, as we meet him centuries earlier in the ancient Egyptian Set and the Persian Ahriman. Persian influences have been conjectured as mainly responsible for the Christian devil. But the real cause of his differentiation into a separate figure is the conception of God as the summum bonum, which stands in sharp contrast to the Old Testament view and which, for reasons of psychic balance, inevitably requires the existence of an infimum malum. No logical reasons are needed for this, only the natural and unconscious striving for balance and symmetry.
Hence very early on, in Clemens Romanus, we meet with the conception of Christ as the right hand and the devil as the left hand of God, not to speak of the Judaeo-Christian view which recognized two sons of God, Satan the elder and Christ the younger. The figure of the devil then rose to such exalted metaphysical heights that he had to be forcibly depotentiated, under the threatening influence of Manichacism. The depotentiation was effected—this time — by rationalistic reflection, a regular tour de force of sophistry which defined evil as a privatio boni (the privation of good).
But that did nothing to stop the belief from arising in many parts of Europe during the eleventh century, mainly under the influence of the Catharists, that it was not God but the devil who had created the world. In this way the archetype of the imperfect demiurge, who had enjoyed official recognition in Gnosticism, reappeared in altered guise. (The corresponding archetype is probably to be found in the cosmogonic jester of primitive peoples.) With the extermination of the heretics that dragged on into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries an uneasy calm ensued, but the Reformation thrust the figure of Satan once more into the foreground.
– C.G. Jung, Preface to Werblowsky’s Lucifer and Prometheus
