39
Lynn Brunet |Ripping back the veil on Masonic abuse
doi: 10.54208/1000/00092/03
Ripping back the veil on Masonic abuse:
Five leading creative thinkers express their struggle
Lynn Brunet1
Abstract: This paper summarises the author’s project since 1999, which has been asking whether the work of several leading
visual artists, creative writers and key figures of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries might tell us something about a
practice that Western society has found exceedingly difficult to contemplate: ritual abuse. The case studies included here deal
with the work of the contemporary American artist Matthew Barney, the English artist Francis Bacon, the Irish playwright
Samuel Beckett, the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung and the English novelist William Golding. In some cases, these creative
individuals recall being sexually abused, but also seem to struggle with something else, something even more confusing and
terrifying that pervades their work. Some also describe frightening but inexplicable childhood experiences, which in one case
resulted in nightmares throughout his life. The work of all five creative individuals references Freemasonry, and all but one
have known family connections to the Masonic Order. The research reveals extensive references to the plots, imagery and
symbolism of Masonic rituals in their work, suggesting that they may have been exposed to abusive versions of these secret
rites at some point, possibly in childhood or adolescence. The paper will address these case studies through theories of trauma,
current research into documented cases of ritual abuse and anthropological insights into initiation rituals, fraternal practices
and secret societies.
Keywords: Masonic abuse Matthew Barney Francis Bacon Samuel Beckett C. G. Jung William Golding.
1 Corresponding author: Lynnchthonianartist@gmail.com. Independent researcher, Australia.
Introduction
Since 1999, the author has been researching the works
of several leading visual artists, creative writers, and
influential figures from the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries. The inquiry centres on whether these
individuals may be telling us something about a
practice that Western society has found exceedingly
difficult to contemplate. This practice is ritual abuse,
and its existence has been the subject of periodic
debate since the 1980s. The case studies cited here
deal with the work of contemporary American artist
Matthew Barney, English painter Francis Bacon, Irish
playwright Samuel Beckett, Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung
and English novelist William Golding. The research
reveals extensive references to the themes, imagery
and symbolism associated with Masonic rituals within
their works, prompting questions about whether they
may have been exposed to abusive variants of these
secret rites at some stage in their lives.
The American Psychological Association (2018)
defines ritual abuse as:
organized, repetitive, and highly sadistic abuse
of a physical, sexual, or emotional nature,
perpetrated principally on children. The
abuse is reported as using rituals and symbols
from religion (e.g., upside-down crosses),
the occult, or secret societies. It may also
include the creation of pornography or the
selling of sexual access to children.
Victims may be forced to engage in
heinous acts, such as the killing of animals, as
a means of coercing their participation and
silence.
Reports of ritual child abuse first appeared in the early
1980s and were, for a long time, entirely discredited
as false. Nevertheless, a substantial body of research
conducted by psychologists, sociologists, social workers
and criminologists has consistently examined the
evidence to confirm the existence of these cruel practices
targeting minors (Becker, 2008 Epstein, Schwartz &
Schwartz, 2011 Lacter, 2011 Lacter &Lehman, 2008
Miller, 2012 Noblitt &Perskin Noblitt, 1995, 2008,
2014 Sakheim &Devine, 1992 Salter, 2018 Scott,
2001 Terr, 1994). These practices are repeatedly used

International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 9, Issue 2 2026 40
throughout childhood and are intentionally designed
to systematically shatter the child’s psyche into multiple
fragments, as well as to confuse, indoctrinate and
terrorise them. Ritual abuse survivor groups have been
hearing personal testimonies regarding these practices
for decades (Brick, n.d.). These practices are often
multigenerational, frequently involve incest and may
have been with us in underground forms for centuries.
Recently, inquiries have been raised regarding the
potential role of this type of abuse in the global issue
of organised child sexual exploitation (Hanson, 2025
Lacter, 2025).
Evidence of trauma features strongly in the work of
the five individuals addressed here. As we shall see,
many of them clearly state that something inexplicable
occurred in childhood that persisted throughout their
lives. Given these themes this author’s studies have
drawn on neuro-scientific research into the association
between memory, trauma, imagination and the brain,
as well as psychological concepts of introjection and
alter formation (Davies, 2019 Freyd, 1996 Schacter et
al, 2012 van der Kolk, 1996, 2014 van der Merwe &
Sinason, 2016 Vogt, 2018). The experience of trauma
is commonly accompanied by dissociation, memory
loss and identity fragmentation. As the psychiatrist
Bessel van der Kolk (2014) notes, the psychoanalytic
term ‘dissociation’, originally coined by the French
psychologist Pierre Janet (1859–1947), refers to ‘a
compartmentalization of experience...[in which]
traumatic memories are characteristically stored
separately from other memories, in discrete personality
states’ (1996, p. 306). It can result from an experience
of overwhelming threat in which the totality of the
experience is not accommodated within ordinary
memory. For a child undergoing the extreme practices
of ritual abuse, dissociation is the only available form
of escape. This can mean that traumatic memories,
particularly those undergone in early life, can be lost
to consciousness, but their psychological sequelae can
continue to disrupt the everyday life of the individual
concerned.
The term often used for the discrete personality
states produced during severe trauma is that of ‘alter
personalities’. In ritual abuse, they can be deliberately
created during trance states in abusive rituals where
the individual is taught to enact different roles, such as
gods, biblical characters or animals (Noblitt &Perskin,
2014). These alter personalities can include copies of
the abusers, which are internalised through a process
of ‘perpetrator introjection...complex psychological
models, that we were forced to take in early in life
because our boundaries were violated by an aggressor’
(Vogt, 2018, p. 3). Miller (2012) notes that in ritual
abuse, these introjects are deliberately created by the
perpetrators, who put themselves into the personality
systems of their victims to control their inner world
this is often done during a rape (p. 45–52).
The research of cognitive scientist Jim Davies (2019)
is specifically relevant for examining the work of
artists and creative writers. He takes the established
psychoanalytic notion of introjection and examines
how it is used in the creative realms. He cites surveys of
fiction writers who say that their characters often evolve
into fully developed personalities and minds of their
own, and that they sometimes feel they are recording
what their characters do and say, rather than creating
the stories themselves they can even have imaginary
conversations with them. Drawing on scientific data
that suggests imagination draws on memories, Davies
(2019) argues that these fleshed-out characters appear
to have evolved through a process of automatisation
(p. 202). This process occurs in the attainment of
complex skills, such as learning to drive, where once-
difficult multiple tasks eventually become automatic
and unconscious. He suggests that once the author has
created a clear mental model of a fictional character,
it becomes automatised and the author eventually no
longer needs to reason out what this character will
say or do, or how they will react. He argues that this
is an unconscious process and likens it to the ancient
Greek notion of ideas coming from nowhere, as though
delivered by the gods or the muses.
Contemporary ritual abuse practices may have much in
common with puberty rites in archaic and non-Western
cultures, studied in anthropological investigations
throughout the twentieth century, in which the
initiates are subjected to a death and rebirth process.
As the historian of religion Mircea Eliade (1995) notes,
these rites involve terrifying and painful ordeals aimed
at disintegrating the psyche to create a tabula rasa state
that enables the rewriting of the personality. They take
place in secret and, according to the anthropologist
Victor Turner (1992), portray a domain of chaos and
disorder in which the norms of social behaviour are