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

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Lynn Brunet |Ripping back the veil on Masonic abuse
turned upside down, and the everyday laws of morality
are derided. Turner (1982) describes the initiates in
these rites as being taught ‘that they did not know what
they thought they knew. Beneath the surface structure
of custom was a deep structure, whose rules they had to
learn, through paradox and shock’ (p. 42). Non-Western
secret societies have traditionally been associated with
these practices and incorporate death-and-rebirth
symbolism into their initiations (Eliade, 1995). In his
study of Mozart’s involvement in Freemasonry, Paul
Nettl (1987) suggests that these primordial practices
may have been the original basis for modern Western
secret societies, which in turn led to the elaborate and
formalised rituals of the institution of Freemasonry in
the eighteenth century (p. 93).
Four out of the five case studies here have known
or likely family connections to the Masonic Order
(Cronin, 1997, p. 9 Fitzpatrick, 2005 J. Golding,
2012, p. 53 Jung, 1963, p. 220). Freemasonry, as the
Encyclopædia Britannica (2026) describes it, is:
the teachings and practices of the fraternal (men
only) order of Free and Accepted Masons, the
largest worldwide secret society...spread by the
advance of the British Empire and remaining
most popular in the British Isles and other
countries originally within the empire.
However, the extent to which Freemasonry can be
described as secret is debatable, given the three centuries’
worth of literature, exploring its beliefs, practices and
symbolism, even including reproductions of some of
the rituals, so that research into it is far easier than
into many other groups. The first three degrees with
which the Masonic journey begins, known as Craft
or Blue Masonry, are the Entered Apprentice, Fellow
Craft and Master Mason degrees (Duncan, 1866).
Every Mason who wants to progress further into one
of the other Masonic Rites (sometimes called higher
degrees) must first undergo these three Craft degrees.
All degrees involve rituals, many of them loosely
based on biblical themes, allegorical tales, and moral
lessons, and often include oaths of secrecy, while the
initiates are sometimes blindfolded. Solomon’s temple
is a central theme and symbolises the individual’s
spiritual life. In the second or Fellow Craft degree, the
building of this temple symbolises the initiate’s own
inner process of gradual spiritual development. The
rituals involve a physical enactment of the narratives
within the lodge room and express a search for ‘light’,
understood as philosophical, spiritual, or mystical
illumination (Duncan, 1866). The organisation aims to
chart a course of spiritual and moral development for
the betterment of its members.
However, the Masonic Order has long been aware
of the potential misuse of its rituals and calls these
corrupt versions ‘spurious Freemasonry’, ‘irregular
practice’, ‘Hedge Masons’ and ‘side degrees’ (Lawrence,
1924, p. 190 Roberts, 1974, p. 28 Universal Co-
Masonry, 2026).1 These practices are not sanctioned by
the various Grand Lodges, but they can nevertheless
appear within some fraternal contexts as distorted
versions of the approved rituals. The potential for abuse
of the initiates is one of the attributes of older versions
of the degrees. Reports of abuse in Masonic contexts
or misuse of Masonic rituals or regalia have appeared
regularly in the literature of ritual abuse (Brunet, 2007
Katchen, 1992, p. 10 Kent, 1993, 1998 Schröder et al,
2020 Scott, 2001, p. 127). The sociologist Stephen Kent
(1993, 1998) used the term deviant Freemasonry in the
context of allegations of ritual abuse in North America
by individuals whose fathers were Freemasons. But as
far as this author is aware, the Order has not publicly
admitted to the use of Masonic rites for child abuse.
This author has suggested that since the eighteenth
century, the Masonic Order may have been ritually
enacting trauma on the body and psyche, centuries
before it was discussed in modern psychology and
psychiatry (Brunet, 2007). Some Masonic authors,
such as A. E. Waite (1925), have argued that Masonic
initiation practices are based on the concept of memory,
symbolically enacting what today could be described as
the psychological processes involved in memory loss
and retrieval. Here, the allegorical legend of Hiram
Abif, which was introduced into the second edition
of the Masonic Book of Constitutions in 1738, may
be a case in point. It is enacted in the third or Master
Mason degree (‘Masonic Miscellanies: The Legend of
the Third Degree’, 2025).
1 ‘Side degrees’ were unofficial meetings of fraternities aimed at
entertainment, rather than ritual purposes. They were popular in the first
half of the twentieth century, and companies arose to supply the fraternities
with paraphernalia and costumes for their hijinks and terrifying ordeals for
the blindfolded initiates. The DeMoulin Bros &Co in the US was one such
company. Its 1908 catalogue depicts their equipment, sometimes described
as ‘only an innocent joke’.