International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 9, Issue 2 2026 46
him to undergo two years of psychotherapy in London
after his father’s death, but the analyst failed to find
the cause of his symptoms and recommended that he
pour himself into his writing (Haynes &Knowlson,
2003). From then, he became interested in the effects
of trauma and described his own in terms of death and
rebirth: ‘I have always had the feeling that somebody
inside me had been murdered. Murdered before I was
born. I had to find that person and try to bring him
back to life’ (Juliet, 1995, p. 138). He used the term
‘existence by proxy’ and the sense of ‘being absent’ to
describe how he felt (Cronin, 1997, p. 388), suggesting
depersonalisation, one of the classic symptoms of
dissociation (Healey, 1993). At the heart of his literary
voice seemed to be an inner turmoil, which he described
as a ‘big, blooming, buzzing confusion’ (Beckett, 1970,
p. 4), similar to Bacon’s description of his studio.
Like Bacon, Beckett said he did not know where the
writing had come from and was often surprised by it
(Bair, 1990, p. 17, 469). His comments all point to an
unconscious traumatic source to his literary oeuvre.
Waiting for Godot is widely regarded as one of the
most, if not the most important, plays of the twentieth
century, published first in French in 1952 (Beckett,
1990). The author stated that it had emerged ‘full
blown’ in his head in a very brief time, suggesting the
presence of an intuitive element in its creation, and
that he intended it to capture a sense of expectation
for something important that was about to happen,
but in a vaudevillian sense (Bair, 1990, p. 404). Brunet
(2009a) has argued that the setting, characters and
action of the play resemble elements of the elaborate
Royal Arch Degree, where the candidate is introduced
to the concept of a mystical union in which he can
uncover the Holy Name of God (Manasseh, n.d.).
However, the play appears to be a parodied version of
the ritual, filled with abuse.
In Waiting for Godot, the minimalist stage directions
convey a country road in the evening with a single
bare tree and a low mound. Here we meet two poor
vagabonds, Vladimir and Estragon the latter is
struggling to take off his boots, a painful process, and
he reveals that he has been beaten again. ‘The same lot
as usual?’ asks his companion (Beckett, 1990, p. 11).
One of the places where the Royal Arch companions
gather is meant to symbolise the Wilderness of Sinai.
During the rites, the blindfolded candidate symbolically
travels along the path taken by the Hebrew sojourners
and is led around the room to contemplate a number
of symbols one of these is the Burning Bush (Cryer,
2002, p. 19). In the ritual, the candidate is reminded
of Moses, who was commanded to take off his shoes
before this sacred bush. In Estragon’s case, the entry
to the sacred is a painful and humiliating experience,
recalling the Royal Arch practice of the Rugged Road.
As Deirdre Bair (1990) notes, Beckett suffered from
recurring trouble with his feet since childhood and
endows Estragon with a similar affliction. As van der
Kolk (2014) observes, the body will remember those
traumas that the mind forgets.
Two more characters now make their entrance: Pozzo
and Lucky. After a cry offstage, Lucky appears with
a long noose-like rope around his neck, and he is
carrying a suitcase and a bag. His cruel master, Pozzo,
follows him, cracking his whip and jerking the rope
until he falls over with all his baggage. In the Royal
Arch ritual, the candidate enters the initiatory space
wearing the Cable Tow, a long rope tied around his
waist, and the Principal Sojourner leads him by it in
the First Degree, it is around his neck (Duncan, 1866).
The Masons who set up the room for the Royal Arch
meeting are known as janitors and porters (Wells,
1984, p. 18). Lucky acts as a porter throughout the play
he is meek and browbeaten and treated like a slave.
Vladimir and Estragon are appalled by this, describing
it as a scandal and a disgrace. The name Pozzo may also
confirm a connection to the Royal Arch ritual. One
of the three Principals is meant to represent Prince
Zerubbabel, who led the Jews out of Babylon. His name
is abbreviated in the ritual to Z or PZ (Wells, 1984, p.
33). Pozzo can be seen as a linguistic diminutive of the
Masonic term, mocking his solemn role in the ritual,
while his treatment of Lucky is a contravention of the
role of the PZ in Royal Arch rites, which is to exalt his
neophyte and impart to him the sense of the mystical
union.
There are many humorous elements in this play,
particularly in relation to the whole notion of a mystical
experience. Vladimir and Estragon decide that they
must wait for Godot near the tree Estragon calls it a
bush, but it looks dead, and they think that they have
come to the wrong place. Later, they realise that this
tree will be of no use to them at all. In the Royal Arch
ritual, one of the members impersonates the Deity and

47
Lynn Brunet |Ripping back the veil on Masonic abuse
calls out ‘Moses! Moses!’ from behind the burning bush
at the same time as the candidate’s blindfold is removed
(Duncan, 1866). It is not difficult to see why this ritual
was easy to parody clearly, nothing like a state of
mystical enlightenment is going to be found here. At the
very end of the play, Estragon tries to commit suicide
by hanging from the tree, but he uses the cord from
his trousers, so that his trousers fall down. In Royal
Arch rites, a piece of rope is present on the floor of the
Chapter room to signify the rope that was tied around
the priest’s waist, which was used to pull him out of
the Holy of Holies should he collapse inside the inner
sanctum (Cryer, 2002 Caba, 2023).3
1
An odd sequence
where the characters throw chairs to each other may be
linked to a practice known as Passing the Chair in the
Royal Arch rite, where the three Principals would share
and swap their roles in order to pass many members
through the Degree (Wells, 1984).
The theme of memory loss permeates Waiting for
Godot, attesting to Beckett’s interest in the effects of
trauma. Throughout the play, we see the same events
continually being revisited, alluding to the repetition
compulsion experienced by some trauma survivors,
and the characters forget what has happened to them
the previous day. Towards the end of Act I, a timid boy
enters the plot he says he is afraid of the men and the
whip. He brings a message from Mr Godot, saying ‘[H]e
won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow’ (Beckett,
1990, p. 49). When the boy reappears in Act Two, he
seems to have forgotten the events of the previous day.
We are not told the age of the boy, but earlier in Act I,
Pozzo asks Estragon what age he thinks Lucky would
be and Estragon answers ‘Eleven’. Here we are being
reminded that the slave-like initiate, Lucky, may be a
boy of eleven. One of the outcomes of ritual abuse can
be the creation of alter personalities that carry different
elements of the ordeals. One of these dissociated
identities, created during traumatising rituals in
childhood, can be that of the ‘spirit slave’, which will do
anything that the abuser commands, including suicide
(Noblitt &Perskin-Noblitt, 2014, p. 116). Lucky has
been reduced to a slave state by the tyrannical Pozzo,
and Estragon’s attempt at hanging himself emphasises
the suicidal ideation that can be one of the effects of
ritual abuse (Rutz et al, 2008).
3 This practice is not factual but is a myth, nor is it found in the Old
Testament. It is described in a 13th century Cabbalist text, the Zohar, Ch. 2,
v. 198. (Caba, 2023).
This author’s fuller examination of Waiting for Godot
demonstrates that many of the elements that contribute
to this intuitive, free-flowing creation appear to
correlate with those found in the Royal Arch Degree
(Brunet, 2009). This suggests the possibility that
Beckett could have been exposed at some point to a
spurious version of this degree and either witnessed
or even experienced abusive treatment. While Waiting
for Godot might present the clearest link to an abusive
version of the Royal Arch rite, many of Beckett’s
plays refer to Masonic elements coupled with intense
emotional states and themes of torture (Brunet, 2006,
2009a). One of his novels, The Unnamable, is an
autobiographical stream-of-consciousness monologue
that reveals more excruciating details of abusive
practices. It includes him being surrounded in a dark
space by a group of men he calls ‘the lords of creation’
who are imparting special knowledge to him: ‘Low
types they must have been, their pockets full of poison
and antidote’ he says (Beckett, 1983, p. 272). They
convey a similar atmosphere to the deviant Freemasons
depicted in Matthew Barney’s work.
C. G. Jung (1875– 1961)
During his mid-life period, and after his split with
Freud, the Swiss psychiatrist C. G. Jung (2009) began
to experience a strange series of disturbing fantasies
and dreams which, at times, made him feel that he
was going mad he called it ‘doing a schizophrenia’,
likening himself to some of his patients (p. 28). To
understand these fantasies, he recorded them in seven
journals from 1913 to 1932, calling the process ‘active
imagination’ (Jung, 2009, p. xi). Transferring some of
this material into a blank leather-bound volume and
incorporating his own handwriting, paintings and
calligraphy, he created a stunning medieval-style text,
named The Red Book. It was originally intended for an
audience, but he decided not to publish it. ‘And who
would understand it?’ he says (Jung, 2020, vol. 7, p.
210). These private works were kept safely in a vault
until a Jungian scholar, Sonu Shamdasani, persuaded
the family to release them. An English version of The
Red Book was published in 2009, and the journals, or
Black Books, in 2020.
In his memoir, Jung mentions that his paternal
grandfather and namesake, C. G. Jung (1794–1864),
was a Grand Master of the Swiss Grand Lodge Alpina