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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

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(Jung, 1963). An uncle, Ernst Karl Jung (1841–1920),
was also a Grand Master of this Lodge (Agrippa’s
Diary, 2023). In childhood, he had several frightening
experiences and dreams that remained with him into
his eighties. At the age of three or four, for example, he
had a dream that he was taken into an underground
chamber where there was a strange object like a tree
trunk made of skin and flesh, with an eye on top, which
he later realised was a ritual phallus. He described
this experience as ‘a kind of burial in the earth’, both
wonderful and terrible, but was amazed that he was
not destroyed by it (Jung, 1963, p. 28 Bair, 2004, p.
24). There are various higher degree Masonic rituals
that involve the initiate descending into a sacred vault.
In the 64th degree or Sage of Mythras, for example,
the candidate enters the vault and is told that when
he achieves this ordeal alone, he will be purified and
emerge ‘from the bosom of the earth and his soul will
be prepared for the revelation of the Mysteries’ (Yarker,
1911, p. 77). He is then named Child of Earth. In the
literature of ritual abuse, there have been many reports
of young children being taken into underground spaces,
vaults or basements where strange rituals and abusive
sexual practices have occurred (Miller, 2012). As in the
case of Francis Bacon, Jung was sexually abused as a
boy, telling Freud about this in 1907 (Freud, Jung, &
McGuire, 1974, p. 94–95).
The author’s study of The Red Book examined each entry
and its accompanying paintings, demonstrating that
almost all of Jung’s fantasies contain plots, characters,
settings and symbolism that are remarkably similar to
those of Masonic rites practised in Switzerland during
his childhood and youth (Brunet, 2019). Many of them
borrow from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite but
appear to be distorted versions conducted abusively and
involving hypnosis. They include corrupt renditions of
religious themes in which the concepts of good and
evil are reversed, such as in ‘Mysterium Encounter’,
where the prophet Elijah appears with Salome (Jung,
2009, pp. 174–177). She is supposedly the prophet’s
daughter and is represented as desirable and good, in
stark contrast to her role in the Bible. To his horror,
Jung is told to love this bloodthirsty woman, that she is
his sister and, eventually, that his own soul is as evil as
hers. In ritual abuse, portraying evil as good and vice
versa aims to confuse the child and establish a basis
for moral indecision as the spurious rituals progress,
while creating scenarios where the child is made to
believe that he has committed criminal acts, which
convinces him that he is evil (Miller, 2012). As early
as December 1913, Jung was becoming aware that he
might be recording mystery plays, as an early title one
entry was ‘The Mystery Play, First Night’ (2009, p. 146,
note 81). The mystery religions of the ancient world,
such as those from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome,
with their secret initiation rites enacted as dramas,
have been a key source of inspiration for Freemasonry,
and a lot of its symbolism has been drawn from these
ancient beliefs and practices (Harwood, 2006, p. 18–
19).
Many of Jung’s fantasies involve infuriating
experiences, trickery, and dreadful riddles, and
vary from the bizarre and the ridiculous to vile and
excruciating horrors. A nonsensical experience in
a desert, where he is pursued by invisible robbers,
leaves him filled with rage and complaining that it is
‘comedy and drivel...You can go on devising torments,
spider-legged monsters, ridiculous, frightful, theatrical
spectacles... I perceive trickery’, he says (Jung, 2009, p.
158). As the scholar of religion Henrik Bogdan notes,
in old versions of the Masonic rites, the candidate was
exposed to ‘a great many ceremonies to frighten him’
and ‘1000 ridiculous postures and grimaces’ (2007, p.
75-76). Another horrifying encounter appears in ‘The
Sacrificial Murder’, where Jung feels that he is being
forced to eat the liver of a dead child (2009, p. 320–
327). Clearly, for a young person, this would have been
a shock that might have produced amnesia. However,
in his journal, Jung recognises that this is another event
involving theatre and trickery (2020, vol. 3, p. 136). In
ritual abuse, the eliciting of strong emotions such as
fear, terror, revulsion and rage enables the creation of
a tabula rasa state, the disintegration of the personality
and the death of childhood that Eliade (1995) describes.
Being taught the religious beliefs of the group and
taken to the ‘realm of the gods’ can be part of the
training in these ritually abusive contexts (Miller, 2012
Scott, 2001). In Jung’s case, he recognised that he was
being led on an internal journey similar to those of the
ancient mystery cults. After contemplating the nature
of his fantasies for over a decade, he realised that his
fantasies contained many references to Mithraism,
the mystery cult of the ancient Roman soldiers (Jung,
2009, p. 197, n. 211). Among Freemasons and other
scholars, there is a belief that Masonry has rites of